A bit of history
Initforthe has been going for a long time. The company was incorporated in September 2004 when I was at university, and my first project was building a virtual learning environment for a language school bringing kids from overseas to stay with families and learn English.
I took the business full time in March 2008 after saddling myself with a mortgage at the very peak of the financial bubble and only a couple of months of runway on a credit card. It was do or die (probably not literally, but certainly for the business).
When I started out full time, I'd spent quite a number of years in the advertising and marketing world as a web developer. I joined a thriving London agency at the start of the dot com boom at the age of 17, and whilst there, built everything from BTCellnet (now O2)'s website to a search engine. When I left, I wanted to learn about the world outside of software, so ran a parts department for a while before heading off to university to study anything but computing. As it turns out, my interests led me to International Relations and Global Politics; business on a macro scale. I engaged with the human aspect of the course most, and that's still true today.
Another day in tomorrow's world
Fast forward some years: we have morphed (all businesses morph) into a very different kind of software company to those that existed before (and many still exist today). We forge our relationships with our clients as partners, almost becoming part of their business. For those of you who are clients, you'll know we passionately care about helping your people get more out of life than boring admin drudgery. For those that aren't (yet?), we spend crazy amounts of time forging relationships (even friendships) with the people across the whole business. We learn what it is to be in your shoes, and we never make assumptions about anything. That means we ask a lot of questions.
Working with us means challenging the status quo. Why is this thing done this way? Is it because it's the right way or because that's how we've always done it? If it's the latter, perhaps we can help you get to a better, cleaner, friendlier way to do things. If it's the former, wonderful!
Our values of knowledge, inquisitiveness, honesty, approachability, and simplicity mean that we're always trying to understand more about you and how you do things so that we can help you make the right choices for yourself and the team around you.
So the new brand identity speaks to those values. It's honest, like we are (we don't pull any punches), and it asks questions. What are you in it for? Certainly for us, money isn't the motivator, and for me personally, I thrive on seeing my clients smile at the work we deliver them. Genuinely, how many times have you found yourself smiling at a piece of software. I'm going to guess it's a rare occurrence.
Why change a name?
We spent some time last year thinking about whether we should change the company name. It's memorable, but hard to spell and pronounce on the phone. But it is who we are, and we couldn't find a name that better describes our values, so we decided to stick with Initforthe and just go with a visual refresh. Even our tone hasn't really changed because we are who we are, and our brand identity didn't quite match that.
I'd love to get your views on the new look (my bum probably does look big in it, but frankly, I don't care). And if you'd like to get in touch to discuss a project, then please do.
This was originally posted on the Initforthe Blog at https://initforthe.com/blog/welcome-to-our-new-brand-identity.
