Rebranding

Reasons to rebrand:

When we first started our company, we intended it to be a training consulting company, but it later evolved into product selling. At the time, we decided to name our brand “SwimmersBest,” but since moving into products, the “ONE” brand was more fitting. We weighed all the options available and debated for a long time as to if we should risk a rebrand or not. Along with our personal opinions, we asked our friends in the industry for advice and for their thoughts about our new name. In the end, we decided to rebrand because we felt as if the SwimmersBest name was still unknown enough to successfully rebrand.

Our many discussions regarding rebranding stemmed from the common confusion that SwimmersBest sounded like a distributor company name. We also knew that we eventually would like to add swimsuits, caps, and other wearable products to our line, and knew a shorter brand name would be more effective. “ONE” was the perfect solution for a brand on wearable products, that swimmers would feel confident wearing, and be a more memorable name.

How we decided on “ONE Swim”:

Throughout the process of brainstorming name ideas, we considered many things. We started by narrowing down what our company does, what we offer, and what our current brand means. Then, we looked at existing successful brands in the industry (like TYR, Speedo, and Arena). If you ask any swimmer to name a swim training product brand, it is likely that they will list one of those three brands. What those brand names have in common is that they are short and memorable.

From the start of our company, we have named our products with a 1 in mind, to accentuate that we are a one-stop-shop for any of your swimming needs. We have products such as “1FlexBand,” “1SwimCuff,” and a paddle product line named “1FastCatch.” This led us to realize that ONE could be a good, catchy brand name. When designing the logo itself, we wanted to incorporate the “1,” into the ONE logo, which resulted into the “1” looking almost like a key. This demonstrates that we are the solution to your problems, and the one place for all your swim equipment needs.

How we addressed the rebrand:

To begin the introduction of the rebrand, we decided to do a slow release. We started by updating the site identity and any other logo location on the website, with the domain still routing to swimmersbest.com. Next, we purchased the oneswim.com domain and routed to swimmersbest.com. We updated internal links to oneswim.com but landing page remained the swimmersbest.com domain. After domain updates, we began sending our regular eblasts with the new logo and company name. Once the new brand was regularly promoted through emails, we began releasing our monthly print ads to include the new brand logo, with the slogan “a SwimmersBest Brand” underneath it wherever it was placed. This was to connect the new brand logo with the currently known company name. We then promoted the new brand for a few months and updated our brand on Swim Outlet’s website for all of our products. Once the new logo was established on the distributor’s website, I updated all signage, flyers, catalogs, and other promotional materials, to include the new brand for our upcoming trade shows.

Complications/Obstacles:

After successfully launching our new brand and logo, we attempted to update our home domain to the oneswim.com domain. I did not have enough experience to switch the domains, to have swimmersbest.com reroute to oneswim.com. After many failed attempts, we reached out externally for help, but realized that switching domains would take more time and effort than we had at the time. This is a problem, as customers who know the brand only as ONE Swim may get confused when they land on a page with a swimmersbest.com domain. We decided to combat this confusion by keeping the main top logo as our ONE logo with “a SwimmersBest Brand” underneath. We felt as if this was the most sensible solution to prevent confusion.