Rebranding … Where do you even start?! This is the exact feeling I have when a new project is placed in front of me these days.

For our business, we realized our name/branding, or lack thereof, no longer signified who we had grown into as a business. Machine Gun Graphics was 20 years old, and we were only providing screen printing at the time it was named. Today, we offer screen printing, embroidery, finishing services, patch sewing, sublimation, and promotional products. Fulfillment is on the horizon.

At some point, you realize you’re no longer just a print shop — you’ve become a “manufacturer.” We still felt connected to the name Machine Gun Graphics in a sense that there is some fear of completely changing your business name. There’s also the concern of losing clients if they feel like you’ve disappeared completely.

There are also other things we had to consider that go into a complete rebrand. When you toss in running the day-to-day operations of running a business, we knew we didn’t have the bandwidth to put in the effort to create a new brand that would encompass all the elements we were looking for. Thinking about it just sounds exhausting … We thought about doing it on our own several times in the last four years, but quickly walked away from the idea to focus on shop priorities.

Still, it needed to be done. Here is how we went about it — hopefully if you’re a shop considering, or needing, a rebrand, you find some helpful takeaways.

Enlist Professional Help

Our first step was obvious to us. We reached out to Airtype, a creative studio and current client, to help us. We already work closely with them on several projects and as a company, they match the vibe we were looking to convey to new and existing clients.

We knew we could trust them to guide us and bring a new era of our business to life. A true creative studio or ad agency will be full service to you, and they will take on all the leg work associated with this task. Look for a company that makes the transition hassle-free so you can focus on what you do best.

We sat down with Airtype a few times to discuss our shop specifics, who we are as people, as a company, and what we offer to our clients. Our main goal was to focus on communicating that we’re a knowledgeable staff that is quality driven and are here to help guide customers through the printing process.

We gave them full control and access to rebrand our current name or come up with a new name with new branding. They came back to us with several options. There was a rebrand of the current name that showed us what was and was not possible with Machine Gun Graphics.  It didn’t offer many possibilities.

It was 100% clear at that point it was time to move on to a new name.

We viewed a few more concepts, the last being Cotton Street Apparel. For those of you who aren’t familiar with us, our address is 610 Cotton Street. Wild to think now that renaming our business to something incorporating Cotton Street never occurred to us, but this is a great example of why it’s best to reach out and put the task in someone else’s hands.

As business owners, we are so tied up in the day-to-day tasks that we don’t even stop and allow ourselves the time for the simple ideas and solutions to appear. Reaching out to a professional agency that has experience with the rebranding process will not only give you an outside perspective, it will also come with the expertise of what to do once the branding pack is completed. Find someone, or a company, who is full service and creative. It is worth what you spend in the long run.

The “Small” Details

The next step was a new website buildout. Like most shops, we used a promotional products site as our main website before the rebrand. With Airtype’s guidance, we allowed them to build us a splash page that links to that promo site. The new page is filled with animation, what we offer, what we care about, and who we work with.

Simple, clean and to the point with improved SEO. Check it out here.

Lastly, the roll out. We partnered with our marketing team to prepare a series of automated email blasts and promo items to help introduce our current clients to the new name.

Our existing social media accounts were easily changed out with new marks and the name change. A few months leading up to the official change, we slowly rolled out two new marks on social media without the name to visually introduce our clients without giving the full details.  The new name was not included in any of these, just the marks themselves.

We are slowly switching the promo site over, keeping some elements of Machine Gun Graphics through the end of the year just to remind our current clients that we are the same rad team with the same rad owners and the same quality-driven attitude.

Dates were pushed back multiple times as we continued to fight with what the best time of the year would be to make that change. We finally settled on January 1. New year, new name. And here we are today, 2023 and the year of the rabbit, renamed and rebranded under Cotton Street Apparel with a cute little unnamed rabbit icon. By the way, we are taking name suggestions through our Instagram DM’s.

Final Outcome

We finally have true branding with icons that are easily recognizable now. We can be seen as a local option or a national option — it speaks to both types of clients.

Another cool realization was how little traffic and how low the close rate was on our old site. Since we still have both up for the next year, we still get leads from both. The new Cotton Street Apparel site is getting three times as many new client submissions and has a 90% close rate. The Machine Gun Graphics promo site does not get the same quality of client submissions and only has a 15% close rate. And yes, I keep track.

A new name and rebrand were absolutely what we needed to attract a wider client base.