This march, 20 members of our remote team came together in Mas Santo, Spain to reflect on our journey, celebrate our wins and enjoy a break from the hard work of building up a transportation technology platform. Getting together in person was an amazing opportunity to connect with each other, as well as to align on some fundamentals for our business as a team.
We took the time outside of our remote routines to think big about the future of our product as well as the identity of our company. More than discussing roadmaps, we looked into our principles and processes and last but not least we evaluated our brand name.
This blogpost will provide you with an overview, why we arrived in Spain as M-TRIBES and left the offsite carrying a new name: MotionTools.
In branding one can be bigger than two.
The more we are gearing up our business operations, the greater we are coming to understand the value of simplicity in our processes and communications. We recognized that having separate names for our company “M-TRIBES” and our product “M-TOOLS” is an unnecessary complication for both our team and our customers.
Asking ourselves the question if our brand is ready to scale to the size of our vision, we were reminded of the “less, but better” design philosophy. Would this mean that it might be more powerful to have one brand name instead of two?
Not following any hype since 2017.
Naturally the decision to rebrand sounded like a tempting opportunity to explore if there might be an exotic animal, a crazy plant, a chemical element, or anything else from the dictionary that could serve us as a creative northern star.
As a startup we strongly believe in the power of market niches. Still we understand that our name should be able to speak to a broad variety of audiences on an everyday basis and for decades to come:
Already our software is serving a wide range of ambitious businesses not only in a multitude of countries all over the world, but also in a growing diversity of categories from grocery delivery and quick commerce startups to logistics-as-a-service operators as well as fleet service providers.
This meant that we quickly came to the conclusion that once again with our brand we wanted to avoid any kind of hype, but identify a term that would explain our bold ambition in a humble character.
Preserving our core, unleashing greater energy.
To come up with the “new” brand we looked at all the inputs that make up our current identity and decided which parts to keep, which parts to change and which parts to erase.
While M-TRIBES as a company name communicates our belief that there is nothing more important to our success than having the right people on our team, it was never designed to reflect the core competency of our B2B SaaS product.
Our M-TOOLS technology platform provides transportation companies with the power to launch and scale highly-customized operations. By revealing what the M stands for, we believe we can take it to a new level.
M is for Motion.
More than two years ago, when many of our customers were facing lockdowns, we were inspired to write down the words that since then have become our company’s genuine purpose: “Technology for a world in motion.”
“Motion”, a term derived from the world of physics, finally gave us a technique to speak to the great diversity of operations all united by the need to manage changes of locations of items and people.
As “motion” is widely associated with the expression “setting something in motion” it stirs not only the start-up spirit of our own team, but speaks to the the ambition of many of our business partners that often defy existing categories and are driven to build their own future.
“The MotionTools rebrand is a key step for our company to provide a more accessible and differentiating customer experience. Our new name answers the question of what we really want to be known for – a truly empowering transportation technology platform. MotionTools offers the freedom and flexibility to set up and scale unique transportation operations from ultra-efficient 10 minute grocery delivery, logistics-as-a-service to on-the-go fleet servicing for sharing operators.”
Johannes Schubert, CMO
The transition has begun.
Today the process of updating our infrastructure from our APIs to our Help center, from our office doors to our slack channels has formally begun. On 5.5.22 the update will be complete.
We will also use this opportunity to polish a few things in our design system such as our typeface and our artworks. We look forward to hearing your thoughts as we take these steps, so please don’t hesitate to get in touch with any comments and questions.
