Rashmi's Portfolio

Overview

A visual brand direction for the smartest restroom around

Throne Labs is changing the public restroom game—forging their mission to expand public restroom access forward with a smart bathroom product in cities nationwide. After reaching Series A funding, their growth reached a point where their original branding needed scaling. I was brought in to facilitate a custom, half-day workshop to help align Throne's visual identity with its brand identity, as well as support the team in building feedback frameworks for ongoing brand work. The findings from this workshop informed the team's brand direction, assisted them with aligning their C-suite with that direction, and solidified a precedent for outcomes-focused daily design projects and forward-moving cross-functional feedback.

Project summary / RACI

My role	Workshop facilitator & creator
Responsible	Myself
Accountable	Senior Marketing Manager
Consulted	Chief Operating Officer
Informed	C-suite team, and Director of Product
Timeline	Workshop: 4 hours Visual identity presentation: 3 weeks
Tech stack	In-person workshop: markers, stickies, dots, large flip pad, Miro Design & collaboration: Slack, Canva, Figma, Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator), Pinterest

Challenges

A divided kingdom

Throne's brand new marketing team revamped their brand identity, packaged expertly in a highly-socialized “Brand Bible.” But they encountered two familiar problems with orgs at their stage: Stakeholders had conflicting brand priorities, and they lacked a shared language for the visual expression of those priorities, their audiences' priorities, or message hierarchy.

Case in point: One stakeholder loved circles, while another hated them. Another stakeholder didn't want to change their monochrome color palette too much, while another wanted to burn it all down. Some stakeholders felt that the brand should be more community-driven, while others wanted a more polished, "techy" look and feel. When creative work was done, conflicting feedback would blow scopes out considerably.

Simply put, stakeholders needed to align on guiding brand decisions so that their creative professionals could create efficiently.

What I built

A workshop fit for royalty

Working together with the Senior Marketing Manager, I designed an affinity mapping-style workshop that I would then facilitate for them. I coordinated goals and logistics with the Marketing Manager, then met with each participant individually to help prepare them and set expectations. Then, I distributed the agenda via email a few days prior to the event.

Workshop design

Purpose	Align leaders & IC team members with a common brand visual identity vision for Throne
Participants	COO Senior Marketing Manager PR Consultant Lead Technician Account Executive
Format	3-hour in-person working session
Pre-work	Short questionnaire that requested participants review their Brand Bible and a brand overview video, then submit responses to questions regarding their feelings and opinions on current branding
Tools	Stickies, dots (for voting), large flip presentation pad, markers, Miro & laptops (for lightning demos)
Facilitation approach	Affinity mapping of brand strengths and weaknesses (expert interviews, sailboat), and creation of ideas (lightning demos)
Outputs	Workshop summary & synthesis, C-suite oriented presentation of findings and recommendations, visual ID Figma file with new direction concept

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Workshop agenda

Time	Activity	Operational purpose
0-15 min	Introduction + warm-up	Create psychological safety and introduce the team to the mechanics of "workshopping"
16-30 min	Expert interviews	Establish and disseminate SME knowledge to participants unfamiliar with departmental precedents
31-90 min	Sailboat (visual element edition)	Examine what's working and not working about the current visual identity, and surface differing points-of-view
91-120 min	BREAK	Provide mental and physical rest for next steps
121-160 min	Lightning demos	Create new solutions and break siloed thinking
161-170 min	Closing	Gather the team's thoughts on how successful the session was and discover any new key insights for future next steps and sessions

Outcomes & learnings

Winning a royal..."flush"

What my heading pun above lacks in sense, my presentation to Throne's C-suite made up for with both outcomes-focused recommendations. Rather than being met with diffuse feedback, C-suite understood the common thread that participants found during their session. Stakeholders aligned on prioritizing a visual refresh, began exercising their new outcomes-focused feedback framework and language, and planned on working with the Senior Marketing Manager to create a working agreement that would help move scopes forward efficiently.

By the following quarter, the team had hired an expert visual design agency to overhaul their visual identity for consistent, brand-aligned messaging and marketing collateral. What would have previously taken them several quarters (or more) was executed in just one instead!

Throne Labs

Designing and facilitating a visual identity workshop for toilet-loving brand creatives & leaders