Transcription
At the start of 2025, I joined Mode as their chief design officer. My first task: reimagining the company's brand. But where do you begin? How do you position your brand to stand out from competitors? Why risk changing something that already works? And how can a rebrand transform a business and shape its future products?
Hello, I'm Matthew Cena. In this video, I'll walk you through the process of building a brand from start to finish. Thanks to Shopify for sponsoring this video.
Before we begin, I want to give a little context on how we got here. The story of Mode begins when our founder, Jacob, discovers mechanical keyboards while working as a software engineer. What starts as a hobby, building his first custom keyboard, evolves into a quest for the perfect typing experience. This obsession sparks ideas that lead to late-night designing, which becomes Mode's first product, a batch of 50 keyboards. No outside investments, no crowdfunding, no guarantee of success. The keyboard isn't perfect. First attempts rarely are, but 50 incredible humans take a chance on Mode.
Since then, Mode has grown steadily, reinvesting in better keyboards with each production run. Now, 5 years later, it is transformed from a side project into a company with a clear vision. Mode isn't just about keyboards; it's about how thoughtful design transforms everyday experiences. This vision comes to life through our small, dedicated remote team across Boston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
That's where I come in. As a creative professional in design, advertising, and branding since 2003, I've collaborated with some of the biggest brands in the world. My path takes an unexpected turn when my own keyboard obsession leads me to explore industrial product design. In 2022, I discover Mode and instantly connect with their design aesthetic. As a DIY project, I create an oak accent piece for their Sonic keyboard. This becomes an official Mode product and leads to a bigger project: designing an entire keyboard from scratch. These successes, combined with my experience, paved the way for me to join Mode as their chief design officer in 2025, where I now lead the brand and product vision. It's a huge responsibility, but I'm thrilled by what's next.
You might be wondering: if a company is doing so well, why change anything? Over the last 5 years, we've grown and developed clearer opinions on what we want Mode to be, what values drive our product design, and how we want to do business. So, we want to update the brand to reflect that. The questions on our minds are: where have we been in the last 5 years, and what's our vision for Mode in the future? How might we position our brand and products to be distinct in the marketplace? What's worth keeping, and what needs to change for our business to grow? And this is where the branding process comes in.
While most people associate a brand with its logo, colors, and typefaces, it's so much more than that. A brand is a person's gut feeling about a product, service, or company. Every touch point and interaction shapes how customers perceive the brand. A strong brand has an outstanding reputation, is perceived as valuable, stands out from its competitors, and forms genuine connections with customers. Our branding process examines all aspects of our business—positioning, product, culture, and customers—to determine what changes will help us achieve our goals. This process takes several weeks and follows the double diamond framework.
A brand refresh is no easy task. And while I'm up for the challenge, it's always good to have an extra creative mind to collaborate with. This is Ben Burns, an old coworker and friend. He's a well-rounded creative with excellent taste. As the former digital director at Blind and chief operating officer at The Future, we collaborated on numerous client projects and digital products together. When Ben became available for design work, I jumped at the chance to bring him on board to facilitate our branding process. With Ben's involvement, I can focus on crafting the brand vision while he provides an objective outside perspective, serving both as a sounding board for ideas and a skilled hand in bringing them to life.
First, we begin with the discovery phase. We expand our understanding of the brand vision, business goals, and challenges while gathering data on products, customers, and the market. We kick off the discovery process by getting the team together at my LA studio. The crew includes Jacob, our CEO; Chris, our head of marketing; myself; and Ben, who guides us through the session.
Before jumping into the brand exercises, we took some time to align on our bigger company goals. Here's what rose to the top: Establish a distinct brand voice with a clear identity and point of view; deepen our understanding of current customers while identifying and planning for new ones; update and refine our product catalog to better serve our customers and reflect our brand; and increase revenue over the next 5 years to invest in more challenging projects.
Before our meetup, we spend weeks gathering research and data. We analyze website traffic, sales data, and conduct customer surveys within the keyboard community to understand trends and preferences. We also do in-depth video interviews with specific community members to learn why they buy or pass on our products. These insights inform our in-person user exercises where we identify and segment our current and future customer base to better understand who we serve. We know our current customers, many by name. So, we focus our exercises on how we can attract new ones. Our research helps us create detailed user personas with names and stories that reveal what matters to these potential customers. We then map how each customer type interacts with our brand from discovery to purchase, noting what influences their decisions and what holds them back.
There were many customers we considered, but here are two examples of personas and their journeys. First is Tim, an experienced UX design manager in Austin, Texas. He extensively researches products before purchasing. Tim values quality, community, and knowing the people behind the brands. As a hobby enthusiast, he'd likely enjoy building our keyboard kits. For customers like Tim, we need detailed product information available and to make the community around our brand visible.
Then there's Jay, a young software engineer in San Francisco, California, who's seeking a workspace upgrade. Jay is busy, so he doesn't want to spend a lot of time trying to find a better keyboard. He relies on influencer and publication recommendations for him. We need a simple purchase process with clear guidance and the option for ready-to-use products.
Looking at different user types gives us a valuable perspective on improving our products and customer experience. With these insights, we now turn our focus inward to examine our brand. In the next series of exercises, we examine our brand through multiple lenses: values and beliefs, features and benefits, voice and tone, and look and feel. Using focus prompts, our team brainstorms freely. We group similar ideas and prioritize what resonates most deeply. The word clusters reveal clear themes that shape our brand's characteristics. These are attributes we currently embody and ideals we will continue to pursue as we grow the brand.
Using the brand attributes defined from our prompts, we analyze our positioning in the competitive landscape. Positioning is the space a brand occupies in the hearts and minds of customers relative to competitors. For our exercise, we create an X and Y map with opposing brand qualities. We plot both our competitors and brands from other industries to visualize where we stand in the market. For our voice, we ask: Are we understated or outspoken? Are we an opaque company or more transparent and human? For our aesthetic: Are we warm and inviting or stark and industrial? Are we highly curated or raw and unedited? Are our products expensive or are they budget options? Are they considered premium or the standard? What we find is eye-opening and sparks a lot of discussion. In some areas, we are swimming in a crowded pool without much to set us apart. This realization pushes us to ask more important questions: How can we carve out our own unique space? What do we need to change to create distinction from our competitors? This helps us refine our brand positioning as we wrap up our work for the discovery phase.
Moving into the define phase, we synthesize information to identify insights and opportunities and the design challenges we want to tackle. The research and discussions helped us understand our business better and where we fit in the market. These insights come together during our LA meeting, but become even clearer as we reflect on them over the following weeks. What emerges is a clear vision for Mode's future. We start seeing patterns and themes that resonate with everyone on the team: ideas like warm tech—making technology feel more human and inviting—creating joy in everyday experiences. Because keyboards shouldn't just be functional, they should bring delight; and making products that deserve to exist, focusing on quality and innovation rather than just adding to the noise.
But having a vision isn't enough. We have to make some tough decisions about our product lineup. This means taking a hard look at our current offerings and being honest about what needs to change. As a result, we're discontinuing certain products to sharpen our focus on better ones. We also know our visual identity, messaging, and website need a complete overhaul to better serve our customers and reflect our new direction. In this define phase, we have a clear set of design challenges to address in the rest of the process: How might we create products that feel thoughtfully crafted rather than mass-produced? Objects that bring joy and warmth to people's spaces? How might we design a brand identity that feels high-end and curated while still feeling humble and human? And how might we design a website that seamlessly guides both newcomers and experienced enthusiasts through their journey? We want the shopping experience to be simple and smooth. So, we use Shopify, the sponsor of this video.
Shopify is a powerful set of tools that help you start and manage your business, whether online or in person. When Mode started its keyboard business in 2019, managing an e-commerce operation while developing its first product felt overwhelming. Thanks to Shopify, setting up a store was simple, letting Mode focus on delivering its first product. As Mode grew, maintaining enough capital to fund orders became crucial for operations. Shopify Capital provides flexible funding that you can repay as you sell, accessible at every stage of growth right from your dashboard. This enables businesses like ours to seize opportunities by improving cash flow, especially when investing in inventory to maintain steady sales. Shopify is there when you're just starting out and grows with your business. It has apps to build and customize your store and ways to connect and sell natively on social platforms to meet your customers where they are.
Thanks to Shopify for sponsoring this video. Go to shopify.com/matthewscena to learn more.
Now that we have our direction, we move into expansive exploration in the develop phase, exploring ideas for the new brand and creating solutions that address our goals. We begin with stylescapes, which are carefully curated mood boards. This is a process Ben and I use to transform abstract ideas into concrete visuals, allowing us to explore different design directions quickly before we invest time in custom design work. Drawing from our discovery and define phases, we identify key themes that shape each direction. We gather visual references that match these themes, adjust them to create visual harmony, and arrange them on a wide layout. Stylescapes provide a preview of how the brand looks across different touch points, from packaging to digital screens.
We develop three distinct directions to present to the Mode team. First, there's Serious Fun: It's clean, curated, and colorful. Next, Crafted Narrative: inspired by editorial design with rich contrasting colors. Lastly, Bits of Joy: bright and fun with a modern take on nostalgic lo-fi graphics. During the presentation, we look for what resonates with the team and how well each direction matches our defined brand values. The second direction proves to be the most popular, particularly for its dark green palette and typography choices. The team also likes elements from the other directions, including the bitmap typefaces from Bits of Joy and illustrations from Serious Fun. Based on the feedback, we combine the best elements to create our final stylescape: The Story of Craft. This direction features editorial-inspired typography, hand-drawn elements, and maker marks that showcase our craftsmanship. Rich colors, warm tones, and imagery highlight how our products bring joy to spaces. This stylescape serves as our foundation for developing the complete visual identity.
The first design project we take on is the website. It's the largest asset we need to create, but also has the most opportunities to figure out many aspects of the brand, like typography, imagery, and colors. The goal is to create an experience that reflects our new brand and feels intuitive whether you're a first-time visitor or a keyboard enthusiast. First, we create a site map, a bird's-eye view of every page on the website. It's challenging to think through, but allows us to plan for all the various paths a user can take on our site. This process allows us to test different user journeys, ensuring customers can easily find what they're looking for. Next, we create two key pages using placeholder content. This gives us a sense of the overall aesthetic and the components we need, like menus, typography styles, buttons, galleries, and more. Once we're happy with these two pages, it takes us a few weeks to create and refine the rest of the website.
Typography plays a huge part of any brand identity. In our stylescape, we determined that we want to use a combination of serif and sans-serif for our header and body copy and a selective use of bitmap-style typefaces as a fun nod to the history of computing and mechanical keyboards. We can test different typeface combinations in a type specimen and look at them in context on our sample web pages. We finally choose to add a monospace font for technical copy to highlight the engineering aspects of our work.
Next is choosing colors for the brand, which is more complex than you might think. We need a palette that works across all of our brand collateral, from physical packaging to our website on screen. For the main color, we fell in love with this deep green. It's bold yet calming because of its ties to nature. To support this, we choose a set of secondary colors that can be used as accents. Ben and I spend multiple sessions reviewing color swatches and combinations. This is one of the most intense parts of the process because it impacts so many aspects of the brand and business. It's so important to get right.
Photography plays a crucial role in bringing our brand to life. I pulled together reference images that best capture these qualities and spend time thinking about the key principles for our photography style: strong directional lighting, warm and natural tones with subtle film grain, scenes that feel lived in but not messy, and people featured in a way that doesn't detract from the product. These rules and references should provide enough guidance for our team to capture photos and videos that fit our new brand direction.
Crafting our brand voice is another challenging task. We want to sound professional but not corporate. Friendly but not fake. A difficult balance to strike. The keyboard world is full of technical jargon. So we want to make a conscious effort to use clear, simple language that anyone can understand. Using a Notion document, we collaborate to write and refine our core messages, making sure our word choices feel authentic to who we are. This means avoiding marketing buzzwords and focusing on honest, straightforward communication.
With the key aspects of our brand identity developed, I shift my focus onto the product. Our new brand concept of warm tech has become the north star of our product design. While most tech feels cold and manufactured, we want our products to feel crafted and human. As one customer tells us during the interviews, a nice keyboard can be like a piece of furniture that ties the room together. This insight deeply resonates with our vision and becomes a guiding principle that shapes our product design. Like a well-chosen piece of furniture transforms a room, a carefully crafted keyboard should elevate your workspace while bringing joy to your everyday experience. I start by exploring different forms, colors, materials, and finishes we can use on our products. Then I take these as inspiration to begin the lengthy process of designing our next keyboard.
We are now in the final phase of the branding process: Deliver. We refine our best concepts into a clear brand strategy and refreshed identity system. The biggest challenge in this phase is getting all the small details right. While reaching 90% completion is relatively straightforward, the final 10% takes the most time and effort. We're four months into the process, and the more we make, the more we learn. As we know better, we iterate on our earliest work to ensure everything is cohesive and drives us towards our goals. The delivery phase will take months to roll out fully, and we'll continue to work on it beyond this video. For now, let me show you what we've accomplished so far.
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First, we finalize our brand identity guidelines. This gives us a clear framework on how we present ourselves to the world. Starting with the logo usage, we kept our existing logo because it works well and we've built brand equity around it. It wasn't something I felt needed changing, so we focused on slight refinements and detailed usage. We've developed a cohesive visual language with carefully chosen typography, colors, and imagery. One aspect that has grown since our original stylescape exploration is the lo-fi bitmap imagery. Inspired by retro computing, tapping into the history of mechanical keyboards, we're calling this the alter ego of our brand. This drives the language of our custom-made iconography, logo variant, and is a fun way to process photos. To shape how our brand speaks, we establish clear language rules that create a distinctive voice and a tone that feels human, confident, and helpful. This includes messaging samples we can use on the website and in marketing. We also have a separate guide of brand expressions, a showcase of our brand across physical and digital platforms to explore different ways it can look and feel. These aren't meant to be final products, but rather are thought starters to draw from when creating assets for future product launches and events.
Through this entire branding process, we've crafted our vision and strategy. Our core mission is to bring joy to workspaces and everyday experiences, creating products that deserve to exist and carving out our warm tech niche to stand apart from our competitors. This changes how we approach our products as we take a more curated approach in developing a more thoughtfully designed ecosystem of keyboards and accessories. For marketing, we'll emphasize transparency to connect with our audience by sharing more of our story, behind-the-scenes content, and introducing the team behind our brand. One of the most valuable insights from our customer research: People connect with our brand when they experience our keyboards firsthand. The "aha" moment occurs when they see and type on our products. That's why we plan to attend more in-person creative and tech events to create more meaningful connections and grow our community.
With a strong brand and business foundation in place, we're working on several exciting ongoing projects. Our website redesign is complete. It's a massive change from where we were before to where we're going as a brand. We've warmed up the appearance of the site, simplified many of the purchasing processes for customers like Jay, and expanded areas that share more about our brand for our curious customers like Tim. Development of the site is currently in progress and will roll out slowly throughout the year. You can follow our updates on modesigns.com. We're taking the first steps in developing more eco-friendly packaging, starting with our next run of the Encore keyboard releasing this summer. We're moving away from foam inserts to recyclable molded pulp, and we'll feature our new brand look. Chris and Andrew in Boston have built a new studio setup to capture photos and videos which will be rolling out on our site and in future content. And the most exciting news: the next generation of our products is taking shape. We finished most of the design of the next keyboard, and now we're working with engineers to complete a full overhaul of components to strengthen our position as innovators in the mechanical keyboard space.
We still have more work ahead, and it will take time to see the impact of our efforts. I plan to share updates of our projects and processes on this channel. If you'd like more content like this, let me know in the comments and subscribe to follow along. Ben Burns will also be creating content about this project on his channel. Give him a follow if you'd like more insights from his perspective. Check the description for links to everything. If you have any questions, ask, and I'll do my best to answer them. With that out of the way, it's time to get back to work.