Shipping should be simple: Shippo’s new brand look

At Shippo, we strive to make shipping as easy as possible. And in the last year, we've been working hard to refresh the Shippo brand. 

Our rebranding goes beyond aesthetics. We've streamlined our look and feel to be more modern and intuitive. Our aim is to empower our clients to focus on what truly matters - running their businesses efficiently and effectively.

Why a rebrand?

At Shippo, we're on a mission to make shipping easy—no more standing in endless post office lines or stressing over tricky customs forms. We want our merchants to ship with total peace of mind, knowing we've got their back every step of the way. By updating our brand, we can communicate that ethos even better.

Last October, we started working with our founders, Laura and Simon, to shape a new direction for the Shippo brand. 

At the time, our brand was using more than one illustration style. We appeared inconsistently and knew that to create a seamless experience for our customers, we needed a change. 

Who is Shippo?

If we want shipping to be easy and user-friendly our brand should do the same. 

And in the process of defining the brand, we asked ourselves:

“Who is Shippo?” 

“How do people perceive us today?”

“How do we want to be perceived tomorrow?”

From those questions, we shaped our brand attributes. These four words became the foundation of how our visual system was created. These are the words Shippo aspires to embody in our brand.

Evolving the visual language

Easy-to-use, modern, and seamless were recurring themes in these early conversations. These themes sparked a multitude of explorations. We used the brand attributes to calibrate different directions to lean into. Here is a snapshot of some of the early explorations last year:

From these explorations, our founders, Laura and Simon resonated with the approachable bright colors of Concept B, and the focus on merchants in Concept D. We learned our identity should be approachable and merchant-centric. You’ll notice a lot of these essences in the current brand today. 

When we went back to the drawing board, we developed an illustration style that intentionally feels approachable and simple. We use bold, black outlines and fresh colors to give our brand the sense of visual clarity. Removing the nuances and details to create a minimal style. This embodies the ease we hope to give our merchants, so they can focus on running their businesses.

We tell the merchant stories through photography while having the flexibility to explain abstract concepts like “API” or “tracking packages” through our illustrations. 

From here, we felt confident in a visual direction and wanted to test if it could scale across all the surfaces the Shippo brands needs to live on.

Creating a scalable brand

Shippo offers two types of solutions:

• Web App - A web app solution for SMBs to manage orders, compare discounted rates, create labels, generate returns, and track packages.
  
  
• API - A customizable solution for higher volume shippers to create labels, compare discounted rates, track shipments, generate returns, and validate addresses.
  

It was important to make sure our brand not only could speak to each of these offerings but also live in both product and marketing.

With the product design team, we underwent intensive study of typefaces, color, and accessibility tests to ensure our choices improved our web app usability and visual presence. With the marketing team, we A/B tested the new brand on our homepage to ensure it would resonate with our audience.

Within the first few weeks of launching our new system, we saw improvements in engagement. On the API page alone, we saw a 200% increase in contact sales requests. We saw this as a signal our new messaging and visual brand resonated with our merchants. It was moments like that, where we started to feel more confident implementing the brand throughout the rest of the customer touchpoints.

This rebrand is about more than colors, typography, or illustrations. It's about reinforcing our promise to our merchants: shipping is easy with Shippo. As we move forward, we'll continue to innovate, iterate, and improve with our merchants' needs at the forefront.

At Shippo, we believe that when shipping is simple, businesses can focus on what truly matters - growing, thriving, and delighting their customers. And that's a future we're excited to help shape, one shipment at a time.

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