An Entrepreneur's Coming-of-Age Branding Story

The story and creative process behind a total brand Glow-up... and *Grow-up*. MUTU is just over 10 years old as an online business, and this month, we revealed our ‘next-level’ rebrand and new website. For anyone into branding or design or entrepreneurship or levelling up, the journey to here might be worth the 3 min read over a coffee ?? and I'd love to read your comments and experiences.

MUTU is a web app, a digital platform providing transformative pre and postnatal preparation, recovery and strengthening for mothers everywhere. We have served more than 80K women to date, are recommended and referred by medical experts around the world and are proud of our thousands of 5-Star customer reviews across all platforms. For those in the UK, we were approved by NHS Digital in 2020 and selected as an NHS Innovation Accelerator Fellow in 2021.

In October 2010 I sold the very first online program to a customer in the US and danced around the kitchen in celebration that someone had actually bought my thing. I had blogged into the ether for months, reached out to lots of impressive or brilliant people who mostly ignored me, filmed myself doing the exercises on a mat in the garden with a Flip camera taped to a tree, and then googled for untold hours to figure out video editing, 'just enough' coding, e-commerce, tech, marketing, you know the score, entrepreneurial stuff. You just have to figure out… everything.

My very first hire was an absolute diamond, a graphic designer, Louise O'Kane who not only created the first MUTU branding, but went on to work with us for more than a decade, shaping and defining the look and vibe of MUTU across every platform and in every format online and offline. Always on-trend, always flawless, Louise was our Brand Keeper as we grew. She's a bloody brilliant designer, a small business owner with integrity, talent and skills by the bucketload and a really, really good human. Check her out.

Fast forward to beautifully shot and produced content (2018) courtesy of Chris Mugford and crew, and a global business with a global team.

The s*%t-show that was 2020 and into 2021, saw new conversations and new horizons, with an introduction to the team at Design Bridge . We began the creative and strategic process that is real ‘next-level’ branding and design. Brand Personality deep-dives, brainstorms and interviews, hours with me as well as talking to every member of our team. Who *is* MUTU? Why does she exist? What is her purpose and her mission, who does she serve and how? As fellow entrepreneurs will know too, over time we can no longer assume that our brand personality is *our* personality. They have grown up and flown the nest, we don’t get to define them anymore. If you’re curious, MUTU is Caregiver with a transformative touch of Magician, turns out my personal brand is just plain Rebel (lol). Iconic Fox is a fun place to start if you fancy figuring your own out and love an online quiz. (Who doesn’t?)

We worked with Design Bridge for more than 6 months, through a process that was so in-depth, so personal, so insightful, revelatory and intriguing, that the end result couldn’t possibly have been anything less than perfect. It is perfect. It’s perfectly MUTU. It had to be, since it's the creative representation as described and loved by its very own team and customers.

Design Bridge conceived visually, what we had never quite been able to explain or do justice to, ourselves.

So huge gratitude ???? and love ?? to everyone on our entirely epic team at Design Bridge - Iona Macdonald, Claire Robertshaw, Monique Bissel, Jamie Galbreath, Natasha Dowdall , Holly Aurelius and of course John Morris and Ian Colvin for the initial introductions. Huge thanks as well to the utterly brilliant Raphael Neves and Clara Lamatta at Green Park Content for the tech wizardry to make it all a speedy, beautiful website reality.

Here’s to the next 10 years, feeling very glowed up and grown-up ?? ??