The dos and don’ts of rebranding in 2025

Miguel Garcia Castillo of Co/Studios said many startups end up thinking about rebranding after growing quickly.

“You start making short-term decisions along the way really by means of survival. Then you get to the point where you look back and say, ‘Wow, I can’t believe we got here. Do we need to revisit what the brand really stands for?'” he said. “You survive with the resources you have, but at some point, rebranding and brand evolution sit inside the success.”

But while it’s often a necessary process to go through, there are ways that brands can easily overspend or miss the mark.

Here’s a rundown of lessons learned from Cleo and Coco, Full Circle, MoonBrew and Co/Studios during their recent rebranding experiences.

Do: Have a “why”

Sustainable home goods brand Full Circle this spring unveiled the first phase of a rebrand packaging update for its line of sponges made with coconut husk. It swapped out a series of bullet points listing its eco-friendly bona fides for a picture of a coconut husk or walnut, which the scrubbers are made of. It added a “grit rating system” to indicate that this is a heavier-duty product that is more abrasive than other materials. It also dropped the cute, but confusing names “Cleana Colada” and “In a Nutshell” from the front of the packages. In addition, it summarized its eco-friendly certifications with the B Corp mark on the back.

Full Circle CEO Kate Lubenesky said the brand was getting lost on shelves among other sustainable brands that were loading up on “eco” references. The existing packaging and name were confusing some customers, she said. The tagline is now ‘Delightful by design, sustainable by nature,” she said.

“This encompasses both of the things we were trying to say,” she said. “We want people to be drawn in by the look of the product and by the functionality. And then, guess what? You can also feel good about the fact that it’s super sustainable.”

In other cases, a major brand moment can trigger the need for a new look. Suzannah Raff, founder of Cleo and Coco, said her company had just landed its nationwide launch in Whole Foods before starting a rebrand. It had previously scaled quickly thanks to a deal with QVC and had sold in person with smaller independent retail store deals. But Raff said she wanted to update the brand before its national debut. “It was a glow-up for the shelves,” she said.

Don’t: Do too much too soon 

Lubenesky from Full Circle said the company decided to phase in its rebrand. It started with sponges, and next comes laundry, brushes and then kitchen tools. This helps the team from becoming too overloaded with the project, cuts down on upfront expenses and allows for more precise swap-outs on shelf.

“We’re doing it in chunks so that we nail it and execute it well,” she said. “But also, the velocity of these SKUs is different, so we’re trying to time it so that the faster-moving SKUs are at the front. And then as we repurchase into our full line, we’re trying to minimize the amount of time that the goods are on the shelf with mixed packaging.”

Do: Examine the competition

When rebranding MoonBrew, CEO and co-founder Allan Shen said the company’s team members scoured Target and Walmart aisles to see what other supplement brands were doing. It also paid careful attention to how products showed up on marketplaces. That’s how it landed on switching the package from a pouch to a jar in a bright purple color, which helps it stand out on the shelf and on online product pages. The company also has a mascot, Astro, who will be featured in future creatives. 

“On Amazon, they only allow you to have a white background — no special effects or anything, just a product photo,” he said. “And in a sea of hundreds of listings, if you don’t stand out with your colors, it’s going to be hard to get a consumer’s attention. And so we take that same approach, from retail back to direct-to-consumer and vice versa.”

Don’t: Overspend

One of the biggest challenges brands face when starting a rebrand is balancing the cost of the process with the strategy. “Good branding costs money, but it doesn’t have to cost your entire budget,” Garcia Castillo said. “Be very mindful about what you actually need when it comes to branding.”

Spending on an agency can tally up to $1 million over time, Garcia Castillo said, with charges for planning sessions and brand guidelines and revisions adding up. Anything north of $100,000, he said, is “big client money.” Some brands over-index the importance of an expensive, fancy agency, he said. But this can lead to on-trend sameness that doesn’t differentiate the brand. “All the products look exactly the same because they hire the same agencies,” he said. “Then LinkedIn is full of the same sans-serif fonts everybody is using and the same packaging color.”

Brands that don’t have that budget may have better results finding freelance designers for $5,000. “In our early-stage world, there is a cap based on where these companies are in their journey and what they can afford, and what they should be able to afford,” he said. “Analyze the resources that are required and where you are in the stage of the brand to be able to make some of those decisions.”

Shen from MoonBrew said companies can get lured into overspending with an agency or third party thanks to “shiny object syndrome.” But there’s no silver bullet, he said.

Do: Get third-party input 

In the case of Cleo and Coco, Raff said having the right partners made all the difference. She had gone through a small business accelerator program that helped her hone in on the brand’s key messages while building decks and pitches to investors. For the brand, that meant emphasizing the balance between better-for-you ingredients but high-end fragrance and experience. “It was always been very important that our packaging would represent how much we put into the formula, and we’re very minimalist and very clean,” she said. “But when you open up the deodorant and you smell it and you apply it, it’s like a moment of luxury.”

Cleo and Coco’s creative director took the lead on the rebrand and also reviewed input from the Whole Foods buyer. “We showed them the direction we were heading and they loved it, and they gave a little bit of input on what they would like to see on the packaging,” she said. “It went really smoothly.”

Lubenesky from Full Circle said it was important to have a core group of stakeholders from within different departments weigh in, whether supply chain, marketing or sales. “Keep the circle tight, but not too small,” she said.

Don’t: Get overloaded with input

Shen from MoonBrew said that the company first had a firm it worked with on rebranding, but it led to too many stakeholders in the room. Instead of letting outsiders guide the process, the company took a more internal approach. It dove into sleep aid history, color psychology and consumer behavior to help inform its new branding.

“The process kind of ran amok,” he said. “A lot of brands and people that don’t quite know or that don’t take the time to really dive into the process expect a silver bullet where, ‘I’m going to go sign on with the agency and hope they produce this beautiful branding that speaks to our customers and speaks to who we are, our company values, et cetera.’ … But you have to do the hard work yourself of understanding who you are.'”

Lubenesky from Full Circle said crowdsourcing is important, but it can be easy to get too many opinions that muddle the process. “Everybody should have the elevator pitch in the company that says, ‘Here’s who we are, here’s what we believe in, here’s what we stand for,'” she said.

Do: Know your brand’s foundation

Shen from MoonBrew said his biggest takeaway is making sure the company knows its main messages before undertaking a rebrand. “If you don’t do the hard work ​​of understanding all the nitty gritty details of the DNA of the company, the customers and the product itself, you won’t get good results,” he said.

Garcia Castillo from Co/Studios said one recent rebrand exercise at Co/Studios involved Serendipity ice cream, a company inspired by the New York City restaurant of the same name that Selena Gomez took part ownership of back in 2020. But the brand got a refresh this year in a bid to expand its retail sales and get on more shelves. The new look amplifies the connection to Gomez, including noting on the package that 1% of sales goes to the Rare Impact Fund that provides support for mental health services. The package itself features a bigger, bolder brand name on the top of the carton and checkerboard patterns.

Garcia Castillo said the company started with three simple questions: “How do we talk about it, how do we act, and how do we look?” According to Castillo, answering these sets off a domino effect to understand how the brand is perceived and talked about, and ultimately, “the combination of how you say something becomes branding.” In the case of Serendipity, the company is courting a Gen-Z and millennial customer. This informed the bright patterns and color scheme and the decision to pump up the connection to the Rare Impact Fund, which the company frequently posts about on social.

But Castillo warned against jumping straight into a rebrand: “When you automatically go to, ‘We need rebranding,’ that’s a major warning sign.” Instead, he said, “Never start with, ‘We need to do a rebranding.’ It should start with, ‘We need to look at what our brand’s foundations are.’”