Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Our first acquisition!

Please welcome My Platinum Box (www.myplatinumbox.com) to the Voodoo family! In June, this health products and workout supplements site officially became our first full acquisition, with some much appreciated help from the Region-Free Titles team. We feel that this business has the potential to grow exponentially, especially considering the major subscription box craze right now and the dramatic growth of the supplement market. 

After much deliberation and many possible name choices, we plan to re-brand this business as StrongPack. Tagline: "Get Smart. Get Strong." We were looking for a name and image that would appeal not only to muscle heads but to other audiences as well, including potentially women.We feel that everyone can relate to the idea of strength. Some of our more wacky name ideas included buffstuff.com, fitsample.com, and even nastybox.com - glad we didn't go that route!

We hope to do more than just use real marketing to grow this brand - we hope to redefine it. It seems to us that one of the biggest missing links in the burgeoning field of supplements is trusted advice. Every product advertising how huge it will make you or how much more you will be able to lift after taking it, but very few can give any solid science behind that. This starts to get scary when you think that none of these products need to be approved by the FDA, and the fact that they are targeted to somewhat at risk populations (i.e., the young "meat head" that might abuse them, etc.). 

For this reason, we hope to the change the game. We want to become the trusted source of supplement and workout product advice and reviews. And we don't expect customers to take our word for it --we are already in the process of recruiting fitness experts to review every product that we provide for our customers. Thus the tagline: "Get Smart. Get Strong." We want StrongPack customers to get fit the right way - quickly but safely, and in a sustainable manner. 

We couldn't be more excited to bring StrongPack to life! Keep an eye out for a new site later in the fall!

And just because it is maybe the most beautiful thing in the world, check out the new logo that our man Milos (our secret weapon designer in Serbia) just put together! We asked for something that promoted both brains and brawn, and we think that the old-school, slightly hipster style of this logo fits the bill perfectly. We were astounded at Milos' ability to illustrate throughout the process (where do you think that I stole my Google+ icon from!). Great work Milos!


Monday, October 7, 2013

We have a logo!

We finally pulled the trigger on The Voodoo Factory! We recently ran a logo design contest on Crowdspring (www.crowdspring.com). This is an amazing site. The amount of design concepts that we received is a bit ridiculous (413 iterations, of which approximately 70 designs were totally unique concepts!), and though the quality did vary, many were quite astonishing. Check out some of our top contenders and the results of our focus group: http://www.crowdspring.com/logo-design/project/2357215_project-voodoo-logo-for-a-hip-business-incubator/focus-groups/. In the end, we choose a logo that we thought was a bit more professional than some of the others, though we loved them all.

See the full contest, including our creative brief here: http://www.crowdspring.com/logo-design/project/2357215_project-voodoo-logo-for-a-hip-business-incubator/.

We found that the key to a successful design contest is participation --the more comments and direction that we gave participants throughout the contest, the better their designs got. Just as importantly, this review process helped us to clarify what we were after. Quick tip: if you use focus groups on this site, be sure to watch out for order bias (we still don't know if participants choose the first concept in the list due to its own merit or its position on the page, which is a bit misleading).

Of course, there could only be one winner. Congrats to Hybryd (http://www.crowdspring.com/user/Hybryd/), our winning designer!

Last but not least... here's the final result: