I joined Togather in May 2023, as Product Design Lead, immediately after the initial rollout of its new brand (formerly feast-it.com). The first year has combined the challenges delivering the promise of the rebrand to it's full potential, while evolving the product for multiple distinct user types.
Marketing were using Prismic to create landing, campaign and blog pages, using a suite of components with a mix of baked in, and versatile design choices. This was causing the following problems:
- With the design customisable on a page level, maintaining good design was becoming impossible at scale. As the page number went in the 200s, even simple attempts to optimise, or conform some of the design choices made by marketeers would require making the change over and over again
- Lack of CMS support for simple things like tags, or logos, meant engineers were constantly called in for content changes
- Site navigation was hard coded by engineers, resulting in regular dead links and more requests for changes
I worked with the CMO and lead engineer to get buy in for using Webflow for a Live specific microsite. Webflow allowed me to easily create a rich and usable CMS to the spec we required, with no additional engineering assistance.
When the benefits of this were observed, and performance and usage monitored carefully, we were able to extend use of Webflow to creating a hub for campaign microsites, which could incorporate a higher standard of design control and content management, using everyones time efficiently
Happy marketers. Richer experiences, more traffic
I joined Togather (formerly Feast it) one week into the launch of their new brand, and having worked on the implementation of rebrands for onefinestay, Tails* and Bloom and Wild at a similar stage, I already had a strong sense of quite how much remained to be done in the following year.
The agency had done a great job of building a rational and versatile system. However, as expected, when these principles meet the real world requirements of digital design, content creation and campaign, one needs to be fairly willing to be brutal.
Carefully pre-rationalised systems have to be streamlined to remain coherent, unique touches that seemed like key assets have to be cellared until they can really add value.
Togather is, at its heart, all about being a great partner in allowing others to realise their events, and giving support we give to the supplier brands we enable to grow. Our own visual brand, therefore needs to be unobtrusive and let the full variety of our offering.
By establishing a more coherent hierarchy of shades of colours, we were able to keep a core brand identity, extend it across differentiated sub-brands, and extend our palette of available colours as far as needed for campaign and editorial work. The result is a site where the imagery is never overpowered and campaigns can be as eye catching as required.
