A Wind at Our Backs: Rebranding Pacvue

If you’re reading this, you’ve likely seen the news: Pacvue rebranded today with a fresh new visual identity; our parent company took on the Pacvue name; and we launched a new solution in the market that we’re calling commerce acceleration.

It’s all very exciting. And yet, I can’t stop thinking about this quote about wind: “I know the story of wind to be complex. It is a story of more than just forecasting. Wind has shaped commerce. It has won and lost wars. It has carved landscapes, made and consumed fortunes, and allowed the first airplane flights.” That’s by Bill Streever, in his book And Soon I Heard a Roaring Wind: A Natural History of Moving Air.

But let me back up.

The Pacvue rebrand had been brewing for well over a year, but it unleashed into a real project around October 2022. I went into this rebrand project with two mantras that I'm sure the Pacvue marketing team is sick of hearing at this point:

• A rebrand is about delivering value. We can build the best products in the market (and we are!) but if we don't communicate to our clients about how to understand and take advantage of those products in a way that makes sense, then we have failed to actually deliver any value to our clients. A rebrand is an opportunity to reset the narrative and provide a framework for interacting with our solutions.
• A rebrand is not a point in time; it's an ongoing effort. Just because the new website went live today and the press release hit the wire, doesn't mean our job is done. In fact, this is just the beginning. Now we have to go tell this narrative in the market again and again until it seeps into every audience interaction, and we have to continuously translate brand into demand.

Those two mantras are interrelated by definition. Our product suite is not static, nor is our audience, so we will always have new value to deliver, over and over again, in the months and years ahead.

While I can’t speak for the other (very talented and dedicated) individuals on the rebrand team, those two mantras provided framework for decision-making for me throughout the process. For example, one of the earliest decisions the creative agency Superhuman led with our team was to choose our brand archetype. Our brand archetype would be a grounding point in our brand identity (think: the outlaw or the sage), and it would guide everything from voice and tone to the style of our iconography. Eventually, keeping the above framework in mind, at least on my end, we settled on The Explorer.

Yes, that felt right. Pacvue is an explorer. Our logo was already telescope! The thing about explorers, though, that is different from mentors or heroes is that explorers are going somewhere new. In fact, explorers probably don’t know all the steps to get there, if they even know where “there” is. But they do it because of the promise of something great.

The earliest recorded explorers were the Phoenicians as early as 1500 B.C., who charted courses across the Mediterranean, and they traveled by sail, i.e. by wind. It wasn’t simply mastery of shipbuilding the Phoenicians needed to embark on their expeditions. They also needed to master the currents of the air.

I became obsessed with wind a few years ago because I knew nothing about it and I'm a dork, so I wanted to learn. What I didn’t expect was that scientists – whether meteorologists, physicists, or otherwise – still don’t really know that much about wind. Sure, we know how wind occurs. It’s nothing more than high pressure air moving towards low pressure air in search of equilibrium. But as Streever explains in his book, why wind occurs and, more specifically, why a certain gust of wind occurs here and there is another matter. It’s a complex system, one that is both emergent and chaotic. It’s also big. Big as in lots of variables. Wind is the original Big Data. It’s something that – as many great thinkers throughout decades have tried and failed – can’t be calculated to a mathematical equation. Even with today’s instruments and computing power, even with AI-generated weather models, it is impossible to accurately predict the wind.

So the more and more that I read about wind, and the deeper and deeper our team worked on the rebrand, I realized how much they had in common. Like wind, commerce is a complex system as well, filled with thousands of variables, some of which are elusive to structured data sets. It’s big. Big on the scale of day-to-day life, touching virtually every person around the globe. And it propels us forward because the commerce industry never reaches equilibrium. There is always movement, always acceleration. ?

At Pacvue, we’re on that expedition. Not because we know the exact destination, but because we have a heading and the wind in our sails.

As Streever writes, “The difficulty – and the fun – comes in understanding why something that appears at first glance to be so simple can be so wondrously complex.”

Finally, of course I have to give some shout outs to:

• The team at Superhuman , who were our guides on this exploration and presented several moments, both large and small, that truly delighted me
• The team at Daylight , who handled the entire website development, were valuable partners for copywriting, design, and SEO, and who, after working with me for nearly 6 years now in various capacities, manage to know what I want before I do
• Zoey (Xuan) W. who has been through the most evolutions of Pacvue out of anyone on the marketing team, and still brought creativity every day to this project
• Joli Latini who took a creative concept and built it into a robust design system not quite overnight (but close)
• Samantha Tepper who herded the cats and keeps me honest
• Victor Y. who makes it much easier for all of us to sound much smarter than we are
• Cassandra Craven who always keeps our audience first
• Sean Chantaracharat and Sydney Meeuwsen who probably need to see an eye doctor because they don't blink, they just keep going with the flow
• Tareeni Bogra who never took her eye off our most aspirational outcomes
• Lynn Lonsway who (I don't have proof of this, but I'd be willing to bet) could literally move a mountain if it stood in the way of successfully launching this rebrand at Shoptalk
• Sarah Littel (Sattler) who knows that the delight is in the details, and crafted an engaging event plan to support the rebrand
• Jared Koll , Matt Abbruzzese , Shannon Harper , and Dhara Patel for taking the "ongoing effort" part to heart and leaning into creative ways to continue building demand from brand throughout the year
• Jolie Kim for jumping into the deep end with us
• Dylan Wingrove for reminding me that Europe exists
• Ma Marjerie Fondevilla for her super-human speed
• Amanda Dahlberg for smartly "scheduling" her maternity leave to miss all this fun, but also for sending us baby pictures for moral support
• ??Jesse Gardner , Jacob DeMaio , and Graham Collector for being the first folks to test out our new messaging and going with the flow
• Melissa Burdick , Zhaohui Tang , and Sandeep Kella for being the most fun, engaging, challenging, thought-provoking, and down-to-earth executive team that a marketing leader could hope for

I'm incredibly proud of what we accomplished together.

Oh yeah, here's our new website: https://www.pacvue.com/