The Backstory of the New WooCommerce to Woo Branding

BobWP (00:00):
So on this special inside, woo, today we have David Callaway. David, how you doing?

David (00:07):
I’m doing well, Bob. How are you?

BobWP (00:09):
I’m doing pretty good. I just wanna let everybody know that I messed up on the calendar. Jonathan was supposed to be doing this particular show, but I’m filling in for Jonathan and we are here to talk a bit about the Woo branding. But before we even get into that, I want to have David tell us a little bit about what he does at Woo.

David (00:30):
Sure. Yeah. Thanks for having me, Bob. It’s really exciting to be on. yeah, so I lead the brand and comms team. We’re the creative and comms team is what we call internally, but we do a lot of work on the brand, so that’s why we’re kind of out in front of this one. and so we handle we also handle the website creative for advertising kind of a wide, pretty big range of stuff within Woo Marketing. so yeah, we’re here to talk about the kind of some of the brand updates today and the whys behind it and and what we’re up to.

BobWP (01:04):
No, I think I told somebody in one of the conversations I was having that, you know, anytime any company of any size, I mean especially larger companies, do a rebrand, there’s always things that have to be ironed out. There’s always things that people take for granted that it was done this way or there’s theories that they come up with. So why don’t you tell us I know, you know, the post touched on it in some conversations as well, but why the rebrand or the reasons behind it?

David (01:35):
Yeah, so, you know, it’s probably years in the making, but I got involved pretty heavily last year. when I, when I joined the team, one of the big things we wanted to do is, was look at the brand and say, is this, is this giving us everything it needs to give? Are we positioned to compete against the SaaS platforms of the world? are we positioned to you know, really grow our brand name? You know, woo is a very successful e-commerce platform but it’s not super well known. And we’ve done brand awareness surveys and, and we see this, right, like very well known, obviously in the community and the WordPress community, well-known events developers, even those who aren’t necessarily part of the community but it’s not really known among consumers or, you know, smaller merchants who who are using platforms like Shopify or even BigCommerce.

(02:26):
so yeah, it’s a, a really big opportunity for us to start to shift the brand a little bit and make it a little more friendly while still serving, you know, our base of developers who are using the platform. so when we, we kind of took a step back, look at the brand with the goal of kind of increasing our brand awareness, broadening our appeal and then more directly taking on those SaaS competitors. so we, when doing that, I realized like, we need to tune up the brand a little bit. and a lot of that was really just the brand hierarchy, not, you know, doing a big rebrand, anything like that. But, but really just looking at like, what’s our top level brand? How does the, how does the structure of the product naming come under that? and also like, you know, is the name, is the name something we can like, lean into the, you know, woo being like a name for excitement?

(03:14):
Is that something we can kind of lean into as our top level brand? and it’s like nice and punchy, obviously. Like it feels really good when you’re, when you’re talking about Shopify or BigCommerce or you know, Wix for that matter. Any, anybody in the e-commerce space, like it’s it feels like a really nice brand to go up against ’em with. so yeah, we, we kind of like looked at that and decided absolutely like Woo is a really exciting brand. it’s you know, it’s really rooted in the fact that we, it’s kind of the excitement we get empowering our customers, grow their businesses, both on the merchants and then, you know, developers using the platform as businesses as well. but it’s also the feeling our customers get when they launch a new store make a first sale, break their previous sales record.

(04:02):
I was in the D two c e-commerce space at my job before this actually. and I was pretty heavily involved, like, not just in the brand and in the creative, but you know, actually like working on the site day-to-Day. We were a pretty small team. and I would you know, you get a rush when you get a sale, even like, you know, we were doing pretty well by the time I finished my run there and we were getting, you know, sales were like a regular thing, but every time you get a notification, it was great. Or, you know, we would break our record or we had like, our best holiday sale. Like it’s really exciting. Like it’s, it’s a really, like, it’s a feeling that woo kind of captured perfectly. so yeah, so the switch to Woo, you know, also allows us to have that more logical and consistent approach to the names for like, all the products, like, woo subscriptions, woo payments, bookings.

(04:47):
Like we, when we surveyed our, like all of the various extensions that we have and all the different products, it became very clear. It was, it was very scattered, and some are for WooCommerce and some are for Woo and some are WooCommerce, whatever. And so kind of putting a stake in the ground on that top domain allowed us to have a really logical, consistent structure and kind of invest more in those products in terms of brand, so that it’s like really clear, like, oh, these are Woo products. so you’re starting to see that now, like, woo, payments and Woo subscriptions have now been updated. we’re still in, we have a, there’s a lot of extensions obviously so we’re still kind of in the middle of switching things over, but, but you’ll see that kind of continue to roll out over the course of the next probably two or three months.

BobWP (05:26):
Yeah, I think it’s that abbreviated punch when you did the rebrand. I, I always kind of go back to thinking of Federal Express and FedEx, how that changed Yep. And how those kind of things. I mean, hey, you know, we’ve had this podcast since 2018, and then we just kind of had a little bit of a lull there and then came back. But it’s amazing how people have taken the term woo through the podcast and actually have fun with it a bit. I mean, somebody today was I was talking about blocks and something to do with the site, and they said, oh, is it gonna be Wittenberg ? And, you know, so it’s a fun name to play around with, but not in a, a bad or negative way. It’s very, you can almost attach it to anything and, you know, have a, have a little bit of fun with it. And it, you know, for me it was kind of a no-brainer, I guess for as long as we’ve been , you know, having this podcast, it was like, I don’t know how many times I’ve had agencies on different people and how many times they’ve used Woo instead of WooCommerce just in the conversations. So it’s been, you know, internally, like you said, in the community already adapted. I think it was just that level. So from what I understand, it’s the brand. Woo. And then, you know, there’s still, the plugin is called WooCommerce.

David (06:58):
Yep, exactly. Yeah. And that’s not gonna change. WooCommerce is our core product. That’s what we’re doing a lot of our development on. even when you look at something like Woo Express, like what we’re doing with Woo Express, it’s all obviously built on the core platform. And anything that we’re doing in Woo Express that might be new or different is really with the intent of using that as the kind of the proving ground to then take it into core. So yeah, WooCommerce isn’t going away. We’re not shifting our you know, our focus on that. We’re still working really hard on the platform. but just as we think about like, everything the company and the brand does, it’s really, it’s broader than just the e-commerce. It’s a lot of complimentary services like payments and we wanna make sure that e’re set up to kind of like have that breadth shown in the brand name.

(07:46):
And as you said, it’s a fun name, right? It’s fun to say. it’s fun to see. It’s fun to design around. as you know, our, our team does all the design work for the website and for advertising. Like, it’s, it’s just a real, like, nice punching name looks great on a, on a silk jacket, so we can look like a cool fifties gang. so yeah, I think really excited about like, what it offers us. and to your point, it’s been something that has been used for a long time, right? We’re not, we’re not like, we’re not doing anything crazy , you’re an early pioneer, but it’s definitely the shorthand in the community and has been for a long time. So we’re kind of leaning into that as well.

BobWP (08:27):
What I want to touch on a little bit now is the homepage. there’s been feedback on the homepage on Woo Express, all the different parts of it. I went and typed in woo.com, can’t say I really noticed a lot of difference. Maybe I’m on the homepage more often than other people, but can you tell us a little bit more about what you saw with the feedback on the homepage and really the reality of why you did what you did with the homepage and how much, you know, did it really change?

David (09:01):
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So first of all, it was the first time I got to type in just Woo.com was like exhilarating. and everything worked very s you know, just an inside look a a very smooth rollout. And I have, I’ve done domain changes and brand changes and all sorts of these kind of like big, like high touch projects where it’s kind of worked on across a big slice of the business. And I don’t think anything’s ever gone quite this well. So that was lovely to see. So yeah, when you type in w.com, you’ll go to the homepage. we definitely saw a lot of really good chatter on our, the WordPress Internets about the change about the brand change and the domain change we definitely did see a little bit of a correlation of the change and starting to promote Woo Express a little more on the site.

(09:49):
I’d say they’re related only in the fact that they’re both things that we are doing to win more of the market kind of a brand that really stands out, and then a product that competes more directly with SaaS platforms. but we made the updates to feature Woo Express on the site about three months before we actually did the, any of the brand or domain updates. so yeah, in terms of Woo Express, like we feel like it’s a great product, obviously. there’s really not any intention to like step away from promoting the core WooCommerce product. but we were looking at who comes to the site and the people who are downloading WooCommerce and installing it on servers and already know about Woo WooCommerce aren’t really going to the, those marketing pages like the homepage, right? They’re usually, they maybe go to docs you know, they’re going directly to to download in on WordPress dot org.

(10:39):
but they’re not really like browsing through our marketing. so yeah, we are starting to tune up our homepage and other top level pages of the site to be more relevant to the traffic we are seeing to those pages. And that is a lot of people coming in off organic search for e-commerce platform or, you know, WooCommerce versus whatever Mm-hmm. to those people we like Woo Express is kind of who it who, or that is who it’s built for, right? There are, it’s really meant to be as, it’s like an all in one solution and it’s got a hosting built in, and you can, you, there’s a free trial. It’s really meant for those those people searching for an e-commerce platform. so those are, those are kind of the site updates that we made. but yeah, we were kind of surprised to see that.

(11:20):
and I think it’s actually, you know, we’re kind of making the bet that like the community isn’t really going to those pages. And I think that was spot on given the fact that like, you know, we made it in I think July and that we didn’t hear anything about it till the domain October 31st. so yeah, I think we, I think we nailed that. I think we got like, who’s going where, right? but I think we still need to do a better job pathing people through the website that includes, you know, for Express or, you know, like better surfacing of developer documentation or whatever. So we’re still working on those efforts too, and just generally trying to tune the website more for like, the entry points that people are coming in on and kind of like the intent that the best audiences will have at that time. so that’s, that’s a work in progress for sure.

BobWP (12:06):
Yeah. ’cause it seems like, and I, I’m gonna just kind of play the devil’s advocate and try to put on my hat of a user or, or somebody that’s not familiar, doesn’t seem like you necessarily, if you’ve searched and you’ve come across WooCommerce for the very first time, you’re going more of a dive in and learning process here. You know, most people don’t just go by the homepage. I don’t know, I, I’m thinking, you know, you’re gonna start looking at what’s inside here, and then you make the decision and then often you install WordPress and you go through the whole hosting thing, then you search for WooCommerce. ’cause it’s a free plugin you can install directly. You don’t want to download a zip file and, you know, deal with that part of it. In fact, I don’t even know if anybody, I mean, maybe some developers do that, but most people, you know, you try to avoid that piece of it because that just causes more confusion for a lot of people. And I imagine that a lot of developers are going into the developer blog, the documentation almost instantaneously and maybe have never even touched on the homepage before.

David (13:16):
Yeah, that’s right. I, you know, I think maybe they’ll go to the homepage, you know, just as that’s like the top level page when they type it in. But from there, we’re mostly seeing people go to exactly right, the developer portal where we’ve got the blog and where we’ve got documentation. we recently did a tuneup on that design as well to to help people find documentation a little better, what they’re looking for, make it a little bit better. But portal there and there’s still, still ongoing work in that space as well. yeah, we’re not, we do have if you go to the homepage, there is kind of a split of like, oh, I want to, you know, I’m, I’m a merchant basically, or I’m a developer. so we do have kind of those, there’s like a choose your own adventure module as I call it, on like right under the hero.

(13:57):
And that allows people to kind of go, you know, again, we’re, we’re just working on pathing, people getting where they can, you know, get to the things that they care about quicker and fewer clicks. so that was one effort we did. but yeah, from there, like we, we certainly have some pages that are a little bit more marketing to developers who maybe haven’t built on Woo before and are looking to get into that. but then, you know, most people who are already working with Woo are not touching any of that, and they’re just going to the developer portal or, you know, they already have all their systems set up and they don’t even really need to even do that very frequently.

BobWP (14:29):
Now, the other piece that people were talking about was the concern over existing businesses that were using. Woo. I know that when we went through the process of the domain, we went through a contract with the legal and figured out things where we could use that. And I think that’s been in place for a while, that people are able to submit something. It’s not like you’re just going to shut them down without even talking to them. And that is, like I said, been in place and it really goes case by case.

David (15:07):
Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah, we have the ability for people to reach out and ask us about, you know, using some of the some of the marks like the Woo name. our, our biggest thing is we want people to be able to promote that they work on Woo, that, you know, their extension is for Woo WooCommerce specifically, or, you know, that they’re like in the space. what we want to prevent is any kind of confusion that they’re associated with the brand when they’re not. I mean, so that’s really what it comes down to for me, is ’cause I’m now getting these, these requests , you know, if, if, you know, some sites like Lean really heavily into the Woo branding, if it could be a little confusing, I think for people who like, you know, find it naturally through organic search and they’re like, oh, is this like a WooCommerce like thing?

(15:49):
Is it built by Woo? Or is it just like adjacent? That’s really where we try to come down. We wanna be really fair to people and know that, you know, they, they need to have Woo in their name right to, or WooCommerce just to make sure that they’re connected and that people know what it’s for. or that, you know, it’s a, that they are say an agency that like works on Woo and they wanna make sure that people know that we wanna make sure people can have thriving businesses built on Woo. So we, we try not to curtail that too much. and it really only gets into that territory where, like I said, the brand is a little, could be a little misleading, and in those cases, we, we work with people, right? We say like, Hey, if it was like, you know, wasn’t using the logo in this way, or like, the entire site isn’t like Woo purple or whatever certain, certain things just to eliminate confusion, and then we’re usually pretty happy to, to let people do their thing.

BobWP (16:38):
Yeah, that’s kind of, and I know that I have at the footer of our website that we’re not affiliated. I mean, there was things that we were able to do, and I think most people that also listened to the podcast and, and knew those of us who were involved that we weren’t, you know, directly affiliated. So yeah. You know, in hindsight, is there anything else you wanna share? I mean, you kinda got the listening audience here around the branding you know, do the process or anything moving forward that you’d like to share with the audience?

David (17:16):
Yeah I mean, just so we’re really excited to continue to build on this. This was just, you know, one of, of many things we’re working on, obviously I think people will start to see some new visuals come out that are same, same thing we’re trying to do with the name right, to, to differentiate to make sure that our brand can stand out. And if you’re seeing us against other ads or competitors or just out in the world that it’s, that you can be like, oh, that’s woo, right? they, there are certain things, there’s certain through lines but that they’re, but that they’re also different. They’re both differentiating and they kind of make us stand out. so we are, you know, we’re showing up in an interesting way. when you see an ad or you see just even the website or you see our booth at WordCamp we really want those to be distinct and memorable and different.

(18:02):
So so yeah, I think our, our design team’s been hard at work. again, we’re not, it’s not a rebrand. We’re not changing the logo, we’re not doing anything like that. But, but you’ll start to see, you know, maybe updated color palette in terms of like, featuring more colors or, you know, different illustration styles, stuff like that, that are, will start to become more of a through line. And we’re already introducing some of those now. so we’re, yeah, we’re building on that. and just, yeah, really excited about, you know, continuing to promote Woo Express and get that out in the world as an option while still having, you know, all the capabilities of WooCommerce core for, for people who wanna have that as well. so yeah, that just like the team’s been working really hard at it over the, especially the, the last year to do that.

BobWP (18:45):
Yeah. Well it was interesting I don’t know, a couple years ago, one of our hosts, I think it was Robert Jacobi, started talking about the word Woo, and would it start to become more of a how we would use it? You know, did you, you know, Hey, you know, II built a shop, did you Woo it? Or something like that. And you never know. I mean, it, it is an interesting short, snappy little word and it fits so nicely in different places, I’m excited to see what you do with it, and I know we’re constantly making up words on our show with it, because that’s just, yeah, it’s just easy to do and fun to do.

David (19:31):
Yeah, thanks. Yeah, it, it’s definitely Bri you could have a lot of fun with, right? We could done that already before, but I think this, this kind of gives us even more license to do so. so yeah, I’m excited to see what the team is, is doing with that over, especially the course of the next year is we’re, you know, doing more campaigns or looking to do more videos, just explaining what Woo is and, and how we can kind of have fun with the, with the name, with the brand. but yeah, Bob, thanks for having me on. Really appreciate it. first time caller, long time listener, so it’s cool to be on.

BobWP (19:59):
Great. And I, I would love to take credit for the change that, you know, I inspired the entire company to do it after the podcast for these past few years, but I don’t think that really is the case, but I can quietly take my I’ll take a little bit of credit. I

David (20:15):
Guess you can take as much credit if you’re an early pioneer Bob. So just however much you want really. Okay.

BobWP (20:21):
Thanks so much, David, for joining us.

David (20:23):
Thank you.