QuicksortRX's SaaS solution helps empower health systems to make the best ordering decisions by providing transparency within the pharmacy supply chain. While that’s a mouthful, in layman's terms they’ve built a powerful solution for those who order medication for clinics and hospitals.
Smooth Sailing was brought in to help build a brand to match its mission, create awareness, and increase sales—all while starting from scratch with a fresh, new name.
Brand Strategy
Logo Development
Identity System Design
Web Design and Development
Social Media assets
Digital and Print Assets
After deciding to change the name of the organization—from AscendRX to QuicksortRX—the team needed a brand and identity to pique the interest of their target customers.
We helped QuicksortRX build a strong foundation for their organization’s brand. This has helped them hire more staff, find more prospects, and gain momentum in the pharmacy sector.
The team decided to go in a new direction and change the organization name. While the old brand had some strong points, it didn’t have a particular focus. Add to that the frequency CEO Jonathan Yantis had to correct others pronouncing AscendRX...
“No, it’s not Ascendrix.”
And we had a place to start.
A simple, professional brand identity was essential for the fresh, new QuicksortRX to compete against a market of older, more “traditional” choices in the space.
From the outside, pharmacy supply chain managers appear to have a straightforward role: find the best medication prices for their hospitals and clinics, and order them. In reality, many of these folks live in 10-hour-a-day Excel-hell. Every day is spent jumping from task to task, fluidly slipping between sub-roles. They lack resources, time, and sleep, while their management frequently lacks patience. Understanding this frustration was key to building a brand to best interest them.
With two distinct user personas built with the client in mind, the next step was to narrow the brand’s focus.
With a solid idea of our ideal customer, we built the brand’s values and attributes through a short series of video calls.
Understanding the brand helped us understand our place in the market. We took what we’d gathered so far, and began the real work: turning all these keywords and phrases into something tangible.
With clear guidelines in place, we built several concepts for the brand. This was our starting point for the brand’s overall aesthetic style. Credit to The Futur for their concept of Stylescapes. Miles better than a moodboard, ages less time-consuming than building several unique brand concepts.
After several meetings and back and forth, we settled on an overall style. The concept called “Pond Lilies” was the clear front runner. The calming colours along with fluid and water aesthetics fit the “end of the rushing river” mentality of many customers. With a concept locked in, it was time to build a logo.
Logo construction is always a lengthy and iterative process. Subjectivity, recency bias, and competition similarities always mean extended research and revisions are necessary.
But with such a strong initial concept, the team was quickly happy with the first logo. Keeping with the simple, fluid style—a single droplet of water within the Q Lettermark logo tied everything together. Extending the logo into a full wordmark gave us options on large and small scales.
With a logo selected, everything else was slotted into place. Guidelines were built to ensure consistent branding for all future projects. This included everything from logo restrictions, typography, photographic suggestions, and sets of graphical assets. With guidelines built, the website was the next big focus.
Building the website was an iterative process. With a short turnaround to the go-live date, an initial website containing a homepage, about page, and a blog-style CMS page were the day-one asks. It was essential to ensure the initial content was clear, concise, and compelling, combined with illustrations to enhance the message.
A major overhaul to the website has been recently completed, and the only page relatively unchanged today is the homepage.
With a slightly older audience and more face-to-face conversations resulting in sales, print documents and other physical materials were necessary for a strong sales rollout.
Keeping in mind, this process began in late 2019 and finished in late February 2020. Unfortunate timing for such a strong face-to-face team.
For QuicksortRX, while the rebrand’s timing may have been a little suspect (at no fault of their own), the team is now poised to take huge steps forward in 2021 and beyond. Their team is growing, and their brand is strong.
Looking at this project from the Smooth Sailing perspective, there was a lot to be proud of—and even more to learn from. With any rebrand, especially one with a complete name change, there can be questions left unanswered and avenues left unexplored. But that just means an opportunity to leave fewer questions next time.
This project would not have been possible without the level-headed guidance of Jacob Cleveland.
It wouldn’t have ended up as beautiful without the invaluable aesthetic input of Tina Park, Michelle Claessens, and Andrew Chen.
This case study’s copy would have been a bit of a mess without help from Dan Kalmar.
And there would have been much more hair loss and general insanity without the excessive patience of Cat Marder.
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