We’ve changed our name.

The backstory

Our co-founders, Jude Novak and Ryan Macpherson, spent years finding weird and wonderful ways to engage learners, from developing some of the most downloaded educational apps in Apple Store history to devising custom training strategies for the Fortune 500. In 2015, they teamed up to form eCoach and democratise learning for businesses of all sizes.

By 2018, eCoach had secured investment and the team had jumped from a number you could count on one hand to a team of over twenty. eCoach had helped more than 1,000 companies deliver better training to their teams.

We had one small problem, though. When people heard our name, they thought of little league coaches, or assumed we were offering career coaching services. We were also looking a bit tired and were not quite presenting ourselves in the way we wanted. eCoach was, and still is at heart: friendly, fun, approachable and innovative. But our name and branding didn’t reflect any of that.

Companies evolve over time, and their branding should evolve with them. It was time to go back to the drawing board. We needed a new name and a fresh, new look.

So we took it back to foundations.

Our why

Why do we do what we do?

Most great companies were founded by a person or people who suffered a problem, went through a difficult experience, or had someone close to them face a tough challenge, and in turn came up with a solution or alternative.

Our company Product Manager and co-founder, Jude, worked in eLearning and found existing technologies clunky, disconnected, expensive, time consuming and worst of all boring. He developed a solution. He created an all-in-one, cloud-based, fully responsive platform that had a super easy-to-use interface. The platform was based on creating bite size learning, to engage learners. Why did he do it? So users could simply share knowledge with their teams to allow them to scale and grow. This is our essence, to simplify the sharing of knowledge to enable success.

What we value

Values are the uncompromising truths and guiding principles that define what your brand stands for. These are the primary driving force behind the brand, business, behaviours, and decisions. One thing we are extremely proud about is the company culture Jude and Ryan have nurtured at eCoach. Values are a crucial part of this culture and these really do permeate everything we do, both as individuals and as a company.

We have seven of them:

1. Keep it simple – Always try to remove complexities where they exist. This applies to everything we do, whether it be the product, our codebase, sales process, communication, and pricing.
2. Focus on the user – Think about the user first and all else will follow.
3. Think big, start small – Starting small allows us to remain agile. Break down large tasks into small, easily achievable chunks. Release changes in small increments. Test a hypothesis with a MVP.
4. Collaborate – The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. By bringing together diverse ideas and skills we can find the best possible solutions.
5. Be accountable – We should always be transparent and operate with integrity.
6. Consider it done – We should possess a genuine desire to help.
7. Have fun – Remember to keep it light and try to have fun. We show up here 5 days a week, let’s enjoy it!

Who is this character?

We have a closely knit team. Part of what makes it such an amazing place to work is that everyone genuinely cares and feel a strong sense of responsibility for both the company and our customers success. The people who work here are the beating heart of the brand and therefore were an essential part of the rebrand journey. We also sent out a survey to our customers and added their responses to the data. Using all of this we asked our team the big questions –

• If eCoach were a person, who would it be?
• What kind of car would eCoach drive?
• What other apps would eCoach like and why?
• And we played a game of cards to help us figure it all out.

Turns out we are

What’s in a name?

We needed a new name that did a lot of things. It needed to be a single word that reflected what we do. After much searching we settled on a combination of two words: collaborate and assemble. Coassemble.

We know that our customers use us to assemble their training in a central place. They use the tool to collaborate on training with their peers, and they assemble their teams to train. Our platform is an all-in-one solution that combines content creation and learning management together. Coassemble reflects this assembling of training, materials, teams and software together in a central place. Perfect!

The end result

The final step. We had our core identify defined and a new name – it was time for a makeover! We engaged the help of Newcastle based Shorthand Studio, and the end result is a visually stunning representation of our brand. Everyone loves a good before and after, so keep scrolling.

Before:

For our new logo, we wanted to include the assembling of various parts, to highlight the “c” and “a” of our two key words, and to hero the authoring or content creation, which was where we started. We also needed an icon, which has been missing from eCoach.

Voilà…

Our brand colours needed to be vibrant and progressive to match our personality. We also wanted to retain some of the blue we had previously had with eCoach. So the whole thing got a refresh.

There’s a saying that great fonts go unnoticed. Our typography needed to be something expressive, but the body also had to be clear and easy to read, able to work with customers branding in their own campuses.

National 2 – Headings

Acumin – Body

And finally, we wanted a design system that brought it all together with imagery to make it fun.

We’d like to celebrate all of our customers, team, and partners for bringing us to where we are today. We are beyond excited for this new chapter in our story. This is just the beginning of our commitment to simplifying online training and changing how companies share knowledge in their organisation.

From everyone at Coassemble