Brand identity. Emerson Ecologics

Emerson invested in improving the backend of its flagship online dispensary product, Wellevate; however, that did not move the needle on Wellevate’s net promoter score nor customer loyalty. Every digital product’s visual design and coherence of user interface have an outsize effect on customers’ impressions, and are constituent to their whole user experience. Wellevate’s UI did not enjoy the benefits of the increased investment, and that reflected on customer satisfaction.

Moreover, Emerson customers tended to also be customers of Fullscript (the next direct competitor in the wholesale health supplement space). Fullscript’s branding and digital product experience convey a clear and coherent brand strategy, and their customers fully appreciate it. Customers that used both competing products were often the most vocal, and would provide feedback comparing Wellevate’s many shortcomings to Fullscript’s features they felt were superior—which outnumbered Wellevate’s significantly. 

Because there were no major advancements in the UI for years, Wellevate customers perceived little improvement in their experience and dismissed the product as dated, kludgy and “fuddy duddy.” Just a few benefits kept them in the Emerson camp; among them, excellent customer service, brand exclusivity contracts, and customer loyalty established decades before Fullscript even existed.

Fullscript acquired Emerson in March 2022, inheriting Wellevate with it.

Emerson Ecologics is its own wholesale platform. Wellevate is a separate business model that is an online dispensary with supplemental services such as telehealth and labs.

The discontinuity between the Emerson Ecologics and Wellevate brand identities only exacerbated confusion amongst both existing customers of either product and prospects seeking a wholesale health supplement distribution partner. The entities did not share enough identity elements, and the overall presentation of either’s benefits and overlap was poor.

On top of the visual friction between Emerson Ecologics and Wellevate, how their brand elements were applied to the different user interfaces (e.g. overwhelming use of low-contrast greens in the former and high-contrast blues in the latter), alongside third-party partner brands did not contribute positively to user experience, and likely had deleterious long-term effects on revenue.

One of Marketing’s primary directives was to take advantage of a $7M revenue opportunity in the skincare/cosmeceutical market, a premium and objectively superficial segment in the space. However, this required an elevated brand identity—and product experience—intentionally built to compete, and the status quo of Wellevate certainly did not meet this criteria.

Pair this with the prior problem—discontinuity between the Emerson and Wellevate brand identities, and we had a compounding multi-brand issue to address with limited time and resources. Regardless of the obstacles, the need for a wholesale brand identity refresh was obvious and imperative.

The responsibility of refreshing the brand identity of a company with a 40+ years of brand equity, starts with understanding its visual history and how it arrived at its current state.

Among the things learned, the Leaf mark was the original idea of one of the longest-standing medical employees’ children. And the Wellevate logotype designed in 2017, established a new design language for the overall company. By early 2021, that language had been extended to the Emerson Ecologics logo and some marketing touchpoints, but hadn’t been adopted into digital product at all.

As with any project, resources and time are limited and that was especially the case with this initiative. In my audit and assessment of my own bandwidth and resources spread across Marketing and Product Design, I determined the best opportunities that addressed the above three problems involved simply typography and color. Changes to these areas would span all customer touchpoints (both Marketing and Product), while imagery and content were to be taken up by my Executive Creative Director, Dave Kamikow and largely affect just Marketing.