Focus Lab

Are you searching for an agency to help redesign your website? Hold up: It might not be the real issue. 🚨 Before jumping into a web redesign, it's essential to take a step back and assess your brand. Your website is just one piece of the puzzle — a reflection of your overall brand strategy, visual identity, and messaging. In our latest blog, we explain why starting with your brand is the key to building a powerful website. 💡 Swipe through to learn why we (almost) always say: Brand before website. ⬇️ --- Full blog → https://hubs.ly/Q02V-dr80 #branding #webdesign #brandstrategy

We had a BLAST at Circles Conference earlier this month connecting with our creative community, getting inspired, and sharing some of our own wisdom. 🙌 It was a privilege to witness so many inspirational creatives sharing their backgrounds, experiences, and insights—so we're dropping just a few of our favorite takeaways, in hopes that they provide you a little inspiration as well. → “Just ask, even when it seems scary.” – Allan Peters on letting conviction lead your career. → “Demonstrate your value at all interactions.” – Emily Cohen on how designers (and, really, anyone) can become more strategic in their work. → "If it's not a 'hell yes', it's a no." – Lisa Quine on the transformative power of public art (we've already started hearing this quoted in our weekly meetings). → "It's a good day to start something." – Jason Craig on his journey from passive work habits to purposeful creation (and how it applies to everything). → "Choose your definition of what it means to win the work." – Our very own creative director, Natalie Kent, on the importance of internal validation in the creative field. And this is just the tip of the iceberg, shout out to all of the speakers, workshop leaders, and creatives—it was an absolute pleasure being inspired by you all. And a huge thank you to Ismael Burciaga, his team, and all of the volunteers for working so hard to make Circles such a valuable event for our community. 🙏 --- Photo Credit: Asper Studios

We may exist in the B2B world, but we aren't just a business interacting with other businesses. We're people interacting with people. 🫶 At Focus Lab, we value authentic interactions, full of empathy and void of egos. Our team lives our values internally and infuses them in our relationships with clients. Our values aren’t just aspirations; they’re points of practice—written intentionally to be as actionable as possible. 🐜 Own the Work 🙌 All Over Ego 🎖️ Lead with Courage 🌟 Assume the Best 🚀 Strive for Excellence ❤️ Empathy in Action It's easy to stick values on your careers page; it's another to put them into practice. We're pretty dang proud to say our values are referred to, utilized, and lived out by each of our team members. Here's a few ways we've found helpful to keep them top of mind: → Values built into our Lattice feedback template → Custom patches & emojis to celebrate team members → Success measurements for our employee reviews → Daily references in Slack when shouting out a teammate → Built into our job descriptions with role-related examples If these values resonate with you, we're currently hiring a Brand/UI Designer! Head to our site for the full job description and be sure to get your application in by Friday, November 1st. 👉 https://hubs.la/Q02Vcv5m0 #hiring #branddesigner #uidesigner

A huge shoutout to our friends at Cuttlesoft on their 10th anniversary! 🎉 For those who don’t know, Cuttlesoft is a software engineering and consulting agency that brings a refreshingly human touch to software development. Flashback to October 2020: during lockdown, many of us were doing a lot of reflecting—personally and professionally. That’s when Cuttlesoft decided to take the leap and invest in their brand. Spoiler alert: We’re so glad they did! This partnership meant the world to us, and we couldn’t be more thrilled to celebrate this amazing milestone with them. 👏 --- Learn more ⤵️ Cuttlesoft's 10-Year Reflection: https://hubs.la/Q02VkhcD0 Cuttlesoft Project Debrief: https://hubs.la/Q02VkkdV0

What happens when you have the best product on the market, but 50% of your target audience doesn't take you seriously? Keep reading. 👀👇 Voiceflow is working to democratize AI assistants so that any business can build, train, and hire them to perform any task. How? By being the only conversational #AI platform that truly works for the whole product team — any product team — regardless of the company size, team resources, or tech stack.  Voiceflow offers the best webchat builder on the market and the most enjoyable user experience around. But while the brand was loved by designers, it was struggling to be taken seriously by its developer community. It needed to adjust this perception so its product could be sold as a shared, collaborative platform. We had the privilege to partner with the team at Voiceflow on: → Brand Strategy → Verbal Identity → Visual Identity → Brand Support Check out the full case study: https://hubs.la/Q02V5D8p0

Ready to dominate your B2B rebrand? 💥 Download the first chapter of Conquer Your Rebrand by Bill Kenney 👋 today to get a (free) sneak peek into the ultimate playbook for your rebrand journey. If you're just hearing about Conquer Your Rebrand, here's what you can expect: → Learn the "why" of B2B branding + actionable details of "how" → How how to prepare and what to expect in your rebranding journey → Learn to recognize and avoid common pitfalls → Discover what matters most in your agency partner → Learn how to plan for your brand rollout And so much more! It's time for your brand to propel you forward, not hold you back. Let's get started. Download the first chapter today: https://hubs.la/Q02TGdyv0

We are beyond excited to celebrate the brand launch of our partners at MessageGears—and we've got a new case study to prove it. 💥 Founded in 2010, MessageGears enables enterprises to drive more revenue and customer loyalty by unifying data management, activation, and marketing channels, all in one place. Alternatives built solely for the marketing use case ask enterprises to move, copy, and ship their customer data from the warehouse to another platform. The problem with this approach is ... everything. 🚨 It’s slow, it’s risky, it’s limiting, it’s expensive, it’s inefficient, it’s annoying, and it perpetuates the silos between data and marketing teams. Enter MessageGears. 🙌 The MessageGears platform provides enterprise teams with a unified, powerful source of truth that connects to their existing data warehouse, activates billions of data points, and enables 1:1 marketing with each of their millions of customers. With a rapidly shifting market, MessageGears needed a new brand identity to break through the noise and champion their differentiators. Project Scope: → Brand Strategy → Verbal Identity → Visual Identity Special shout out: After completing our branding work, we collaborated closely with our partners at Craft&Crew to bring it to life on the new MessageGears website. A huge congratulations to our partners at MessageGears on a flawless brand launch and a big thank you for such a wonderful partnership from beginning to end. We can't wait to see what's in store. 🚀 Head to our latest case study for the full scoop: https://hubs.la/Q02TDqkM0

As North America’s leading trade association of its kind, Fabricators and Manufacturers Association has spent 50+ years dedicating itself to the professionals of its industry. The impacts of FMA are far-reaching, but not widely known. You don’t have to be an FMA member to benefit from everything it’s doing in metal manufacturing (CE, training, events, scholarships), and the association operated separate independent brands for its various needs. In doing so, FMA’s own value and meaning has been downplayed and somewhat hard to find. With a goal to unite its brands so they would be understood as a connected ecosystem, we helped FMA reposition itself as the leader it’s always been, sharing its common mission of uniting and connecting the industry for good. Project Scope: → Brand Strategy → Verbal Identity → Visual Identity → Web Design → Brand Support It has been a pleasure to collaborate with the wonderful team at FMA on multiple initiatives over the last couple of years — we'll never get tired of seeing it out in the world. 🔥 Full project: https://hubs.la/Q02SBzHt0

Odi Spotlight 💥 Our early-stage agency just launched a brand new case study — introducing Tarro + their new visual identity. Running a restaurant is hard work: long hours, slim margins, and a hundred moving parts to manage. Tarro exists to help restaurant owners do more with less, reducing stress and increasing revenue. Local restaurants are the heartbeat of their communities, but their proprietors are often overworked with little return. Founded by the son of restaurateurs, Tarro understands the challenges its clients face daily and seeks to create the “technology all restaurants run on.” Already serving over 3,000 restaurants, Tarro was ready to break into new markets and needed a more established identity for its next phase of growth. Huge kudos to both teams for building an identity that took the Tarro brand to the next level — we can't wait to see what's in store for the future. 🚀 ✅ Check out the full case study: https://hubs.la/Q02S0nKJ0 ✅ Be sure to follow our early-stage agency → Odi #b2bbranding #earlystage #rebrand

Here’s a statement: at Focus Lab, we don’t write positioning statements. ❌ What? (What?!?) It’s true. With the pace of innovation and the nuances of technology mean new products and services debut every day — maybe they’re better, maybe they’re not, but it’s become increasingly difficult to clearly describe how and why. And trying to describe how and why in a single sentence that isn’t 50 words long and doesn’t sound like something out of a graduate-level computing course? Good luck. 🍀 Here’s the truth: it wasn’t long ago that Focus Lab was, in fact, writing positioning statements alongside our clients. But after awhile, we started to notice some patterns in these statements, that we now call The Five Too's: → Too many ideas → Too little focus on best-fit customers → Too limited differentiators → Too little attention to alternatives → Too much wordsmithing So, here’s what we did, what we still do today — and why strategy-led positioning at Focus Lab is decidedly different. We call these … The Four B’s. → Brand first (with product as decidedly supplementary) → B2B-specific → Best customers and context → Bridging strategy and verbal identity Positioning should not be limited to a statement. It should be a collaborative exercise that combines branding expertise with the client’s expertise. It will work if we all put in the work. When you replace a statement with a strategy, you have a stance. And that means you have the strength to steer the market. Learn more in our blog written by our talented Brand Strategy Lead, Haley Bridges 🐝 https://hubs.la/Q02SL6dC0 #positioning #brandstrategy #b2b