Founded in 2001 to help small businesses with email marketing, Mailchimp now offers powerful and sophisticated marketing tools for businesses of all sizes. The company sends more than one billion emails daily - and adds thousands of new customers every day. But the brand needed to better reflect what it was becoming: a powerful business platform with many more products and services than just email alone.

We were charged with evolving the Mailchimp brand to drive the company’s ongoing business transformation. The new brand identity would be woven throughout the entire Mailchimp experience, affecting all parts of Mailchimp’s business (website, marketing, advertising, products, support channels, and all internal expressions).

With more than 800 employees and an uncommon cult-following of fans (who already collect Mailchimp monkey swag), we had to rethink the whole Mailchimp brand to recruit new customers while retaining the existing loyal ones.

Working closely with Mailchimp’s team, we clarified its brand purpose and built a new identity system by elevating the company's unique characteristics: odd, weird, unconventionality. From there, we developed a new design system that logically swings between common sense and the surreal.

The design system was created to be used across all products, platforms, and media. It was implemented in marketing and product simultaneously. The illustration strategy allows Mailchimp's team to engage diverse illustrators to bring complex ideas to life quickly, while the editorial-inspired design system lends itself to multiple contexts, from marketing to product dashboards to new films and advertising.

Our work unifies Mailchimp’s creative expression under a cohesive design system that captures the heart of Mailchimp and encourages the company to play on a world stage. In amplifying its personality through design, we can better support Mailchimp's ever-expanding range of products.

The new design system elevates Mailchimp's signature quirkiness under a vivid, new, yellow flag. As a beacon for growing brands looking to make their mark in the world, Mailchimp, in every element, embraces its peculiarity and humor while projecting the authority and expertise of a leader.

Key changes include:

- Redesigning Freddie, Mailchimp’s beloved mascot.

- Replacing the old script logo with a new, chunky, slightly off-kilter wordmark.

- Introducing a new brand typeface, Cooper Light, which better captures Mailchimp’s humanist, warm spirit.

- Creating a purposefully naive illustration style that favors odd personal expression over realistic, vector-based accuracy. It's a nod to Mailchimp’s uncommon support for brands looking to build their businesses by amplifying their own weird, unique voices in the world.

- Evolving the name. “MailChimp” became “Mailchimp” in an effort to stop emphasizing “mail”, now that the company offers other services.

Mailchimp’s new identity was introduced in fall 2018 through a microsite. The brand's re-imagination retains that which endeared the company to its first, fervent fans —the odd, ineffable Mailchimp spirit, a mix of wry humor, celebration, and a dash of absurdity — while creating space for Mailchimp to speak with greater authority to a wider audience.

It sends the message that growing up doesn’t mean buttoning up, bucking current, grim, reductive design trends in service of embracing all the peculiarities that make a brand unique and magnetic.

The launch tweet for Mailchimp's new identity garnered 50k+ impressions on Twitter, of which 36k were organic. Mailchimp’s redesign was highlighted in Fast Company, which reported that “In staying strange–and, they say, true to themselves–Mailchimp is challenging the typical paradigm for tech branding today."

In total, media coverage of Mailchimp’s brand system achieved a total potential reach of 14M+ readers.