This post is from Thumbtack’s CEO Marco Zappacosta. For more on Thumbtack’s new brand, check out our announcement here.
All I said was “don’t change the name.”
Other than that, I wanted a new Thumbtack. We’ve had the same brand for 10 years but Thumbtack has radically changed — it’s now a much smarter, easier tool for our customers and pros. I wanted us to reflect on who we are, who we want to be and, more importantly, what kind of company our customers and pros need us to be.
Our Creative Director Matteo Vianello and his team started with questions: What promise do we make? Why do people need us? We wanted more than flowery words. We wanted something we could deliver on confidently.
And at the end of the day, it’s pretty basic: we make it easier to get more done.
But inside of that simple promise are three important principles: ease, possibility, and accomplishment. We want to make finding the right local professional so easy you can accomplish everything on your list, from those things you need to do to those you want to do—maybe even those you haven’t thought of yet.
As we figured out our new brand, those principles helped ground and guide us.
Here’s how Matteo thinks about it:
First, for the record, I wouldn’t want to change the name. The name Thumbtack is awesome. And it’s a natural word, which is a good position to be in when you’re building a brand. Apple, Shell, Target — they’ve all created strong brands around visualizations of their names. So we created a typographic logo that subtly featured a tack as the Thumbtack T, while make sure it was bold enough to stand on its own.
As for colors, we couldn’t wait to explore a palette outside of orange and black and gray. But we’re not going crazy. In fact, in a lot of ways I think of our new brand color as white. Lots of white space gives customers and pros a clean, de-cluttered starting point to get stuff done. Plus, our primary blue is bright and inviting — blue is popular for a reason, but not amongst our competition. And punches of secondary colors help shine light on the breadth of what we offer.
Something else we’re leaning into is radical honesty for our brand voice. We know finding a plumber or a handyman isn’t always glamorous, and being that plumber or handyman isn’t always easy. So we don’t want to hide the rough edges or pretend everything’s perfect — we want to be honest about how we’re going to help.
That honesty has to come through visually too. Take our new photography, for example: real people doing real things in real places. With hundreds of types of jobs getting done on Thumbtack, building this library of images is challenging, but the authenticity of each photo makes all the difference.
All together, it adds up to something bigger than a new color or a new voice and tone. Our new brand marks a new chapter in Thumbtack’s history. And it’ll help carry us wherever we go next.