Back in 1997, I founded Zephyr Adventures as the world’s first inline skating tour company. Over the years, we evolved our offerings to include more and more activities such as hiking, biking, and kayaking.
This year, we decided it was time to not only evolve our tour offerings (check out our new Specialty Adventure Category) but to evolve the Zephyr website and logo as well.
Rebranding a 20-plus-year-old company is no easy task. It takes time, consideration, research, and many, many conversations to make sure one is heading in the right direction. We engaged a dozen or so designers to provide design options and conducted many rounds of voting and feedback sessions.
We are very happy with the end result of our efforts and hope you are too. In case you’re curious as to what led us down this path, I’ve outlined our thought process below:
Our rebranding criteria
- We (the Zephyr Team) have to like it
- Our alumni and potential travelers have to like it (If you’re an alumnus, you’ll remember that we sent out a survey asking for your opinion earlier this year)
- It needs to be meaningful to who we are as a company
Why update the Zephyr Adventures logo and website now?
- We are in our 21st year; we want to start the next 20 years with a refreshed look
- Websites get old, it was time to create a new one, and we thought this was a good time to create a new logo too
- We have refocused our company’s “identity”
What we love about our new look
- It has a clean and crisp look and feel to it.
- The mountain reflects both what we do and where we are from. Not all our tours have mountains but most do (we counted!) – even the skating trips have mountain scenery. Most of our guides and staff live in the mountains, big or small. On top of that, Zephyr’s HQ is only a short hike from the highest mountains in Montana.
- The subliminal (or not so subliminal) Z in the mountains doubles as a hiking path, skating path, or a river.
- The colors we chose are similar to the blue and green colors we have used for 20 years and were the top vote-getters from our alumni survey.
We’re excited for this fresh start and are looking forward to getting many years out of our new branding. And don’t worry, if you personally don’t like our new logo, you just have to wait another 20 years for a new one!