Our Website and Visual Brand Gets an Upgrade

If you haven’t yet noticed, Mangrove has an all-new look and a fresh website! One of the driving reasons for our rebrand and website was the fact that we have changed significantly as an organization over the 11 years since Mangrove began, and it was time to assess whether our brand still represented who we are as a team today.  A website rebuild also gave us the opportunity to bring our site in line with the WCAG Level AA accessibility standards.

The rollout of our rebrand comes after months of collaboration with one of our agency partners, Four Fin Creative. We wanted to work with an external agency who could inspire us with a different perspective and keep our leadership team accountable and aligned.

We began with Four Fin’s virtual Brand Session, where they helped us define the Mangrove brand and overall creative strategy. Our mission is to create websites that make it easier for good people to do great work, so “championing the good guys” was a natural concept for our core messaging.

Brand Session also entailed revamping our original, decade-old logo which was inspired by the beautiful canopy of a Mangrove tree (if you don’t know the story of our namesake, give this post a quick read). But the true magic of Mangroves is their incredible root systems that help protect coasts from rising sea levels, protect the coral reef, and filter out heavy metals. Our new visual identity is a nod to those roots, celebrating our brand’s mission and values as a certified B Corp.

Once we had a logo in place, we explored the overall visual identity of our brand and began to develop our new site with FourFin’s insight and our own team’s design and development expertise. Reworking our own site was a long process (yes, back-burnered and overanalyzed many times) but it’s feeling well worth the effort. Today we’re taking a moment to celebrate this milestone, and share a few key takeaways we noticed along the way:

• Revamping your own website is hard. We do this every day for our clients, but being on the other side of the table reminded us that it can be tough to define who you are in a succinct and visual way. Our rebrand brought up plenty of questions, uncertainties, and challenges that helped us develop a renewed empathy for the client experience.
• Your website is a living, breathing asset and doesn’t have to be 1000% “done” at launch. We hoped to launch our new site before Maiya’s second baby was born, but here we are and he is already nine months old!  It’s just time to get it out the door. Now that we’ve committed to our new branding, we can continue to finesse and make adjustments as we go.
• A solid collaboration with a trusted partner makes a big difference. We’re grateful for the talented team at Four Fin for helping us push our boundaries, keep us moving, and bring the “new Mangrove” to life.

Stay tuned for new assets and announcements, and for a transition period of a few mismatched Mangrove moments over the coming weeks!