The mission of 4 Corners Yoga + Wellness is to serve and support the Dorchester community and surrounding neighborhoods in taking charge of their health and wellbeing.
The vision of 4 Corners Wellness + Yoga is to provide a space of beauty, sanctuary and revitalization by providing high quality services to the community. We value each customer and are committed to conducting our business with the highest level of professionalism and ethical standards. We envision a body positive, welcoming, accessible and culturally affirming space that customers seek out for personal care services and yoga.
We need an agency’s help to help communicate with people who are new to wellness practices including yoga, bodywork and acupuncture. We have an innovative business model and pricing structure which seeks to widen access to yoga. We want to change the face and identity of an industry that seriously lack diversity in race, class and gender towards a vibrant and welcoming community of practice.
48 Peaks is a hiking fundraiser for the Alzheimer’s community (operated through the Margie Steele Foundation). In our first three years, our hikers have raised a total of $309K to support the Alzheimer’s Association.
Each year in June, we mobilize hundreds of hikers to collectively climb all 48 of New Hampshire’s 4,000-footers. With each team hiking 1-3 peaks, we climb all 48 Peaks in 48 hours as a symbol of the strength and resilience of the Alzheimer’s community. In 2017, we raised $104K with the help of 37 teams and 216 hikers.
So far, 48 Peaks has been a grassroots event driven 100% by volunteers. We started the event to honor my wife Margie Steele, who passed away from early-onset Alzheimer’s at the young age of 57. While $100K per year is nice, it’s not going to change the course of this devastating disease. Now that we’ve established proof of concept, we’d like to take 48 Peaks to the next level and turn it into a powerful fundraising engine to support the Association’s efforts in care, advocacy, and research.
Our vision is to create something similar to the Pan-Mass Challenge (PMC), which has raised over $547M for cancer research since 1980. The President of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute once said: “When they write the history of how cancer was conquered, the PMC will be in chapter one.” We’d like 48 Peaks to play that same sort of role in the fight against Alzheimer’s.
At this stage, it would be invaluable to have an agency’s help with branding and marketing. By building an exciting brand and enhancing our marketing efforts, we can begin to attract new teams and secure corporate partnerships. This will supplement our grassroots recruitment efforts and lay the groundwork for an event that’s capable of raising millions.
addapptation is a digital platform to build focused, high quality Micro Apps for businesses that can be integrated with any cloud system. We provide a suite of tools for developers to build Micro Apps and a marketplace for customers to purchase them.
What if we could change the way we adopt pets? adopets aims to reinvent the pet adoption process, through their web-platform and mobile apps. A pet adoption management platform, adopets is uniquely designed to support and simplify a historically tedious process for both adopters and organizations like shelters and rescues. Using the largest database to source the most robust list of animals worldwide, adopets’ fresh take on saving lives promises to invigorate and excite more people to adopt with ease.
ACEA is the platform for licensed professionals to learn throughout their careers. We serve as the central resource for continuing education (CE) in healthcare. All clinicians are legally required to find and track CE throughout their careers to maintain their licenses, but it is a fragmented, outdated process. ACEA has developed the only end-to-end solution that matches practitioners with the most relevant education and tracks credits from any education provider – to save time, ensure compliance, and improve the quality of care.
The Aging in Place Essential Toolkit™ addresses the challenges that individuals and families face in caring for loved ones or themselves. It is a one-stop resource and “roadmap” of customized, practical advice and support that helps people plan for how they will live a good life as they age. This fall we plan on beta testing the “Toolkit” in Massachusetts. We want to reach the over 800,000 unpaid family caregivers who are in need or are looking for caregiving support and advice. Being selected in the Brandathon program will help us get our message to this audience.
American Roots was founded out of the desire to accomplish the following: To create good paying, living wage jobs in the community, state and country we love; To produce from start to finish a 100% American made product by utilizing and building a responsible supply chain that is domestically rooted; To become a leader and household name in the American made clothing industry, making sure a positive foot print is left behind. Our mission statement has never wavered from the beginning- “to create good jobs in the United States, deliver a quality product, have a commitment to our community, our workers and our country, and to support a better more sustainable way of life”. In just under two years of official operations, American Roots has grown from a 900 square foot shop floor with 4 employees to a 4,000 square foot factory with 16 hard working employees committed to building the American Roots vision. We are excited for the new cotton line we are rolling out and are even more excited to fine tune our message, brand, and name in the months and years to come. In order for American Roots and our team to go to the next level, we fully recognize we need the expertise, knowledge, and experience of an agency or persons who believe in what we are doing, understand our mission, and have the ability to help us find that tightly wound web of our brand, logo, mission and message all into one. We are a bootstrap company, we have dug in, learned from each other and gotten better every day. It’s time for us to go to the next level with some fresh ideas and strong experience.
Art Resource Collaborative for Kids (ARCK), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit established in 2012, partners with Boston Public Schools to deliver creative arts integration programming taught by highly qualified, trained teaching artists. We offer our programs to low-income students during the school day and free of charge. ARCK’s mission is to empower students through high-quality arts education that fosters culture and community while supporting schools’ learning objectives. We use art as a vehicle for social change through a custom-built curriculum focused on three core modules: leadership, civic engagement, and social justice. This past school year, our arts-based projects promoted awareness of environmental issues. The upcoming year’s lessons will build on this topic, allowing students to grow to become productive global citizens through sustainable fashion design and social entrepreneurship. Since ARCK’s inception, we have impacted nearly 1,300 Boston Public School (BPS) students. We have supported six schools and next year will continue with Gardner Pilot Academy in Allston for the 5th year, and Blackstone Innovation School in the South End for the fourth year. We have plans to expand to a third BPS school this fall. Between all our sites, ARCK’s in-school instruction reaches student populations in which 80-90% are considered low-income. Particularly given the challenges these students face, we consider it imperative that we not only nurture their personal, artistic, and academic well-being (“whole child approach”), but provide them with the means to thrive as globally and culturally competent, compassionate leaders for their communities and the world at large. In addition to our core program, our recent community-oriented projects include: a large-scale public mural across from Fenway Park co-created by ARCK’s middle school students and a professional artist, a participatory multimedia installation created by students in partnership with HUBweek Boston, and Literacy Through Art workshops for immigrant and refugee parents of our ESL students. Why ARCK needs branding help: As a growing organization with increased public visibility, we are hoping to refine our brand identity as we sustain and scale our programs. The interwoven themes of our program are varied and innovative — from art, to social justice, to academic subjects, to community building — and we need to find a way to communicate all of this to our current and potential supporters as well as prospective partner schools. Help our students reach their greatest potential!
Artyfactos is an eco-exotic, statement jewelry business that features unique, hand-woven designs by entrepreneurial artisan women in Latin America. Our jewelry is 100% recycled, made with all natural materials such as orange peel, cantaloupe seeds, coffee beans and vegetal ivory (Tagua).
We create sustainable economic opportunities while bringing unique and green fashion to the world. We offer manufacturing and technology tools to small artisan workshops to develop their infrastructure and build business capacity.
We create sustainable economic opportunities while bringing unique and green fashion to the world. We offer manufacturing and technology tools to small artisan workshops to develop their infrastructure and build business capacity.
Colombia is the country with the highest number of displaced people in the world – more than Syria – and 60% are women. We are creating new income opportunities for them that they otherwise would not reach.
We are also making a valuable contribution by minimizing the negative environmental impact by using natural and recycled materials for our jewelry – 15 million tons of orange peel and unused seeds go to landfills every year contaminating the soil.
Our designs are striking and interesting to look at. The special composition of beans, seeds and orange peel, really makes them intriguing and on top of it, they have an amazing natural orange and coffee aroma that enhances customer’s experience.
For our retailers, we offer competitive advantage by helping them to stand apart from the competition by carrying global products that are differentiated from the masses.
We want Artyfactos to be the lifestyle brand for statement jewelry that is both eco-friendly and aligned with societal values. To achieve this we need to create brand awareness and reach our to more customers. It is very difficult to navigate the online world and even more in the jewelry industry. I already differentiate ourselves from the product perspective, now we need to grow our brand.
Bare Tree Media empowers brands to engage consumers through innovative and engaging mobile messaging solutions. Our mission is to become the ” go to” messaging sticker agency to advertising agencies of all sizes. Our value includes a creative services studio, propriety tech platform, and experience with branded messaging stickers (Apple iMessage, Facebook, Kik, SnapChat, Twitter, Viber). As a self-funded start-up we have earned the trust of five star clients such as Dreamwork’s Animation, Life is Good, L’Oreal, MuscleTech, New England Patriots, Lionsgate, The Game Show Network and Warner Bros. As a candidate within Brandathon, we wish to rebrand our company name, logo and tagline to better reflect fun and be more memorable.
The Best Bees Company is on a mission to improve bee health. To raise funding for our bee research, we provide beekeeping services to homes and businesses across 16 states, with headquarters in Boston. Our full-service beekeeping product includes hand-built wooden beehives, installation of honey bees (Apis mellifera) on rooftops and gardens, and monthly maintenance visits for beehive inspections. Our clients pay an fee ($1025 – $3500) on an annual subscription basis. Since our founding in 2010, we have expanded from one small Boston apartment to a national operation with part-time employee beekeepers covering the following nine greater metro areas: Boston (headquarters), New York City, Washington DC, Chicago, Denver, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
We are making a real difference to improve bee health, and stabilize the food systems that rely upon these vitally important pollinators. Over the past eight years, we have collected over 18,000 beekeeping visit notes, generating what we believe to be the largest, multi-year, national data set of bee health in existence. In 2017 alone, The Best Bees Company installed over 10 million bees into beehives nationwide. We bolster these pollinator populations by manually getting more bees out there. We collect data during each beehive visit using a proprietary mobile phone app, for which we write the code in-house. Our beekeepers nationwide know how each our ~1,000 beehives are doing at any given time by simply looking the beehive name up in our app, called Bzzz. Bzzz provides charting for bee health research metrics, such as productivity of honey, survival of lifespan, fecundity of queen egg laying, and more.
In 2014, we spun off our research laboratory into an independent but affiliated 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, called the Urban Beekeeping Laboratory and Bee Sanctuary, Inc. The Best Bees Company installs beehives and collects data. The Urban Beekeeping Laboratory then analyzes these data, and publishes the results. This cycle of information informs beekeepers about ways to improve beekeeping practices worldwide, further improving bee health. More details about ongoing research studies may be found at www.BeeSanctuary.org, including our sponsor-a-beehive program, which brings beekeeping services to underserved communities, such as public libraries, schools, non-profit urban farms, and low-income communities.
As we grow and look ahead, The Best Bees Company is making progress with our product innovation pipeline. We’ve been a one-product company up to this point, with many opportunities to expand. New products preparing for launch include the following: whipped honey (Whole Foods is a buyer), pollinator habitat garden beds (Beacon Capital Partners is a national buyer), and SmartHive data sensors (patent application filed with interest from GE and Autodesk to develop).
With the launch of an expanded product line, our need for unified branding is more important now than ever. The opportunity to work with an agency would be a tremendous help to us. We have no investors. We have bootstrapped from day one to build a successful and profitable, million dollar business. With a little help from an agency, we can unify our national brand’s products to continue growing our company, while also making a real positive impact on our nation’s pollinator populations to stabilize food systems in America and beyond, for generations to come.
BEST LIFE
Best Life is a healing practice and manifestation center that changes lives to a place of top health and happiness.
Best Life is a healing practice and manifestation center that changes lives to a place of top health and happiness.
I am a sole practitioner energy healing. I have studied many different modalities of energy and alternative medicine over the last 20 years. My current primary offering is MARCONICS which is a 5th dimensional frequency which has an amazing transformational effect on healing a person’s body but even more amazing it heals and brings into alignment at a higher level all aspects of their life which manifests incredible gifts into their life.
I have been offering various energy healings for 12 years. I previously had a small office in Dedham. My focus is now Marconics and I have a new office in the center of Southborough that I am setting up that will operate under the official name BEST LIFE.
This is a full-time business and I have a waiting list of clients. This is a much needed service offering as there are so, so many the are injured, seriously ill and/or in need positive transformation in their lives.
I have been working completely unbranded!! It has just been completely word of mouth but as I open my new office it really the time has come that I create a Logo, Brand, signage and all the related marketing materials.
Please talented branders select this worthy business for a brand creation! It will allow many people to be healed and happy. As a super small business its an amazing opportunity for BESTLIFE to have a polished look to attract clientele – and you have a totally clean slate to work from. I would be so grateful to have a BRANDATHAON Branding and would be happy to offer my branders a Marconics session, if they would like, that they may experience the amazing power of Marconics in their lives.
We’re a new daily fantasy sports startup launching in Boston. Our game, WA11.ST (pronounced “wall street”), gives fans the ability to buy and sell athlete shares during live sporting events. We’ve been running small contests for golf throughout the summer, and we’ve found there’s nothing like a little live trading to spice up a lazy Sunday afternoon. It’d be great to have the help of a local agency to get the word out in time for the big PGA event at TPC Boston the first weekend of September!
Investment in a comfortable, safe, and healthy workforce is an investment in the quality of your business and the satisfaction of your clients. At BioStructures, we build state-of-the-art safety boots custom designed to accommodate each wearer’s individual needs, and we work with construction and manufacturing companies to get them on the feet of their most valuable assets. We believe that the people who have built the world around us deserve better than to be treated like a length and a width. Our mission is to bring on a new age of footwear in which your feet and bodily needs are the basis for creating your one of a kind shoes.
We have worked in construction and manufacturing. We’ve felt the pain of searching for safety boots that fit, and we’ve felt the bigger pain of wearing safety boots that don’t. We’ve worked with tradesmen who have been wearing safety boots for decades and who feel their body deteriorating. For us, the need is clear, and we feel a responsibility to these workers to improve their quality of life.
We met at the beginning of our MBA program at Babson in September of 2016 and began working on BioStructures almost immediately. Since then, we have worked hard to make our business a reality. Our early feasibility studies proved the business possible. In our market research we learned that workers feel this pain as strongly as we have; they are paying as much as $400 a year between safety boots and insoles, and they still aren’t happy with the options available. The companies we’ve spoken to also recognize that this problem negatively affects their business; they tell us their goal is for their workers to go home at night the same way they came in in the morning, and they know that’s not happening.
Our main focus for the last several months has been prototyping. It is a significant undertaking to develop a new product and the manufacturing technology to build it. However, we have the engineering expertise and the advisors necessary to ensure our success. We’ve moved past preliminary prototyping and will begin product testing over the next several months. While we continue to be laser focused on product development, we need to ensure our branding is in place to launch aggressively come spring. In just the last year we created a lot of confusion changing our name from Bear Sword Boots to BioStructures. It is important to us that we lock in our branding as soon as possible to avoid further confusion as we continue to develop customer relationships.
We have had difficulty branding because our success relies on appealing to both the companies we are selling to and the employees that will be wearing our boots. We also foresee expanding into B2C within a few years of official launch. To add more complication, a feeling of American tradition and values is one of the prominent reasons workers choose certain safety boot brands, but if we follow that too closely we won’t differentiate our business. How do we capture that grounded feeling while also presenting a new technologically superior product that is nothing like workers have experienced before? And does it make more sense to be a house of brands or a branded house?
Our first name, Bear Sword Boots, was a fun and cheeky brand that appealed to our MBA classmates…but not our target audience. We changed our name to BioStructures to indicate a goal of developing products biomechanically designed for an individual. Instead most people think we are a biochemical company when we tell them our name. We are confident that an ad agency can help us build a brand that meets all of our needs and prepares us for future growth.
BodyRecog Metrics has a multidisciplinary team of 7, working closely with science and business advisors, has thus far won, along with its founder, 26 prestigious awards and recognitions, including ‘TOP 50 Most Innovative in the World of Sports’. See: http://www.bodyrecog.com/awards/
BodyRecog, its flagship product, is an integrated body hacking platform designed for both health professionals and sport/fitness professionals.
Health professionals use BodyRecog to assess health risks of their patients for cardiovascular diseases, diabetes T2 and cancer based on their 3D scan; and to track how their health improves over time as a result of a prescribed diet, exercise, medication, therapy, or any combination of the aforementioned. Sport/fitness professionals use BodyRecog to track how the body changes over time as a result of diet and/or exercise – where one has lost fat or gained muscle and by how much in cm/inch, for training optimization (especially top athletes), and to aid their trainees in achieving a desired body shape – whether of general health, or sport-specific. BodyRecog also provides both remote monitoring of patients/clients by professionals and self-tracking for the individual.
Our goals are to:
• penetrate 8% of the US health club market by 2020
• enter the US medical market by 2019 after completing 5 pilots
• become an official tool of national olympic committees for tracking top athletes in 10 countries by 2020
Our vision is monitoring personal health, national health and global health in real-time!
Coming mostly from a scientific & tech background, our team realizes that strategies and tactics of branding, marketing and sales are not our strongest points. Our business advisors have suggested that it might benefit us to have a complete re-branding done, plus maybe even have two websites/brands – one for health professionals and another for sport/fitness professionals. We truly need experts to guide us in this aspects.
Bonsai Child Care is rethinking the daycare business and changing its form. We are on a mission to reinvigorate the child care industry by adding our unique approach when working with children and communicating with families. Bonsai Child Care is not just a place where children spend their time while parents or caregivers are away, it is a warm and caring community of passionate educators who love and truly know children.
Bonsai Child Care embraces each day, every challenge, and major developmental milestone following simple principles of balance, peace and harmony, which became part of the foundatio of the organization. We are not just providing reliable, consistent, and understanding services to families in the Metro Boston area, we are building and growing a new model in child care industry. This model relies on mindfulness and patience when working with children. This model brings children to the original beginnings of life following an interdisciplinary approach to education. Children learn to observe and note signs of nature growing to be active participants in the community, they learn by interacting with different age groups, and they learn to be creative thinkers and problem-solvers.
Bonsai Child Care is already strongly rooted in the local community of Medford, MA, the majority of clients find out about the facility through word of mouth. The organization is already working on growth by creating additional space for additional enrollments and future opening of new locations.
Brandathon is an amazing opportunity for us to put our unique identity and model to work for us in the digital world of marketing. We hope to achieve our goals with the help of one of the agencies. Daycare business is a niche market, and we are looking to expand it and create a big name following our core principles and most importantly Little Ones’ needs.
BostonSpeaks is dedicated to enhancing your communication skills to drastically improve your relationships, self-awareness and professional success. We provide training for individuals interested in furthering their communication skills through classes, workshops, long-term programs, community events and corporate training. Our popular monthly breakfast series (BostonSpeaksSeries) brings together the entrepreneurial community in Boston to help business professionals connect, learn and get inspired. BostonSpeaks is seeking an agency’s help to strengthening our brand awareness and to create consistency for our promotional materials. We want to be known in Boston as the #1 communication company that offers the best training in communication and public speaking.
Boston Technology Research (BTR) is an innovative and dynamic company with a focus on the Life Science industry. Established in 2011, BTR is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, with offices in the US and Europe. Our professional services division specializes in Quality Systems and Risk Management, IT and Regulatory Compliance, Computer Systems Validation, Auditing and Training. And our software solutions division provides the Res_Q™ software suite of products which includes modules like Electronic Change and Risk Management, Supplier Management, and automated Validation Lifecycle. Our proprietary methodology, flexible resourcing model and deep compliance expertise, make Boston Technology Research the best choice for Fortune 500 and innovative early-stage companies. Our goal is simple yet ambitious; We want to be a global leader that helps advance a company’s ability to bring drugs, medical devices, and diagnostics to market quicker, safer, and cost effectively. We are in a stage of growth and change, thus our need for these marketing agencies to help us move to the next level by create a brand strategy around launching a market changing software as well as transition from a “services” company to a “services plus” company.
What started as a craving for the food we grew up eating has blossomed into what we see as, “Goya, but better.” Buenas is a line of South American-inspired specialty goods to aid all kinds of home cooking. Because to us, cooking at home is a super important part of leading a happy and healthy life. So, we make our products in the hope that food (and the personal relationship to it) becomes less complicated for everyone—ourselves included. Our goal of, “we just want to make good food for our friends,” still stands. But taking our growth over the past year as inspiration, we’ve got our sights set beyond wholesale in New England and a retail outpost for our friends in Boston—this coming year we’ll tackle distribution on a much larger and hopefully national scale for the folks we left back home in Miami and Los Angeles (our second home). We have a good idea about who we are as a brand, but we need an agency’s help to bring it all together and put it out there in a cohesive way that a new small food business just can’t do by itself.
BusWays is focused on working with schools to help them rethink their transportation system. BusWays allows parents to be notified when their child gets on and off the school bus and track the bus on a live map. We use the data gathered to help schools optimize their bus routes and bus capacities. How we work is that every child has a BusWays keychain attached to his or her backpack. When they get on and off the school bus the BusWays beacon detects that the child entered or go off the bus and sends a notification, through our mobile app, to the child.
Founded in 2013, CampusTap is making immense strides to reach the company’s goal of providing the resources students and professionals need to obtain the passion-based and fulfilling career they desire.
CampusTap’s private career networking and alumni mentoring platform is already driving increased career readiness and employment opportunities at colleges and institutions across the country. And the next step in our growth is helping companies drive increased employee retention and lower recruiting costs by empowering Human Capital communities to explore their own career path, define and achieve actionable goals, and gain invaluable mentoring experiences.
Since 2016, CampusTap has grown from a three-person team to a team of 20. In addition, our client list has grown from five New England-area institutions to over 60 institutions nationwide. That list includes University of Miami, Boston College, Boston University, Purdue University, University of Georgia Athletics, Gonzaga University, and Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce. By our estimates, we’ll be working with over 100 institutions by the end of 2017.
Our rapid growth has led us to seek a Series A round of funding so that we can further grow our team to meet bandwidth demands, dedicate resources to our corporate offering, and invest in a PR & Media campaign. In anticipation of closing a Series A, we’re seeking an agency’s help to formalize a messaging guide to enable each member of our team to express the same mission and consistent brand messaging to current and future clients. In addition, we’re seeking to gain branding insight for our new enterprise vertical.
Our goal in this process is to ultimately build a relationship with an agency that we trust and can turn to when we are ready to fully invest in PR and digital strategy.
Casting Call Club’s mission is to encourage transparency between voice actors and casting directors for professionals, and to provide a place for hobbyists to practice/find mentors. Think LinkedIn for voice actors. We’re about to hit the 60,000 members milestone, and we’re seeing an average of 1,000 new casting calls per month.
Cancer Wellness TV is a free online platform featuring videos and content dedicated to cancer integrative therapies: yoga, tai chi, exercise, meditation, nutrition, art therapy, survivorship support & many others. Now people dealing with cancer finally have access to complementary therapies from any computer, tablet or smartphone anywhere in the world. Our video library has close to 200 videos.
Cancer Wellness TV came about due to our founder, Jeff Sirlin, and his struggles to access integrative therapies while he was battling stage 4 colon cancer. The main problem was access. Jeff, like many other cancer patients, lived too far away from his cancer center to attend the therapy sessions being offered there such as yoga, tai chi, meditation, nutritional consultations, support group therapy and art therapies. The other issue is that many people dealing with cancer are in too much physical discomfort to leave the house, let alone drive to the hospital to access these therapies. The system was broken. There needed to be platform that would give patients (and caregivers) instant access to these therapies without having to leave the house. And this is how Cancer Wellness TV came about.
Message / Slogan – “We’re taking the fight to cancer beyond the hospital walls”
Goal – To provide free and instant access to integrative therapies to cancer patients throughout the world.
Why do we need branding help? We pivoted early on from an ecommerce site that offered anti-cancer foods, to an online video platform offering a extensive video library of cancer integrative therapies (covering many integrative modalities), so our brand just went along for the ride. We are bouncing between the original name, CWellness, and the brand name of our new platform, Cancer Wellness TV. We need a more consistent brand strategy. Plus, our logo was quickly done via 99 Designs, so having a professional agency help us out would be a huge boost for us.
The Charity Warriors Challenge is an annual 10-week competition for women ambassadors of local non-profits. Participants are put to the test with weekly challenges to hone their skills, test new ideas, and raise funds and awareness for their causes. The challenges are scored and judged by a panel of experts – with a winner declared each week. The five contestants who outperform their peers during these weekly challenges are selected to compete in the final fundraising event.
To date, the participants have raised over $800,000 for worthy nonprofits such as Jett Foundation supporting boys and families dealing with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, Flying Kites educating vulnerable children in Kenya, WellStrong conquering addiction through wellness activities and Sibling Connection bringing together siblings separated in the foster care system. These are just a few of many amazing and vetted MA nonprofit organizations who have participated in our program.
Our inspiration comes from the countless women who fight for what they believe in. This group is diverse and powerful including the mother who spends countless hours acquiring auction items for the upcoming gala, the marketing executive who helps support a non-profit’s mission by joining the board of directors, the recent graduate who sends impassioned email blasts to all of her contacts to raise money for her charity race and the entrepreneur who starts her own non-profit to solve a problem.
The mission of Charity Warriors Challenge is to create a fundraising platform using game theory and storytelling to motivate donors to engage with and donate to several charities. Our 2020 goal is to hold five individual Charity Warriors Challenges around the country and award a national winner.
Media creation through weekly videos, podcasts and “warrior” themed imagery is an essential tool to create excitement and engage donors to follow the challenge.
We need an agency’s help to streamline our message. CWC is lots of things; an accelerator, crowdsourcing tool, media producer and Final Challenge event. All of the pieces of the pie work well together, but we need help communicating the big picture to the public.
Functionally, we have always promoted giving to all 5 nonprofits. We accomplished this online in 2 ways; a slider for each nonprofit donation with one total at checkout and a $5 for 5 (nonprofits), $10 for 5, $25 for 5 and so forth option for an even split. We need help to determine if this multi-donation idea is truly possible.
We have formed relationships with top mentors and experts for the accelerator, imagined fun weekly challenges such as sending our warriors into a crowded room with 5 unidentified donors, produced energetic videos and held a entertaining Final Challenge events. We need your help to get to the next level. Think Survivor for the nonprofit community.
Elon Musk once said: “If the rules are such that you can’t make progress, then you have to fight the rules.” We couldn’t agree more!
Our goal is singular and bold: to change how the donating public thinks about charity — just like public opinion has been changed for issues like seat belts, smoking, and gay marriage. The central belief we intend to reverse is the “overhead myth,” the false idea that low overhead indicates high performance. We believe this is the fundamental issue that holds back every single social cause.
However, since our launch, we’ve heard concerns about our name and messaging (over and over…). After hundreds of conversations, we believe it sends the wrong message for two reasons. First, it gives the false impression that we’re defending any and all charities (including the bad ones) and calling for a removal of accountability. Totally wrong – we want the exact opposite! We simply don’t want the high-performers to be undermined by counterproductive ideas about compensation, fundraising, infrastructure, etc. Second, many of our supporters have questioned our use of the word “charity” in our name, which they see as synonymous with waste and enablement. We don’t necessarily agree, but we’ve heard it from LOTS of people at this point.
We’re considering a rebrand toward something more “aspirational” (as opposed to defensive and confrontational). A message that celebrates the high-performers and highlights their innovation, commitment, and ingenuity. Maybe something along the lines of the “not your grandfather’s charity” messaging to show that the old way of thinking is antiquated and unsophisticated…
Whatever it is, it should inspire trust and confidence in charities. It should make donors want to give. It should make high-performers proud to work for social good. And, it should draw more of the top talent to the sector. With that shift in public confidence, we can supercharge the charity sector and help it finally realize its full potential.
We’d love an agency’s help in getting our messaging aligned with our true mission! Thank you!
Chow Stirs Asian Kitchen
Chow Stirs Asian Kitchen believes a balanced life begins with a balanced meal. That’s why each Chow Stirs Asian Kitchen’s dish is crafted with ingredients purposely chosen for nutrition as well as flavor. Our menu is inspired by ancient Asian cooking, from the wok-fired classics of China to the street market spices of Thailand, all freshly made to order in our open kitchens daily. Which makes it a little easier for you to eat the food you love, (even if you’re gluten-free!) with less of the stuff you don’t. Chow Stirs Asian Kitchen features a menu of healthy, fresh and customizable meals using the highest quality ingredients with BIG and BOLD flavors! Made with love…eaten with chopsticks Wok fired eats! Fresh and hot like you! CHOW STIRS ASIAN KITCHEN I am self funding my start up in a VERY difficult and VERY competitive industry! I need help with marketing and branding my business
Language is one of the last true barriers in the world. The ability to understand each other is critical in life and businesses. Automated Translation is currently limited to one to one conversations. Ckaps is a software that allows you to have a conversation with multiple people in multiple languages at the same time through live simultaneous translation. Users utilize Ckaps through an app on their existing iOS smartphone and recipients can see a live translation in their native language through a browser. Ckaps – Make your world bigger!
In 2016, the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has declared sleep loss a public health epidemic. One in three American adults struggles with sleep at least once a week (over 80 million people) and, together, they spend $66 billion on sleep aids and remedies annually. The financial losses resulting from altered performance and loss of productivity due to sleep deficits amount to $411 billion a year (RAND, 2016). The health burden is even bigger, with studies funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) providing overwhelming evidence of sleep loss causing or aggravating major chronic disorders, from obesity, cancer and diabetes to depression.
ClockCoach provides a solution to the sleep problem through a digital health platform for personalized optimization of nighttime sleep and daytime performance. The multi-disciplinary founding team includes experts in sleep, circadian rhythms, mathematical modeling and software engineering, with over 20 years of experience at MIT and Boston University. The ClockCoach platform incorporates two advanced and scientifically validated approaches to sleep and performance optimization, circadian rhythm alignment (CRA) and cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). CRA adds optimal alignment of major circadian body rhythms that control not only sleep but metabolic, cardiovascular, cognitive and endocrine functions, thus addressing multiple clock-related disorders.
The ClockCoach product is built upon three mutually enhancing algorithms, based on experimental data, mathematical modeling and machine learning. It taps into data streams from a variety of smart devices, such as smartphones and wearables, and incorporates self-reporting by the user. Together, this allows ClockCoach to achieve a unique level of personalized optimization of an individual’s sleep, metabolic rhythms and performance. The platform seamlessly streams weekly schedules and daily advice to the smart phones, providing gentle timely reminders of when to sleep, eat, exercise and perform other regular activities, all in tune with individual’s unique circadian rhythm alignment. This leads to sound sleep, high physical and cognitive performance, and optimal metabolic functions.
The ClockCoach product is applicable to a number of markets where sleep loss, jet lag and altered performance are detrimental to individuals and organizations, from hospitality industry to sport, education and assisted living communities. The primary target is the corporate health and wellness programs in businesses and governmental institutions. Currently, this is a $9 billion market in the US, expanding to other countries.
While ClockCoach carries all the necessary expertise to improve sleep and circadian alignment, we fully appreciate our lack of experience in marketing and brand development strategy. The Brandathon team could provide invaluable help for ClockCoach to successfully attract the targeted consumer market and maximize product value. The ClockCoach platform will be launched in the Fall of 2017 and we hope to work with a branding team that could be as passionate as we are about providing consumers with a personalized optimization of nighttime sleep and daytime performance.
Through cocoa plantations, Cocoa360 transforms farming communities and facilitates access to education and healthcare. Our pioneering cocoa-campus: a girls’ school and medical centre situated amid our 40-cocoa plantation addresses the major effects of poverty, inadequate access to healthcare and unaffordable quality education. We are able to provide tuition-free education and subsidized healthcare through our “Sweat for Impact” model, in which parental labor and profit from the farm sustain campus operational costs. We hope to replicate this model to empower rural farming communities all over the world.
OUR STORY: Born and raised on a cocoa farm in Tarkwa Breman, Shadrack Frimpong, the founder of Cocoa360, lived and witnessed poverty, first-hand. Growing up alongside classmates who suddenly stopped attending school, he realized the harsh realities of poverty – the de-prioritization of girls’ education and the inaccessibility of basic human needs like clean drinking water and healthcare. The effects really hit home at age nine, when his legs were nearly amputated after contracting a life-threatening water-borne infection from swimming in the village river.
Shadrack started questioning how people in rural communities, who are hardworking cocoa and rubber farmers, and consequently key drivers of national development, could wallow in abject poverty? Cocoa360 was created to resolve these injustices.
WE NEED BRANDATHON: We realized not long ago that our old name, Tarkwa Breman Community Alliance, was problematic for two reasons: 1) it’s too long/hard to pronounce; 2) it didn’t explain the essence of what we do. In an effort to rectify this, we hastily changed our name to Cocoa360 and have been shuffling back and forth between the two identities ever since. This also means that enough attention wasn’t given to our messaging, which currently lacks the emotional connection we want to exude through our communications. Additionally, the diversity and complexity of our audience has been a huge challenge for our team to address. We struggle to cater our brand to an international audience of various backgrounds and interests.
We are confident in our model and believe that our branding is severely stifling us from landing the visibility and validity which we desire. With the help of Brandathon, we honestly feel we’ll be able to take Cocoa360 to scale.
Overview:
Pulse is a community-based survey platform designed to help organizations collect and understand the opinions of their constituents. Beginning with universities, like Dartmouth College, we have attracted an active user base of 95% of the student body and achieved an average response rate 6X higher than competitor platforms in just 16 weeks. By the start of the 2017-18 school year, we plan to be on the campuses of every Ivy League university, as well as several private high schools. In the long run, we plan to expand to any organization that struggles to understand the opinions of their constituents, including large corporations and local governments.
Pulse is a community-based survey platform designed to help organizations collect and understand the opinions of their constituents. Beginning with universities, like Dartmouth College, we have attracted an active user base of 95% of the student body and achieved an average response rate 6X higher than competitor platforms in just 16 weeks. By the start of the 2017-18 school year, we plan to be on the campuses of every Ivy League university, as well as several private high schools. In the long run, we plan to expand to any organization that struggles to understand the opinions of their constituents, including large corporations and local governments.
Our Story:
The event that sparked the creation of Pulse was a 2015 campus-wide protest at Dartmouth College that divided the community. Students sought to make sense of what had taken place, what they believed, and whether their opinions aligned with those of the larger community. With no reliable opinion platform available, administrators and students alike were forced to speculate or turn to polarizing opinion platforms to assess the campus climate. Inspired by these events, we set out to create a student-centered opinion platform to fill this informational void.
Our Beliefs:
– You have a right to access accurate data about what your community thinks about important issues.
– The free and open sharing of opinions helps communities identify and solve problems better.
– Distorted perceptions of public opinion are a major impediment for community progress.
– Traditional online survey tools are incapable of capturing the ever-changing nature of public opinion.
Why we need help:
Pulse has a unique branding challenge. While to those who use Pulse, the differences between our platform and others (e.g. SurveyMonkey, Qualtrics, GoogleForms) are clear, to outsiders, we are just another survey platform, and that description comes with unwanted baggage. By and large, people currently perceive surveys as annoying, administrative and unrewarding tasks and we need your help to explain to those who have not yet used Pulse how our surveys are different. This becomes especially important as we expand to new audiences this coming year. Another branding challenge that we face is that we have two different customer segments to market to: (1) the students, (2) the college administrators. For students, we want to come across as a fun social media website, but for college administrators, we want to be seen as a serious enterprise platform. So far we have exclusively marketed towards the students, so we feel like there is a lot of work to be done to explain our value to administrators. With your help in crafting our message, we are confident that we will be able to execute our rapid expansion strategy and start changing the way the world understands surveys.
Supporters:
– Millworks Fund II
– Alpha Loft
– Stamps Foundation
– Dartmouth Entrepreneur Network
Located in Dorchester, MA, CommonWealth Kitchen (CWK) operates Greater Boston’s only shared-use commercial kitchen and food manufacturing social enterprise. We’re on a mission to close Boston’s growing wealth divide by promoting inclusive entrepreneurship and creating sustainable employment through food.
CommonWealth Kitchen has a unique two-prong approach, providing shared commercial kitchen space plus integrated technical assistance and access to markets to over 50 early stage wholesale and retail food businesses. Over 70% of our companies are owned by women, immigrants, and/or people of color, employing over 140 people in one of Boston’s lowest-income neighborhoods. We pair this work with our own small-batch contract manufacturing social enterprise, which works to help member businesses efficiently scale production. We also provide processing services to a wide range of farms, restaurants, retailers, and institutions. In 2015, CWK was named Best Incubator by Boston Magazine and a Game-Changer by The Boston Globe.
Over the past 3 years, CommonWealth Kitchen has been in the midst of exponential growth as we work to maximize mission impact while responding to the enormous shifts in the regional food economy. We’ve added a 12-week Food Business Start-Up class. We’ve expanded our workshops and mentoring services. We’ve built strategic partnerships with industry leaders like Whole Foods, Boston Public Market, Target, and Harvard University. Since our inception in 2009, we’ve graduated over 45 wholesale and retail food companies into their own operations, creating nearly 500 jobs.
We are looking for agency help to effectively convey our mission, goals and impact, strengthen our branding, and present our innovative model in a clear and compelling way to a range of audiences, including consumers, industry partners, aspiring entrepreneurs, and funders. Our goal is to increase awareness of our work, positioning CommonWealth Kitchen as a national leader in the fields of economic development, urban food manufacturing and of course, authentic artisanal food production.
About Cuseum: Cuseum helps museums, public attractions, and cultural nonprofits drive visitor engagement and success using mobile. We’re on a mission to help museums around the world unleash the power of digital faster and easier than ever. Our mission is to become the world’s leading provider of software to the cultural sector.
Why we need your help: Cuseum is at a crucial milestone having recently launched its 2nd product, with plans for a 3rd product already in the works. As our company’s product vision has expanded drastically, we’re in need of an agency’s help to redefine our voice, and develop creative, non-traditional marketing / outreach opportunities to increase brand awareness and aid our sales efforts.
My name is Anders Bill and I am the Co-founder of Darkroom.Tech. Last year, I was lucky enough to be one of the winners of Brandathon as a Co-founder of EchoMe, where we worked closely with Viewpoint Creative to transform everything we knew about our brand. I recently left EchoMe to start Darkroom.Tech, a venture-backed, socially-driven print marketplace for photographers, by photographers. Myself along with my two co-founders are all photographers who have felt the pain of our customers. Photographers often make money by selling prints of their work. The problem? They are limited to two main methodologies of selling. Say a photographer has a beautiful picture of the Boston skyline she would like to sell. She can either buy that print in bulk with the risk of sitting on inventory because she misjudged the demand for her print or she can fulfill her orders on a per order basis for a much higher cost per print. These financial barriers deter many photographers from selling their work at all. The solution? Darkroom.Tech. On Darkroom.Tech a photographer simply uploads the file of the print they want to sell (say the Boston skyline), sets a sales goal (say 10 prints to sell) and a time limit to sell them within (say 10 days). If the photographer sells those 10 prints in 10 days, Darkroom.Tech will print, package and ship every order for the photographer and send them all their profits. We call this a successful Darkroom.Tech campaign. That photographer just made the highest margin per print possible while never having any type of financial or inventory risk. There is only one rule on Darkroom.Tech and that is that every single photographer must donate at least 1% of their proceeds to charity. Why? Because they just should… they should give more than that, and Darkroom.Tech will match the percentage given to charity. We have recently partnered with IGBoston, a group of nearly 500 of the top photographers in Boston, to provide them with an innovative way to sell their work. These leaders of Boston’s photographic community are helping us grow our platform and improve it for future users.
We need Brandathon for so many reasons. Every single one of the participating agencies has the power to transform our brand because I know firsthand that their teams are full of some of the greatest creative minds in Boston. Our mission at Darkroom.Tech is to empower both the community and its aspiring photographers and artists by providing them with a platform for effectively selling their work. Only the agencies in Brandathon have the power to build a brand that encapsulates that mission. Thank you so much for your consideration, we can’t wait to hear back!
DCT is a digital health company with clinically proven platform technology that detects cognitive change before symptoms manifest. Our first product, DCTclockTM, is the most sensitive test available for objective, reliable, and quantified measurement of cognitive function. The test was developed over the course of 10 years at MIT and Lahey Hospital & Medical Center using artificial intelligence technology and clinical expertise with normative data from the Framingham Heart Study to unlock robust measures of brain function from natural drawing behavior. Potential uses are to screen for cognitive impairment, monitor cognitive health over time, and track change in cognitive function in response to treatment. It is non-invasive, inexpensive, takes less than 2 minutes to perform, provides instant results, and takes up less counter space than a smartphone.
Today’s clinical standard for cognitive assessment has remained the same for decades. Pen and paper or tablet-based test batteries are time consuming, dependent on clinician observation and subjective scoring, have inherent bias, and are insensitive to mild impairment. DCT utilizes a digital platform with advanced analytics and precise measurements of the entire test-taking process and output for deep insights into cognitive state. Billions have been spent on cognitive impairment research, treatment, and care. We should not be using subjective tests in a digital age. DCT is poised to make a significant impact in the healthcare community.
Today’s clinical standard for cognitive assessment has remained the same for decades. Pen and paper or tablet-based test batteries are time consuming, dependent on clinician observation and subjective scoring, have inherent bias, and are insensitive to mild impairment. DCT utilizes a digital platform with advanced analytics and precise measurements of the entire test-taking process and output for deep insights into cognitive state. Billions have been spent on cognitive impairment research, treatment, and care. We should not be using subjective tests in a digital age. DCT is poised to make a significant impact in the healthcare community.
DCT would greatly benefit from the amazing expertise available through Brandathon, which are resources otherwise unavailable to a start-up such as ours. The scientific concept and potentially massive healthcare impact can be confusing or difficult to communicate in a succinct fashion. Crafting this message both through copy and graphics is essential to marketplace understanding and acceptance. We have also struggled with creating a brand identity that portrays our mission, yet clearly communicates our products to the medical and scientific communities. Finally, we need a cohesive branding strategy that will be inclusive of future product development.
We plan to come out of “stealth mode” to officially launch to the clinician marketplace in the winter. We would love to partner with a Brandathon team who is as excited as we are to get our branding and messaging right in time for an initial market entry with a new offering that can dramatically impact caring for patients’ cognitive health, which is a huge market need.
Every day, Gen Zers find things they want to acquire or achieve, but are unbanked,so have no means to participate in the economy. Concurrently, when searching for products, their data is monetized by search engines without their explicit consent. Doni will allow Gen Zers to plan for and achieve their goals by utilizing new, social-driven financial instruments and will be able to own and monetize their personal data: a tectonic shift for users. Doni users can set up goals and wish lists, and then are enabled to achieve these goals by alerting friends and family to their wishes. They can crowdfund their goals. They can also share goals with retailers, and receive a share of the advertising revenue for permitting us to share their data. Longer term we anticipate allowing users to borrow for their goal from friends and track those loans, as well as start a group purchase event. Doni’s potential reach is anyone with a mobile phone, however, Gen Z (26% of the population) will be our beachead as a generation that desires financial agency and are highly driven to save for their goals. We characterize our Gen Zers as MUUGLS – Mobile-first, Unbanked, Urban, Goal-oriented, Liberal, Spenders. Millennials will also adopt Doni as they begin to experience a compression of life events such as weddings and home purchases. Thus far, Doni’s naming, branding and positioning has been rather ad hoc and could benefit from professional review by a leading agency. We welcome a new way of looking at our value proposition by experts in the field.
Please note the attached video was produced by actual fans of Doni, not Doni itself.
Donii is a donation matchmaking service that gets the stuff you donate to the people who need it most. Currently more than 80% of the items people donate are ultimately sold for profit, often overseas, and never get to the critically poor in our community. Donii is working to change that. Our mission is to help local individuals and families in crisis get the goods they need to survive and thrive. Through a network of local charity partners, Donii connects donors with people who lack exactly what the donor has to spare.
WHO WE ARE
– Donii is an app: our application allows users to search for local charities – like women’s shelters, homeless shelters, and child welfare programs – that need their unneeded items for someone they serve.
– Donii is a service: our concierge pick-up and delivery service is available to the employees and tenants of buildings and companies that sponsor Donii. We provide an employee engagement tool, a tenant community-building service, and a vehicle for sponsors to create meaningful social impact.
– Donii is a crowdsourcing tool: We digitally connect the charities on our platform with a larger community of supporters. We enable human service providers working at agencies with tight budgets to find needed items for the people they serve.
– Donii is a connector: we bridge gaps between those who have and want to give, and those who need and want to receive. We connect corporations with the charities they share a city with. We connect nonprofits to the existing flow of generosity in our community.
– Donii is: a nonprofit, a startup, a social enterprise. We have a small budget but big dreams.
WHY WE NEED THE BRANDATHON:
– We need an agency’s help in making “I want to Donii this” a default thought for the person who has a bag of clothes, baby gear, or a blender they no longer need.
– We need an agency’s help in communicating that, through Donii, the mom whose baby shower turned into a downpour can connect with the mom sleeping in a car with her newborn.
– We need an agency’s help in showing companies that sponsoring Donii gets them more bang for their philanthropic buck: not only do they support a social innovation for the public good, they get an on-site service that enables employees to create meaningful social impact right from the building lobby.
– We need an agency’s help in communicating our brand, mission, and impact using a cohesive visual language.
– We need an agency’s help because our team has the visionary, the get-it-done person, the tech guy, the intern… but no marketing or branding expert!
Founded by a female combat veteran, DropZone For Veterans is a digital platform that connects veterans and their families with personalized, high-impact resources so they can keep kicking ass after the military. With over 116,000 resources in the database, ranging from Zen Mountain Healing retreats in California, to 3 day entrepreneurship bootcamps in Colorado, DropZone For Veterans is the only place where America’s military community can discover and connect with benefits customized to their individualized preferences.
Our mission is to create authentic, mutually beneficial connections between veterans and the organizations that support them, so veterans can create an authentic, and ass-kicking post-military life.
Our goal is to create tangible, measurable impact for veterans-not just a lot of social buzz so that means connecting them with resources that are relevant, helpful, and that they actually use. Our job isn’t done until a veteran actually uses a resource.
We need Brandathon’s help in conveying to our users and to the community at large that we are the not typical veteran organization, for the following reasons and that is our greatest strength. It’s exactly why we will succeed, and why we can do what no other organization has been able to do.
-We are a for-profit social enterprise because we don’t believe that doing good and making money are mutually exclusive, nor do we see veterans as charity cases. We know that when companies and organizations connect ith veterans, they bring financial, social and cultural value.
-Although all veterans have served, we are not all the same. We are as diverse as the country we represent, and we don’t fit into nice, neat boxes. Veterans can, and are more than one thing at the same time.
-We don’t limit our view of veterans as being either a war hero to be placed on a pedastal and idolized, or as broken, PTSD stricken souls to be pitied. Veterans are humans, and we just want to the chance to succeed, the same as anybody else.
Dwellyr is a multi-sided platform (MSP), facilitating two-way matching between landlords and renters based on preferred amenities and interest-based attributes – effectively a ‘match.com’ for landlords and tenants – equalizing the search burden and eliminating the need for a broker. Dwellyr’s business model and proprietary algorithm yields accurate matching. Our MSP and interest-based matching will save users – landlords and renters – time and money. Dwellyr was born out of the direct needs of one of its founder. Team Dwellyr is special on many fronts: We have a diverse mix of professional experiences in technology, finance, and strategy. We challenge each other to think beyond the norm. We are collectively aligned in our values of pay equity for all, company culture, and the entrepreneurial spirit. We are innovative leaders, and part of the MIT community. Our collective personalities overcome any individual shortcomings. We trust and respect each other and above all, we strive to improve the world. As we plan to go to market in Fall 2017, a very strong brand partner and marketing campaign will ensure a successful launch. Dwellyr has engaged with market participants during its prototype phase in Fall 2016 through Spring 2017 and is looking to build network effects within the Chicago and Boston market in Year 1 of launch. Early stage startups need strong brand awareness very early in their lifecycle to ensure successful scaling and a strong future, and we believe partnering through Brandathon would be the perfect first step.
Education Modified was founded by two NYC public school special education teachers who struggled to support students with diverse learning challenges. The achievement gap for students with special needs is vast, and with focus on compliance, it is not getting better. Yet, we know more about neurodiversity than we ever have before. The special education space is desperate for an innovative approach to support teachers and students. Education Modified provides instant access to research-based strategies for every special need in a teacher’s classroom, and a workflow tool to track what works and what doesn’t, for each individual child’s needs. Our mission is to bridge the gap between research and practice by equipping teachers and leveraging technology to improve outcomes for students with disabilities. Currently, our platform is being used in schools in NY, ME, TX, MA, and FL. We will be integrated within the popular LMS Schoology this Fall, which will significantly expand our exposure and reach! So far, we have raised a small (pre)-seed round, mostly from social impact investors and individual angels, but have not been able to dedicate resources to branding. We have done all of our own branding and design- our logo is what we off-shore outsourced for $75 over three years ago. We believe that with expert strategy and guidance, Education Modified can provide a new, innovative brand to an outdated special education market.
FASTPORT is a technology company that builds digital products to help the military community find employment. Our ResumeEngine.org app allows a military spouse, a transitioning or post-military service member to translate their military experience (MOS) into a beautiful civilian resume in about 15 – 20 minutes on any smartphone using common terms for any civilian recruiter. ResumeEngine.org was adopted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s “Hiring Our Heroes” military hiring effort. It is also adopted for use by the USO, the Army Guard and Reserve Field Officers and many of the Soldier For Life Transition Service Officers (SFL-TAP).
Here’s the challenge: 200,000 service members transition out of the military each year. They are added to the currently 500,000 unemployed veterans and the 700,000 under-employed veterans. Our mission is to eliminate veteran and military spouse unemployment and underemployment in America. We see a strong adoption of our platform and it’s changing the way transitioning service members and veterans are hired into civilian jobs. The pieces are in place but our window of opportunity is a short one.
Here’s the background and where we need agency branding expertise: A couple years ago, we contracted with the U. S. Chamber’s Hiring Our Heroes to help hire veterans into great Trucking opportunities. Our approach was so unique and so effective that our top 12 Trucking companies helped to increase veteran hiring by 400% (400). The Chamber had never seen that and now asked us to extend this approach across ALL 19 industries including; Automotive, Agriculture, Construction, Financial Services, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Retail. This window won’t be ours forever. We need help to build a strategy that identifies FASTPORT as the service to use for hiring veterans in the minds of VPs of HR and Veteran/Diversity Hiring Talent Acquisition Directors of Fortune 1000 firms across all these industries while we have the attention of these veteran service organizations.
This is a great project for many reasons. It’s relevant. It’s timely in that our window is now. It’s measurable and most importantly, we are a blast to work with. Help make our message better. Our approach is different and that’s why we have seen such early success: We will leave no veteran left behind who’s actively in search of a job.
Quinn and Sara started Flare after having experienced sexual harassment and assault in situations that they thought would be safe with people they trusted. They are not alone – 1 in 5 women experience sexual assault in their lifetime and over 70% of assault takes place between friends, classmates, and family members in places where they feel comfortable.
That’s why they created Flare – a discreet technology that gives women a way to get out of awkward or uncomfortable situations, which can escalate and potentially become dangerous. Hidden inside jewelry or other unassuming personal accessories made by their product partners, Flare becomes a part of your favorite items. This makes their technology incredibly discreet to use and immediately accessible (when the seconds really matter). At the press of a button in an uncomfortable situation, the user can either i) initiate an automated phone call, which creates an innocuous interruption and an excuse to leave or ii) send a text message to her nearby friends asking them to come interrupt (and potentially get help if necessary). Flare’s technology was developed over the last year with the input of over 1,600 sexual assault survivors, advocates, universities, and young women. Their team of entrepreneurs, engineers, and designers recently closed a seed round of fundraising with the support of Bolt and Underscore VC and were the grand prize winners of the 2017 Harvard Business School New Venture Competition.
The heart of Flare’s brand is about helping women boldly live the lives they want without fear. Sexual harassment, assault, and safety are difficult topics to discuss and can evoke a very emotional response. The help of Brandathon’s agency partners will make the difference between being seen as a product that is only useful to people who are vulnerable to a product that enables women to exert more control over the lives they lead. Your support turning Flare’s vision into a compelling brand that resonates with its target user will enable the company to better tell its story and ensure alignment in everything it does. With your help, the Flare team can better reach people all around the world who would benefit from this technology and protect millions of women.
Finnest is a prepaid debit card account and mobile app for school kids between 8-18 y/o designed to give them early and relevant money experience in a society that is moving digital. With Finnest, kids can set up saving goals, budget, and spend money with their prepaid card while parents maintain oversight and control. We innovate the way children grow up with money and offer a new approach of teaching personal finance. As the platform grows with our users, new functionalities will be enabled. For example, parents and their kids can sign up for additional financial products, ranging from 529 savings plans to custodial brokerage accounts, straight through the app. Finnest incentivizes its cardholders by gamifying the experience around money. Points can be earned for financially responsible behavior and redeemed to participate in raffles. User engagement is currently tested with customers between the ages 8 and 18 using prepaid cards and a basic app interface. Through this test we identified that there is a real customer need and that we can successfully tap into a market that is currently overlooked by the banking system.
Finnest was finalist at the MIT FinTech Hackathon 2017 and is currently participating in the MassChallenge Finals.
We know that reaching parents and their kids with a financial service is challenging. The right branding with playful but trustworthy elements is essential to reach our customers in the near future. With the help of the brandathon we can leverage world class talent to achieve our mission of changing the way school kids grow up with handling money.
FLY (For the Love of Yoga) is a new “athleisure” apparel brand that allows the millennial yoga enthusiast to showcase their love for Yoga; in and out of Yoga Studios. With comfortable, innovative and quality fabrics and easy style elements, our brand’s street to studio versatility not only proves functional, but also resembles a lifestyle of positive intentions. FLY is committed to creating a harmonious union between your get up and go and, your studio flow. Namasté. Our brand and logo development is inspired from love. As a Taiwanese American (born in Taiwan and immigrated to the US at 3), we carefully unpacked, combined and re-organized the lines of the Mandarin character, “Love,” that became FLY. Our company solves the problem of automatically expressing the personal branding for millennial yoga enthusiast; that is to be “FLY” or “Cool.” Our belief is that millennials are interested in experiences and material possessions and are also self-indulgent attention seekers. Not only do they like to endorse their own lifestyles, but also they like to endorse the brands that help them do so and it’s demonstrated on Instagram. We need an agency’s guidance in the following manner: 1) Understanding if our brand works for the athleisure market and/or other markets that we’re unaware of. 2) How to use the brand FLY. For example, FLY originated from “For the Love of Yoga.” However, we realize that FLY could be used as “For the Love of You” and wasn’t sure if we should launch both brands or have one be a master-brand the other as sub-brand! 3) Creating or latching onto a movement (and develop supporting marketing events and materials like a look book) that our customers can identify and connect with as to want to buy from and associate with a start-up apparel company like ours. 4) Redesigning our website. We’re currently using a t-shirt store on spreadshirt.com and could use assistance in creating a new website look/feel that we can execute on Wix.com or another start-up friendly platform. Our 3 product lines are: 1) General FLY Shirts as worn by our customers in the uploaded pictures – Currently Available 2) FLY Shirts with a catch-phrase like “Your Next Guru” (In development) 3) Performance Athletic Shirts (In development) a. A workout shirt with silver metallic lining to eliminate odor b. A workout shirt that has sliming capabilities like “Spanx” and won’t flop over on your face when performing inverted Yoga Poses. Our mission: 1) Discover and use innovation material fabrics for athleisure products 2) Create a movements that makes our customers feel positive and with good intentions when they wear our branded products 3) Move beyond the athlesiure segment and into couture segments like Louis Vuitton 4) Become a company that seasoned fashion designers would desire to work for. Our goals: 1) Work locally in Boston and setup a pop-up store in downtown Boston. 2) Create Customer Contest to generate buzz, content and find devoted customers and influencers that we can collaborate with a. Photo Contest of Best & Unique Yoga Poses while wearing our shirts b. Endurance Contest – Who can pose in 1 position the longest c. Crowd source catchy phrases 3) Develop a. Influencer programs for Instagram and social media personalities b. Direct to consumer reoccurring sales program c. Indirect sales program with yoga studios and yoga instructors 4) Finalize new products: a. Fly Branded Shirts with Catch-Phrase like “Your next Guru” or “Your Next Yogi” b. Silver FLY Performance Shirt – Using embedded metallic silver in fabric, we’re going to create a performance shirt that will inhibit the growth of human bacteria on fabrics thus destroying human based odor. c. FLY Performance Slimming Shirt – Using slimming materials like “Spanx,” we’re going to create a performance shirt that makes a person looks slimmer and won’t flop over on your face when performing inverted Yoga Poses.
Our goal is to bring people together, while supporting local restaurants. ForkOut makes it simple for groups going out to eat, through our streamlined all-in-one platform. The application connects friends and colleagues, allowing them to coordinate outings easily with messaging and location-based tools. Businesses can also use the platform to learn about customers, and engage with them, without needing to build out their own custom applications.
Small mom and pop shops and local restaurants have become discouraged when working with large restaurant tech companies. Self focused business practices have caused local restaurants to feel forced into subscribing to a service or reducing their already slim margins to increase their search ranking. Despite a general weariness among restaurant owners, people are more inclined to work with a respectable young startup. Additionally, our existing connections in the food industry promise to kickstart ForkOut’s release, beginning a mutual beneficial relationship of cross promotion.
One of the hardest parts of creating an app like ForkOut is getting the word out, and sparking widespread adoption. By partnering with an agency for rebranding, we’ll be able to better expand our reach and refine our messaging. More users and partners will not only result in a superior in-app experience, but also help build community and relationships.
Frank is a personal, private, no-BS, no-judgment, 24/7 career mentor that helps new grads navigate the job search and the professional workplace through on-demand support via Facebook chat. Frank’s guidance is sourced from 200+ managers and seasoned Millennial professionals, has thus far received an average of 4.8/5.0 stars, and is delivered by real humans – not an automated system.
Frank’s mission is to level the playing field for students who may otherwise lack the mentors to get ahead in their careers, including low-income, ethnic minorities, and first-generation college students. Longer term, Frank aspires to address the national shortage of school guidance counselors given that the average ratio is one counselor for every 471 students.
We are seeking an agency’s help because Frank faces a number of branding dilemmas:
(1) How do you create a brand around a single fictitious persona? – The goal is not to create a two-sided platform where counselors are matched to advisees one-on-one because such a model is inefficient; the goal is to have Frank be the single source of truth by intelligently repurposing 80% of its guidance under the oversight of a human being
(2) How do you make Frank seem like a real person? – Our users have repeatedly told us that they do not want a chatbot
(3) How can the name of this fictitious figure resonate with a broad base of users? – Frank is clearly a male name; is there a better unisex/genderless name, especially given the number of questions we’ve already gotten from women who would like guidance on how to navigate male-dominant workplaces? Or is it a non-issue since clearly women are engaging with Frank despite his name?
(4) How can the name have a dual (or otherwise creative) meaning? – The great thing about “Frank” is that is not only a person’s name, but also a synonym for “candid”
(5) What domain prefix best describes the value prop of Frank? – “Chat With” implies a benign interaction, which hits at the real-time element, but does not highlight the credibility of the guidance at all
GeoSure’s Mission: A Safer and More Predictable World through Increased Safety Awareness GeoSure Global LLC is the world leader in developing the most highly scaled, granular and timely geo-location safety metrics. The company is the first to map every major metropolitan area, points of interest (POIs), as well as more austere environments across the globe into dynamic safety “temperatures” known as GeoSafeScores™. Through advances in natural language processing, “big data” analytics, and statistical research, the company has successfully created the first real-time Global Safety Scoring Standard™, mapped down to the neighborhood level (over 60,000 locations). Using a proprietary combination of big data and predictive analytics, GeoSure aggregates and analyzes large amounts of structured and unstructured data, then processes the data through rigorous vetting and advanced statistical models. The resulting information takes the form of GeoSafeScores™, presented on a simple 1= Cool/Safe to 100= Extremely Hot/Dangerous scale. Data is harvested from WHO, UN, CDC, Interpol, World Bank, human rights organizations, city and country crime statistics, proprietary machine learning/AI tools and much more. The company’s revolutionary quantified safety data programs act as a “funnel”, reducing our valued partner’s safety information overload and costs, time costs, safety resource optimization, and crisis planning by as much as 60% or more. GeoSure has scored neighborhood-level locations across the following GeoSafe categories: Overall Safety, Physical Harm, Theft, Basic Freedoms (political), Disease & Medical, and Women’s Safety. Data rich city safety ratings at this level of granularity have not existed before, providing relevant and timely content for travel and tourism organizations, while simultaneously empowering travel planners, Boards of Directors with Duty of Care responsibilities, and traveling business executives with a simple, personalized safety analysis tool. GeoSure’s customized location-specific safety data is available to enterprise partners via API licensing, as well as simple web app that can be embedded within partner’s URL or intranet site. GeoSure’s metrics provide a simple safety awareness and planning tool for managers and employees, or enable brand-differentiating content for third party clients. We invite you to learn more about GeoSure Global as we enter our next phase on the way to a safer, more secure world.
Ghost Ship Murder Mysteries is unlike any other murder mystery company–we’re not selling a kit, we don’t hire actors to play the roles, and guests are encouraged to lie and steal. At a Ghost Ship party, there is no sitting around a table reading from a script. Guests are up on their feet the whole time, sipping our complimentary cocktails, looking for clues, and making choices about who to share information with. It’s like being at a regular party…except that everyone is trying to solve a murder (or, if you’re the murderer, trying not to get caught). We send a Ghost Ship representative to each party to help the guests through it all (and handle all those pesky details so the party’s organizer doesn’t have to know who the murderer is or have any clues spoiled).
Founded in September 2016 by Lindsay Carpenter and Dylan Zwickel, our service fits into the realm of boda borg and escape rooms, perfect for any age and designed for people who’d rather spend money on a unique experience. With so many murder mystery companies offering a product that is silly and juvenile, we need an agency’s help to illustrate that our service is edgy, sexy, and fun for adults. We are looking for help to align our product with our brand to better attract the intended audience.
Gravyty helps nonprofits raise more money. We use artificial intelligence and machine learning to generate insights from donor, public, and behavioral data to prescribe actions that can be taken by fundraisers. We help higher education, cures & causes, hospitals, and more nonprofits build deeper relationships at scale.
We are a marketplace for quality sustainable products. You shop and we reduce the impact. We enable people to shop in a way that supports circular economy. This is similar to Amazon combined with Etsy, but with standards and quality control, for non-food products initially.
Objective: make it easy for people to find quality sustainable product options
Mission: reduce the negative impacts that consumerism can have on people and the planet.
Overview:
1. Framework for products to be listed on our platform across quality, health, environment and society. Details on every page.
2. Filters to shop for values and certifications:
– Values: Plastic-free, vegan, fragrance-free, upcycled, zero waste etc.
– Certifications: Fair Trade, Cradle2Cradle, Ecologo, Energy Star etc.
3. Fulfillment process reduces the impact of the shopping cycle:
– Carbon Neutral Shipping for all purchases and a Take Back program for items that cannot be recycled locally.
4. Impact Tracking:
– we are automate and show the estimated savings across carbon emissions, waste and water on our homepage (for all purchases) and hope to be able to automate and summarize this in customer accounts in the future.
Objective: make it easy for people to find quality sustainable product options
Mission: reduce the negative impacts that consumerism can have on people and the planet.
Overview:
1. Framework for products to be listed on our platform across quality, health, environment and society. Details on every page.
2. Filters to shop for values and certifications:
– Values: Plastic-free, vegan, fragrance-free, upcycled, zero waste etc.
– Certifications: Fair Trade, Cradle2Cradle, Ecologo, Energy Star etc.
3. Fulfillment process reduces the impact of the shopping cycle:
– Carbon Neutral Shipping for all purchases and a Take Back program for items that cannot be recycled locally.
4. Impact Tracking:
– we are automate and show the estimated savings across carbon emissions, waste and water on our homepage (for all purchases) and hope to be able to automate and summarize this in customer accounts in the future.
The long term objective is to brand “sustainable” for Quality, Health, Environment & Society similarly to the way organic has been branded and become recognized as a branded option for health. Sustainably made products are now some of the highest quality products because of what the product design space has been focused on in recent years, for many different types of products. This product design space also produces products using the most advanced methods, which protects the environment and people involved in manufacturing along the supply chain. This is value currently uncaptured in the market that people want, and The GreenLine offers one central place to shop for these products, across many different product categories. I need help branding the offer and capturing the benefits for Quality, health, environment and society that they offer customers. We help close the loop on the consumerism cycle with carbon neutral shipping for all products and a Take Back program, which reduces emissions, water and waste. I need help consolidating “what we do” into one tangible, well packaged offer that is simple and appealing for customers such as “You shop. We reduce the impact.” or “Sustainable. Quality without compromise.” We are not yet live but have many suppliers joining us.
HigherMe helps retail and restaurant employers find, screen, and hire better employees faster. We work with great companies like Dunkin’ Donuts, Panera Bread, and White Castle to help them save time, reduce turnover, and find great people. We’re funded by great investors like Y Combinator and Barbara Corcoran, and we’re growing rapidly – we’ve doubled headcount and revenue every 6 months since we were founded, and we’re now processing over 100,000 job applications every single month. Our business is unique in that we’re really B2B2C – our employer partners drive our revenue, but we’re also reliant on job-seekers to power our platform as well. A strong brand for both our employers and our job-seekers is critical. One of the reasons we need an agency’s help is that we are in desperate need of a name change. Our name was originally meant to evoke the concept of a “higher, more self-actualized” version of a job candidate – really helping them rise above a resume and stand for more than just what they had done so far in their life. The problem – we fail the phone test! Many of our investors, customers, job-seekers, and even FAMILY MEMBERS routinely refer to us as “HireMe” – and unfortunately the owners of www.hireme.com are content with squatting on their domain. We have a business that’s growing incredibly rapidly, but we’re hamstrung by our name – and we’ve wasted more man-and-woman hours than I’d care to admit trying to come up with something different. We could really use your help!
We believe people should love the ones who protect them as they take risks in life. Or more directly, we believe people should love their insurance. This is rarely the case. Our mission is to change this – to change the way customers and insurance carriers work together. It’s a big goal, but we think current trends in AI, machine learning and messaging have created a unique window to make things better for everyone. This is our second startup (first was acquired by Aon) – and we really want to get the voice and brand right if we are going to succeed as we need to garner trust in both insurance carriers and tech-savvy customers, quickly. We think this is a big opportunity, and would be really grateful for any help here
Have you ever been a part of a group gift collection for your child’s teacher or coach? Or for a baby gift, wedding gift, or 40th birthday? Whether you organized the gift or simply contributed to it, you know the process is painful. How many times have you heard, “The check is in the mail or backpack.” Or, “I will pay you back!” We have all been there. It is painful to collect money for anything!
HipChip is a group gifting service that allows people to join together to give gifts to others. We eliminate the time-consuming and stressful efforts to collect money for any group gift. With HipChip, there is no more awkward asking for money or reminding stragglers. No more IOUs or spending time tracking the contributions. You set up a HipChip gift and we take care of the rest.
HipChip has a strong and loyal customer base. Busy moms love us! Our growth is powered by repeat users and viral growth. We want to gain awareness for the brand so HipChip becomes the only website synonymous with group gifting. We are a small and lightly funded start up creating a solution for a universal pain point. We would love to work with a creative agency who can help market our brand on a limited budget.
The online dating industry has been growing at a rapid rate over the past decade with no signs of slowing down (over 50 million online daters in the US alone). The vast majority of those users (18-34) perceive the biggest apps as either hard to take seriously (Tinder) or too old to use (Match, eHarmony). On top of that, there are professional dating coaches that cost upwards of $4,000/month (seriously) just to help people navigate these apps. Icebrkr is a dating app aimed at combining the best parts of these tools while removing the negatives.
Icebrkr connects daters with their own personal dating coach named Hootie. Hootie is a powerful machine learning AI chatbot that provides daters expert guidance on common pain points like creating a great profile, intuitive chatting advice with matches and custom date recommendations. Hootie acts as an ‘Emotional Intelligence Enhancer’ as it aims to empower every user with communication skills and self-confidence to build meaningful relationships.
Combining online dating with artificial intelligence is the natural next step in the progression of an industry that desperately needs it. By employing the power and scalability of A.I. within a youthful brand, Icebrkr provides the personalized value of a $4,000/month dating coach into an app with faster, more sophisticated matching than eHarmony while maintaining the simplicity of Tinder.
We could use an agency’s help to position ourselves as the go to dating app for serious daters. The market is saturated with way too many people who think they know what they’re doing when it comes to online dating. As someone who has studied the field for years, I find it very frustrating and almost insulting at the gimmicks many of these apps are trying to pull and the horrible dating advice they give. We could use help rising above all of this noise to better position ourselves to investors and our customers. Today’s online daters deserve better and should have platform available to them where they’re set up for success. The selection of a spouse is one of the most important decisions in someone’s life and it should be treated as such. Help us better spread this message!
Involved is a civic tech application to improve civic engagement and communication between citizens and elected officials through mico-polling. We are launching our mobile application this fall, followed by text and email applications and AI chat bot technology for direct messaging. Our goal is to help voices be heard; we want to drive democracy using simple, effective technology that improves communities and the lives of the people that live in them. Our mission is to have elected officials around the nation at every level of government interacting with their community to help guide their decisions. We need branding help because in this two-sided market it is difficult to design the optimal approach that not only wins over the time, budget, energy, and trust of elected officials, but also the time, energy, and trust of everyday people. We need to do this through telling our story effectively and understanding how to best approach these two uniquely sensitive markets to build the momentum we need for polls to be representative and for elected officials to engage in our vision. Without one side of the market, we don’t have the other. Perfecting the brand approach from both angles is pivotal to our mission of bettering the world.
During an emergency, contacting help immediately is essential. However, most times people don’t have enough time to reach their phone before it’s too late. Sadly, statistics show that: 83% of US citizens will face a violent crime in their lifetime, 1 in 5 women report experiencing rape or sexual assault, and every 19 minutes, an older adult DIES from a fall. Even if you can reach your mobile phone, when you make a 911 call from a cellphone the operators pick up your location from the closest tower which may or may not be near you. The call often lands in a regional center which could be in a far-away city. If you can’t talk, there isn’t enough information for the dispatchers to find you. We live in a world where if your iPhone is lost, it takes seconds to locate it, whereas if you’re in a life threatening situation, police may not be able to find you.
invisaWear has designed and developed smart jewelry and accessories that allow users to instantly contact friends, family, and police in the event of an emergency. With the push of a button users can send an alert message containing their location to pre-configured emergency contacts and connect directly with police. The small component, containing invisaWear’s technology, can be easily interchanged within a variety of customized jewelry and accessories including but not limited to necklaces, bracelets, chokers, and keychains. This means a user can wear their invisaWear in a simple bracelet while at work in the morning, and later the same night in a necklace at a black-tie event.
Our mission is to allow people to protect themselves and the people they love. We aim to accelerate obtaining assistance during an emergency and to decrease the staggering statistics. We would love an agency to help us build our brand and identify the proper messaging. We’ve gotten a lot of traction and were recently accepted into MassChallenge’s 2017 summer cohort. We’d love to make sure that our branding and messaging is aligned with our customers as we continue to gain more traction.
Janji’s mission is to create pathways to explore, connect and improve the world through running. Each season we focus on a different part of the world and design a collection with inspiration from that region. We believe running is the best way to explore new places, so we’ll travel to these places each season. Finally, we then donate 10% of sales towards clean water programs in that region as a way to pay it forward.
John’s Crazy Socks is a father-son venture inspired by co-founder John Lee Cronin, a young man with Down syndrome. John’s affinity for crazy socks paired with his love of making people smile made our mission clear: we want to spread happiness through socks. We opened our online store in December 2016 with a promise to offer the widest array of fun, unique and beautifully designed socks that let you express your passions and personality. We want to offer you socks you will love. And we deliver those socks with fast, personal service. We provide same-day shipping and every package includes a hand-written thank you note from John and some candy. We also believe that giving back is important. We donate 5 percent of our earnings to the Special Olympics as they’ve played such a vital role in John’s development. We continue to expand our charitable partners by offering and creating socks with specific “awareness” themes, such as our Autism Awareness Socks and Down Syndrome Awareness Socks. We love what we do. We hope you love our socks and that your experience with John’s Crazy Socks brings you happiness. To date, we have achieved good initial suss. We have shipped 19,000 orders, garnered 67,000 Facebook fans and received positive media coverage.
Our challenge is to tell our story in a consistent manner. We talk about John and our originals. But we also talk about our sock offerings and service. We want to find a way to present both aspects of our story together.
Our mission is to excite, educate, and empower children in mid-sized and smaller cities to use computers and technology. We strive to educate and inspire children to pursue interests in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields so they are ready to embrace the STEM career opportunities that will arise as they enter the workforce. We accomplish this through our after-school Tech Clubs in which students learn computer skills and how technology is used in a professional setting. We engage students in the curriculum and foster a lifelong interest in science and technology by promoting a positive learning environment and offering a vision of success. We focus on mid-sized cities like Lowell, Massachusetts and other Gateway cities in Massachusetts because they are emerging centers of tech innovation.
We will be able to increase awareness of our brand and will motivate people to take action to support our cause. With your support, we will become better in communicating our brand, mission, and impact through various mediums. We’d love to make sure that our branding and messaging is aligned with our various stakeholders as we continue to gain more traction.
Our mission is to excite, educate, and empower children in mid-sized and smaller cities to use computers and technology. We strive to educate and inspire children to pursue interests in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields so they are ready to embrace the STEM career opportunities that will arise as they enter the workforce. We accomplish this through our after-school Tech Clubs in which students learn computer skills and how technology is used in a professional setting. We engage students in the curriculum and foster a lifelong interest in science and technology by promoting a positive learning environment and offering a vision of success. We focus on mid-sized cities like Lowell, Massachusetts and other Gateway cities in Massachusetts because they are emerging centers of tech innovation.
We will be able to increase awareness of our brand and will motivate people to take action to support our cause. With your support, we will become better in communicating our brand, mission, and impact through various mediums. We’d love to make sure that our branding and messaging is aligned with our various stakeholders as we continue to gain more traction.
Kim Lundgren Associates, Inc. (KLA) is a woman-owned, benefit corporation that delivers customized solutions to local governments to create sustainable communities. KLA seeks to drive action and long-lasting behavior change to realize tangible improvements to the economic, environmental, and social aspects of our communities. Every individual can do their part and we believe that local governments have a unique opportunity to lead their community toward a more sustainable future. We provide tools, services and solutions that are affordable and accessible to all who are inspired and ready to take action. Our keystone tool is the KLA Community Dashboard. The dashboard leverages the KLA story telling framework to translate data into compelling and easy-to-understand stories that enable local governments to meet transparency and accountability standards, track progress toward goals, and engage their community members to be part of the solution.
Our team has spent more than 16 years in this space. We have been in our customer’s shoes. However, working in the government space often creates challenges for traditional marketing and branding techniques. Many representatives of our target audience are not using social media regularly, though we are on LinkedIn and Twitter regularly and we do host a podcast, SAS Talk with Kim (Sustainability Action Series: https://soundcloud.com/sastalk) to build the brand. Email marketing and conference sponsorships/booths offer us good opportunities for visibility. However, word of mouth and testimonials are what will close deals. We are looking for an agency to help us get creative with how we continue to grow the company’s brand and then leverage it to spur growth in this market .
We at knead help companies promote a culture of well-being with onsite massage therapy, yoga, and meditation that take minimal resources to set up and maintain. Familiar with the workload of HR professionals everywhere, we try to make our wellness services as autopilot as possible in action, and as flexible as needed in planning.
In our effort to ensure that our quality of service is excellent, we pay on the upper end of the pay spectrum to our individual service providers and provide them with worker’s compensation and additional voluntary benefits. To maintain top quality talent, keep our costs as accessible as possible, and manage nationwide service, it’s difficult to redirect any capital or focus into branding.
Knightly is a social safety app that keeps students safe while making college campuses safer. On a late-night walk home or a weekend night out, users can stay connected to their friends via our peer-to-peer safety network. With the touch of a button, your chosen friends will know where you are, when you get home or if you don’t get home. In an emergency, students can use our app to contact closest emergency services, ensuring their safety in the most effective way possible.
For Universities, Knightly acts as a community engagement manager. We offer Universities an platform for engagement tracking, direct-to-student communication, location based safe-zone mapping, and post-event analysis. Not only can we let Universities know where their students feel uncomfortable on their campus, but we can measure how, when, and how much students engage with certain campus resources. These insights can be used to create more effective and user-driven solutions.
The coolest thing about Knightly is our brand. We are a high-tech sleek safety application that molds its functionality to our user’s patterns. Knightly will be your walking Blue Light whenever you need it – giving you a sense of awareness and a strong piece of mind. Although our customer is the University, our brand is built to be design-driven by the wants, needs, and desires of the college students. Knightly makes safety cool, even to college kids.
Having a strong brand that resonates with students also is important to our utilization rates. We need an app that students will actually use and we believe that presenting a valued brand to our users outside the UI of the application will enable us not only to acquire users, but create an integrated community that drives usage. Our mission is simple: to create social safety networks within campuses and groups of friends. Our brand needs to embody this deeper mission so it can spread from campus to campus. It also needs to make safety “cool”! Safety is such a hard concept to deliver because it has so much weight attached to it. Anything “safety” immediately is bright yellow, uncool, and disinteresting. We want to flip that notion on its head. Working with an agency on this gives Knightly a unique opportunity to redefine how college students view personal safety and their safety habits.
We need an agency’s help because as a student-founded startup, we haven’t been able to focus on our marketing and brand strategy, but we need to. We are currently entering working with the Northeastern Campus Police Department to launch a full-scale pilot on Northeastern’s campus. While we are focusing on developing a product that meets specifications we need to ensure that our brand is ready for the exposure we will get during this pilot. This will be student’s first experience with Knightly and we have to deliver them the brand that hooks them, so when we launch full-scale, they will become loyal active users.
Kulisha believes in a better food system. Nearly 40% of food in the U.S. goes to waste while our oceans are severely overfished to provide a protein base for animal feeds. At Kulisha, we utilize a system that takes organic waste as a feedstock input for a type of insect called black soldier fly larvae, which are then harvested as a sustainable protein base for feeds. We work with organic waste managers and food and beverage companies to source pre-consumer waste and recycle those nutrients which would otherwise be lost. We’ve spent the past two years fundraising and developing the technology, and now we’re ready to take our product to market. Our first product line will be a protein chicken treat geared towards small-scale hobby chicken farmers. We’re currently rebranding ourselves entirely to better communicate our mission and goals, and simultaneously are creating a separate brand and image for our first product that speaks to our intended consumers.
The Kush Groove Shop is the flagship retail location for the Kush Groove brand, founded in 2011. The Kush Groove Shop opened it’s doors in July of 2015, in the Mission Hill neighborhood of Roxbury, MA.
When the Kush Groove brand was first launched in 2011, Boston, Massachusetts wasn’t recognized as a destination for cannabis culture and lifestyle on the scale of other west coast cities who share some of the same demographic profile and cultural connection to cannabis culture as Bostonians. Today, with Boston as the first major east coast city with legalized adult use of recreational cannabis, The Kush Groove Shop, in Mission Hill, Roxbury is Boston’s #1 boutique destination for cannabis accessories, in-store events, parties, Kush Groove apparel and much more.
LabMate is an online platform that rapidly connects biopharmaceutical companies and investment firms with scientists from top-tier research institutions for short-term consulting projects and full-time employment. Built in the heart of the Boston biotech ecosystem, LabMate aims to reinvent how companies & investment firms access and engage scientific talent and expertise. LabMate is working at the intersection of technology and the life sciences with unique branding goals that would be most efficiently reached by leveraging a creative agency.
Our mission is to take the worry out of giving your child a mobile device with a service for parents that keeps track of a child’s online activity and reports dangerous behavior. Our approach is to enable informed conversations, not spying on your child; although we do allow each family to decide what is the right amount of information to collection and where the balance between a child’s privacy and a parent’s right to know lies.
Our MVP is available to early adopters this month. We need the right appeal to parents of children 8-15 (with a focus on moms of preteens) as we begin building a subscriber base. We are excited to work with an agency because both founders are engineers with cybersecurity backgrounds, but lack experience in marketing or consumer-based services. After pouring through marketing and sales books, we realize just how much we don’t know. And we sit near to Zombait at MC, and while it’s a completely different market, it’s one very cool campaign from the brandathon.
I’ve attached an image of a flyer we made that provides more information about our service and our approach–and to illustrate the problem we face. We’ve had very positive reaction to our logo, which we worked with a designer last year on and tested with our target audience. It captures themes of family, safety, and staying in the loop.
We know we can build a great service for parents, but they won’t come unless we have content and messaging that resonates and calls them to action so we can grow our business.
LiquidSky Technologies, inc was formed to design practical solutions to Energy related problems.
We imagine, design ,engineer and construct the WattZilla line of EVSE ( Electric Car Chargers – Think Tesla),
right here in the USA. We have expanded it into a full product line for all market segments.
Our products are the worlds most powerful. We design all our products to be the last one a person ever needs.
Most of our products enclosures are 316 Stainless steel, not plastic.
Whenever a customer receives one of our products, we call and ask the if they feel they received “Good Value for their money ”
Most people laugh and wonder how we do it. And then they tell their friends and they come and buy them too.
Our mission is to hasten the creation of infrastructure of high power charging stations at a reasonable cost so that the Electric Vehicle revolution can occur as soon as possible and help us with Global warming and smog reduction.
While we have relied on Adwords and social media to some extent, we are ready for the next level.
Our products are literally bulletproof.
We imagine, design ,engineer and construct the WattZilla line of EVSE ( Electric Car Chargers – Think Tesla),
right here in the USA. We have expanded it into a full product line for all market segments.
Our products are the worlds most powerful. We design all our products to be the last one a person ever needs.
Most of our products enclosures are 316 Stainless steel, not plastic.
Whenever a customer receives one of our products, we call and ask the if they feel they received “Good Value for their money ”
Most people laugh and wonder how we do it. And then they tell their friends and they come and buy them too.
Our mission is to hasten the creation of infrastructure of high power charging stations at a reasonable cost so that the Electric Vehicle revolution can occur as soon as possible and help us with Global warming and smog reduction.
While we have relied on Adwords and social media to some extent, we are ready for the next level.
Our products are literally bulletproof.
MarketMuse lets content marketers measure and improve the quality of their content.
Powered by machine learning, our software shows exactly how to write to cover a topic comprehensively.
Our platform also develops data-driven content strategies, by identifying topical gaps and low-quality content across your entire site.
We have 75 customers ($1Mn ARR), including CBS Interactive, BigCommerce, Sears and others.
Minus the Moo, a Boston-based, female-run startup, is expanding across New England with their first-ever premium lactose-free ice cream, still made from milk and cream. For years, lactose intolerant ice cream lovers have been relegated to eating “frozen desserts” made from plant-based milk alternatives, or eating lactose free options that compromised on taste and texture. Now, co-founders and former college roommates Katy Flannery and Gwen Burlingame are changing the game and making real ice cream a possibility for lactose intolerant foodies again.
Nearly two-thirds of the population is lactose intolerant to varying degrees, because they are unable to produce the enzyme lactase, which breaks down lactose into digestible sugars. Minus the Moo adds the lactase enzyme to their custom recipe to make real ice cream that is lactose-free. Lactose intolerant Flannery, who was a registered nurse from Boston Children’s Hospital and graduate of the famous Penn State Ice Cream Course, developed the idea out of her own need. She was tired of non-dairy substitutes that didn’t taste like the real thing.
Minus the Moo creates deliciously creamy ice creams from back-to-basics ingredients like cream, milk, eggs and cane sugar. They source rBST-free dairy from a 100% farmer-owned co-op and with five flavors – Sea Salt Chocolate Chip, Vanilla, Chocolate, Mint Chip and Espresso. Minus the Moo is now available in retailers across New England and customers can order pints straight to your door from Amazon Fresh or www.minusthemoo.com.
Our goal is to take Minus the Moo to the New York Metro and Mid-Atlantic regions next year, as well as increase Minus the Moo’s online presence on both www.minusthemoo.com and other online grocery channels. An agency could help clarify our message to communicate our unique selling proposition and efficiently target the lactose intolerant consumer.
Methane leaks are a major contributor to climate change and MultiSensor Scientific’s mission is to make gas leak imaging and leak repair ubiquitous, affordable and accessible to a wide range of customers. MultiSensor develops machine vision algorithms and camera systems that enable customers in oil & gas from the wellhead to municipal utilities as well as petrochemical and many other industries to visualize gas and oil leaks with easy to interpret color contrast images at an industry leading price point (see attached pictures). Moreover, MultiSensor’s camera systems have the unique ability to quantify leak rates which allows customers to prioritize leak repair efforts on environmentally damaging and safety critical leaks. Our systems provide automation of manual tasks, lower cost of ownership, improved leak detection performance and automated reporting for both the leak inspection and gas safety markets. The management team combines decades of technical experience in infrared imaging, spectral sensing and pattern recognition with decades of blue-chip and startup business experience.
As we are preparing for the launch of our first product in 2018 we are looking to work with an agency with the following objectives:
– Revamp company branding as well as look and feel of the website and social media presence to focus on selling to our industrial customers: gas distribution utilities, oil / gas fracking companies, oil majors, refineries, gas plants and LNG plants.
– Develop messaging that clearly communicates the benefit of our product to the target audience: reliable, easy to use (unlike competition that requires months of special training), easy to interpret color contrast images (not greyscale like the competition), cost effective / faster detection / reduces overall process cost of detecting leaks / fast payback, reduces error rates / improves consistency, only available imaging solution for underground pipelines, only available solution that can calculate the size of a leak (“leak rate”) and allow repair prioritization, camera enables faster leak repair (in addition to detection / inspection), camera can identify gas type in addition to identifying a leak
– Company name: eliminate the “Scientific” as it does not appeal to industrial buyers, we are also open to proposals to change the company name altogether to something that communicates the product benefits. At the same time a name for the to-be-launched product is to be chosen, which ideally should be the same as the company name to maximize marketing payback.
Company Background: MultiSensor has working product prototypes and paying industrial customers. We just won a major grant award that will accelerate our product commercialization (see page 5 on http://eralberta.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ERA-Methane-Challenge-Backgrounder-July-11-2017.pdf). The company is actively hiring software and hardware engineers.
Mylestone uses AI and actual writers to translate any set of photographs into stories – for those with large photo libraries, this is an amazing way to generate your story, worth passing on to family and future generations. We initially launched as a death-services and memorialization product, but have evolved into legacy preservation – and our brand doesn’t quite have the feeling and vibe of that company. We’d love some help communicating the tone and emotion that would attract family historians and genealogists to submit their photo libraries to active their family stories!
The Mystic River Watershed Association (MyRWA) works to improve the lives of the more than half million residents of Mystic River communities through its efforts to protect and restore water quality, natural habitat and open space throughout the 76 square mile watershed. We strive to have “A” grade water quality in our rivers and streams that support abundant fish and wildlife habitat and safe opportunities for boating and swimming. We envision world-class parks and a robust path network along the Mystic River that allow pedestrians and bicyclists to move easily and safely along the waterfront from Chelsea and East Boston all the way up to Winchester as part of our new Mystic Greenways initiative. Although our work began in 1972, we do feel we are in an exciting startup mode. Recently we launched new initiatives including the Mystic Greenways and Herring Video Project, and we have a new Executive Director, Patrick Herron who began in this role in 2016. We also recognize we’re operating in a new environmental political climate. This is a moment of growth and transition for us with new projects and a new reputation. With our new underwater video camera, students helped document the river herring migration – which is estimated at 660,000 herring this spring, our science has received national attention, and the river recently received and “A-“ water quality grade from the US EPA. Just ten years ago we had 1.5 full time staff. Now our professional staff of six engages more than 1,200 volunteers annually. We are at an exciting phase of work and are ready for the next level. This is why now is the time to revamp our brand and why we need an agency’s help. It’s vital to expand awareness of our work throughout our 22 diverse and urban communities, to better position ourselves on social and digital platforms, and to appeal to a younger millennial audience – for both our financial sustainability /fundraising success and to engage communities in the beauty and value of a clean Mystic River and watershed. Our current logo is nearly 10 years old, awkward and dated, and it does not appeal to our target audience. We are discussing options for a new, stronger tagline to work in conjunction with a new logo. Our brand presence is inconsistent and patch work. We are lucky some volunteer designers have produced fun fliers for us, but nothing relates back to our old dated logo. We have limited professionally designed branded materials or templates. Our days of a part-time Executive Director and one staff member are over, and our hard work over many years has paid off. Now we have an “A-“ water quality grade, we’ve seen tremendous success in managing invasive plants, and a new greenway along the Malden River is becoming a reality. We would greatly benefit from a modern “A+” brand identity that better reflects our important mission, vision, staff and the diverse communities and unique urban river we serve and represent.
nDash is a content creation platform driven by ideas. We help brands build teams of writers based on specific requirements, generate unique content topics, and manage the entire content creation process—from pitch to payment. Unlike other freelancing platforms, nDash seeks to reward the most qualified and creative writers (not the cheapest) by giving them the ability to earn business by pitching content ideas. To date, more than 65% of all completed assignments have been the result of a writer pitching a topic, making nDash a literal marketplace of ideas.
We are a 2.5-person company, with one of those people being our CTO. This has resulted in marketing taking a backseat while we gain our footing. The framework is in place, but the messaging, along with the look&feel, is sorely lacking. The opportunity to work with a leading agency would do wonders for our brand and business. I appreciate the consideration.
We are a civic tech startup that targets the two big challenges of housing affordability and aging-in-place. Our digital community pairs older householders who have spare space with young people willing to exchange help around the house for cheaper rent. Our web platform offers friendly user profiles, secure vetting, guided communication interfaces, customized contracts, ongoing relationship management tools, and much more to enable homeowners and renters to easily connect and agree to a personalized arrangement. We are speeding towards our official launch date of September 1st in partnership with the City of Boston, and we need our branding to be compelling and on-point.
Our team originally came together at MIT around devising creative solutions to the housing affordability crisis, and quickly hit upon this idea of combining tasking platforms (e.g. TaskRabbit, Handy) and house sharing tools (e.g. Airbnb, HomeAway) to open up unused housing stock. Since then, we have transitioned from an academic project to a fully incorporated company that’s been featured in The Atlantic, Forbes, Inside Higher Ed, and others. We’ve graduated school, the venture has graduated to a new stage, and now our branding needs to graduate as well. To date, we have received hundreds of messages from people across the U.S. and the world more broadly asking us to bring our model to their cities and towns, and we are primed to scale rapidly. At our core, we are dedicated to doing well by doing good, and making our current housing options work better for people at all life stages, from young renters to older homeowners.
We are starting off by pairing graduate students with local empty-nesters and older householders, but we ultimately see task exchange for housing, and homesharing more generally, as a flexible solution that can meet the needs of a wide range of people. Accordingly, we are in the market for a full-scale overhaul from a name change, to a logo redesign, and tagline refresh. The team has been working around the clock to onboard our first users and wrap up the platform development, so we haven’t been able to give our brand the time it deserves. We are hopeful that through the Brandathon, we can better align our public face with our mission and vision, and ensure that we can connect as many people as possible to housing opportunities that can improve their lives.
A photo feed says a thousand words- what do your social media photos say about you? Netra is revealing insights hidden in plain sight, providing brands and agencies with consumer insights that no one has been able to capture, until now.
Through image analysis, we are pioneering the evolution of brand marketing and consumer segmentation. Imagine if you could automatically pick out photos where someone is drinking, eating, wearing, or using your brand or product. Imagine if you could skim through Instagram profiles at scale to identify Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts aficionados, dog or cat lovers, a mountain climber or a beach bum. Our tech can do that. We’re redefining the future of social listening, moving beyond text captions, hashtags, and profile data to tap into deeper consumer insights derived from image recognition.
Visual listening is the next frontier. We’re empowering brands with new customer insights to revolutionize the way they engage with consumers. Going beyond text-based social listening, Netra analyzes audience photos to gain insight into what other brands they love, how they spend a Saturday morning, and who they value in their lives.
We have the core tech and we have a visual listening dashboard. Now we need an agency’s help branding and positioning our platform and our consumer insight reports. Our goal is to innovate an indispensable next step in social listening for brands and agencies- so who better to have a say in our branding than a creative, forward-thinking agency?
nohmii™ handcrafts mountain inspired clothing that transitions easily to every day living wear.
nohmii™was born in the mountains and became the founders everyday living wear. Transitioning from the mountains, to the yoga studio, sport fields, to work then dinner becoming every day apres.
Using technical materials that is hancrafted with quality and care made in the USA.
nohmii™ is built on the very simple idea that when you feel good about what you are wearing …you ultimately are going to look good.
You can’t help but carry that energy with you
nohmii™ is taking your every day activewear to become your everyday living wear through craftsmanship, fit and function
nohmii is dedicated to creating sustainable products. All nohmii products are constructed in the USA, providing jobs for the local economy, partnering with local creators and makers. nohmii will always seek to utilize sustainable processes to include recyclability and reusability. % of all sales will go to support women and the outdoors.
Why we could use an agency’s help? It been a year since nohmii’s launch…and it is now time for clear messaging and a company logo. 2017/18 is a growth year and nohmii could use clear messaging for it’s tribe as we continue to grow. Sharing the love.
nohmii™was born in the mountains and became the founders everyday living wear. Transitioning from the mountains, to the yoga studio, sport fields, to work then dinner becoming every day apres.
Using technical materials that is hancrafted with quality and care made in the USA.
nohmii™ is built on the very simple idea that when you feel good about what you are wearing …you ultimately are going to look good.
You can’t help but carry that energy with you
nohmii™ is taking your every day activewear to become your everyday living wear through craftsmanship, fit and function
nohmii is dedicated to creating sustainable products. All nohmii products are constructed in the USA, providing jobs for the local economy, partnering with local creators and makers. nohmii will always seek to utilize sustainable processes to include recyclability and reusability. % of all sales will go to support women and the outdoors.
Why we could use an agency’s help? It been a year since nohmii’s launch…and it is now time for clear messaging and a company logo. 2017/18 is a growth year and nohmii could use clear messaging for it’s tribe as we continue to grow. Sharing the love.
Nomsly packs and delivers healthy lunches for kids, ordered online via subscription and delivered weekly. It’s been described as a healthy version of Lunchables , and we’re working to simplify parents’ lives while helping them feed their kids nutritious, tasty food.
Nomsly was founded by Chris Buck and Andrew Macaulay after they were commiserating over the challenges of healthy eating. Chris has two preschool-age daughters and he and his wife were all too often scrambling at the last minute and sending mediocre and unhealthy food because it was easy. After a childhood of poor eating choices, Andrew himself weighed nearly 300 pounds in college before realizing that his health was in danger and losing 120 pounds.
Realizing they could make a difference in the lives of parents and help kids build healthy eating habits that would impact the rest of their lives, Chris and Andrew founded Nomsly in late 2016. We help busy parents provide healthy, fun, and convenient lunches for their kids, get kids off to a healthy start in life by building habits early, and help solve the childhood obesity crisis.
We think we have a strong start to our brand, which is intended to be fun, healthy, and exciting for kids. Our customers love our imagery and our fun fruit and vegetable characters, but we are looking for the assistance of a professional agency to help expand the character ecosystem and really develop the brand into a stronger asset.
nQ Medical, The new standard for neuro technology, is a powerful, machine learning SaaS, supporting the continuum of neurology care. nQ Medical provides a path to improve efficacy and outcomes of pharmacology. Using just background data on how you interact with devices you already own, we use machine learning to build a computational biomarker, which can be used to detect early symptoms or Parkinsons, Alzheimers and other neurological disorders.
Our goal is to prevent any unnecessary suffering due to undiagnosed diseases. Our technology is fit for providing the masses access to their mental health. Maturing from the world of academia to real-world solutions, we need help packaging our solution for the general public.
NU-RISE helps doctors providing accurate cancer treatment.
We are a 2017 MassChallenge finalist. With the pitch competition starting in late August, we want to stand-out. And Brandathon is the way to go.
Our technology, a medical device that monitors in real-time the radiation levels, ensures proper radiation levels in breast and prostate cancer treatment. With NU-RISE technology, the Doctor can target the cancer, but avoid the healthy organs. Better, faster and safer – it’s an evolution for cancer treatment.
We are a 2017 MassChallenge finalist. With the pitch competition starting in late August, we want to stand-out. And Brandathon is the way to go.
Our technology, a medical device that monitors in real-time the radiation levels, ensures proper radiation levels in breast and prostate cancer treatment. With NU-RISE technology, the Doctor can target the cancer, but avoid the healthy organs. Better, faster and safer – it’s an evolution for cancer treatment.
NU-RISE technology is undergoing clinical studies. Currently, our focus is the international medical device certification, internationalization (European, US and Asian markets) and funding.
We are a team of physics engineers with many years of experience in the development of radiation detectors, although, no experience in marketing or branding.
Nutrimedy is a telenutrition platform that uniquely matches patients with chronic disease to an ideal Registered Dietitian (RD). It enables the delivery of convenient, expert, and personalized nutritional counseling across a range of conditions while providing unparalleled telenutrition support to reinforce healthy lifestyles. Our mission is to ensure that the 130 million Americans who have a chronic disease related to diet can find the help they need and that our platform, with the support of a Registered Dietitian, can help them change their behavior to management that disease.
We need an agency’s help as we are a young startup (team of 3) focused on building our new product, clinical studies, partnerships, and investments. However, reaching the right partners and users will require a level of marketing and strategic expertise that we do not currently have internally. We believe that we can truly help people with our product. Boston Children’s Hospital and the MassChallenge, who have accepted us into their accelerators, believe in our product as well. However, to truly reach those in need, we need the support of marketing and branding experts.
Oat Shop is Boston’s first oatmeal cafe. We opened our first brick and mortar shop in Davis Square, Somerville in January 2017. Prior to that we operated a two month pop up shop and participated in events.
Our goal is to provide unique, healthful and customizable options for breakfast and lunch to the Somerville community and local offices. We specialize in high-end coffee and tea and customized oatmeal products, alongside healthy grab-and-go snacks. Our main product is hot oatmeal bowls. Customer can choose from signature bowl options or build their own oatmeal bowl with creative add-ons and mix-ins. We also serve overnight oats, chia pudding, baked goods and smoothies, all made in house!
We pride ourselves on accommodating many dietary restrictions such as gluten free, dairy free and vegan. Oat Shop puts an emphasis on environmental sustainability with 100% compostable packaging and waste reduction practices. We aim to source products responsibly and of the absolute highest quality. We believe in transparency both to employees and to customers.
One of our company goals is to help rebrand oatmeal from a boring breakfast food to an exciting, healthy option that can be enjoyed many ways throughout the day. Working with an agency would be a great opportunity for us. We have no outside investors and often don’t have as much time as we would like to focus on building a strong and cohesive brand. We believe an agency could help us get to the next level and expand our reach. Oat Shop has goals for future expansion and we need a brand presence to help us get there.
OnHand, is a consumer products company that sells tech accessories to students. To date we’ve found our success by finding a niche in the collegiate retail market where we’ve been able to help stores on college campuses sell more tech to their students. It’s our goal to become the #1 brand of tech accessories in the collegiate market, but to date our focus has been fully on our B2B business signing up new retailers. This wholesale focus has left our consumer brand underdeveloped without a distinct brand voice that connects to the students that buy our products.
Recent studies suggest that 65% of today’s consumers think that the world would be a better place if we owned fewer things and shared them more. This departure from traditional consumer behavior has given way to an economic phenomenon known as the sharing economy. Unfortunately, consumers often suffer from app fatigue as a new app emerges for each company that provides access to a shareable “thing” – from bikes, to cars, to portable smartphone chargers. At the same time, at least 40% of product manufacturers are developing aftermarket services as a complementary revenue stream to their retail business. Some manufacturers have found incremental revenue by building the technology into their products to make them shareable. As a result, each manufacturer must invest in both the hardware and software that allows consumers to locate a shareable thing, use it temporarily and return it when done. Oomf satisfies the problems of consumers and manufacturers alike. For consumers, Oomf is the only app they need to locate and access a shareable “thing.” For manufacturers, Oomf is a ready-made cloud platform and mobile app that unlocks incremental revenue streams while minimizing the software-centric investment and expertise required to make a “thing” shareable. Oomf’s first shareable product integrations were portable batteries – one for a smartphone and one for a laptop. Since launching the Oomf-enabled battery sharing service, we have charged over 125,000 smartphones from a crowd of 20,000 collaborative consumers. In Q2 2017, we partnered with additional product manufacturers in the power, furniture, smart lock and hospitality spaces to extend the capabilities of the Oomf platform beyond portable batteries. Over the past two years, Oomf has pivoted a number of times and only recently has found its true identity. As a result, the world around us has a very fragmented perception of who and what Oomf actually is. We need a brand audit and makeover. We’d love to work with an agency who can take a holistic look at Oomf in order to help us to refine our brand message throughout our marketing, sales and fundraising efforts.
Veteran-founded and led, Operation Code is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charity. Our mission is to empower the transitioning military community to learn software development, enter the tech industry, and code the future! Our goal is to be the leading veteran’s social impact tech organization, establishing connections between the military community and the civilian sector for software development opportunities.
We serve past and present Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, and Coast Guard service members, disabled veterans, and military spouses, who are welcome to apply to any of our programs. Through our online community, we work with 3000+ members around the world.
Our goals are to:
* Develop our tech infrastructure to become a central hub of interaction for the military software development community.
* Expand the size and knowledge base of the Operation Code community by focusing on military installations and transition programs.
* Increase awareness of software development opportunities within the military community.
* Strengthen the relationship between the military community and tech industry.
Turns out that we can prevent cancers with vaccines, specifically those in both genders (cervical, anogenital, head and neck cancers) caused by the human papillomavirus (HPV). Despite spending >US$2B/yr on HPV vaccines, current offerings do not provide complete HPV-cancer prevention so women have to undergo regular screening while men have no program to detect HPV cancers. Our HPV vaccine, RGVax, developed by part of the team behind the existing HPV vaccines, is the only solution that prevents infection of all 15 cancer-causing HPVs and we have received validation in the form of a National Cancer Institute grant that gets RGVax in human trials in 2019. Not only that, current vaccines suffer from poor uptake due to a STD stigma since they only target the sexually transmitted types, whereas RGVax also targets skin HPVs responsible for skin warts and cancers. We need help in crafting a marketing campaign that highlights not only our complete HPV cancer prevention, but also its ability to sidestep the STD stigma, in order to generate more interest to support our work in bringing RGVax into the clinic and eradicating all HPV disease for future generations.
Pepperlane empowers mothers to launch and build businesses on their own time and terms and discover opportunities by sharing skills. We believe that mothers offer unique services of great value, and are committed to building an economy that’s more supportive of them. We do this by providing an easy website creator so they don’t have to get hung up on details that aren’t necessary or helpful, and we immediately connect them with a community of like-minded business owners and customers that are committed to supporting mothers. We were founded by three mothers and startup veterans: Sharon Kan, Jess Petersen, and Margaret McKenna.
Why We Need an Agency’s help
We’ve already done a rebrand earlier this year to develop a new logo and color palette that is reflective of our warm, professional, and clean aesthetic, but we need an agency’s help to further develop our copy, voice, and brand positioning. We want to be seen as credible and authoritative, but also inviting and friendly to those who don’t quite see themselves as entrepreneurs. We also believe there’s an opportunity to be more clever and fun with how we talk to our customers, and we’d love an agency’s help in figuring out how to strike this balance.
PetsEmpower.org is a nonprofit umbrella organization increasing access to short-term pet fostering for domestic violence survivors in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. While only three percent of domestic violence shelters in the United States accommodate for pets, studies have shown that “nearly half of the domestic abuse victims who stay in violent households do so because they are afraid for their animals” (Animal Legal Defense Fund).
In order to create more accessibility to the services and awareness for the need in America, PetsEmpower.org will connect with corporate and individual donors to scale underdeveloped and underrepresented fostering agencies starting in MA and later nationally. To date we have fostered 15 pets through Safe People Safe Pets of Massachusetts and have begun building relationships with the MSPCA, local veterinary offices with extra space, and over 75 individuals looking to foster or volunteer for our organization. We also hosted our first event on May 12, 2017, which was a Pet Fashion Show Fundraiser with over 80 attendees and 216,000 viewers online.
Our goal is to help foster 100 pets in 2017 and increase funding and brand recognition during the 2017 MassChallenge Accelerator Program. As a nonprofit, our marketing budget is minimal until we receive funding but we need professionally-made marketing collateral and branding style guides. Our social media presence is growing rapidly and PetsEmpower.org needs the expertise of an agency to make sure our audience can immediately distinguish our postings. In addition, our website needs revamping and a font and color pattern basis developed by an agency would create a foundation for the reworking. We have proven growth as a startup, over 40 media placements including Boston Metro, Huff Post, NBC 10 Providence, RI Monthly, The Rainbow Times, Cornell Dyson blog, SEGreenhouse Blog, The Marblehead Reporter, Lynn Item, and Cat Country 98.1 already. An agency can help us to expand further into both the pets and people market.
At Phiar, we combine our cutting-edge breakthroughs in deep learning artificial intelligence and augmented reality into a new form of vehicle navigation platform, to enhance driving safety, facilitate more intuitive wayfinding, and connect drivers with their surrounding environments. As an early stage startup with the latest technologies in AI and AR, we lack branding and marketing expertise. However, Brandathon seems to be the perfect help that we need to take care of that department!
PROPS ATHLETICS INC is company focused on creating revolutionary, performance enhancing products that are all about FITNESS, FASHION & FUNCTION.
PROPS are designed to encourage and empower people to get out and sweat in any environment- from the gym, in the class, to the streets. PROPS launched with a sleek, stylish, comfortable and functional workout glove that transcends and enhances all workouts (from yoga, Barre, Pilates, spin, TRX, bootcamps, rowing, weight training, ropes, Lagree, Cross-Fit, interval training, and tennis, among others).
Our brand is all about making sweat sexy and encouraging people to be active. PROPS has grown from a single concept and is now recognized as an emerging fitness brand. To date, everything we have done has been grassroots and in house. We continue to evolve the PROPS brand by aligning ourselves with fitness influencers and top gyms and studios that already embody the PROPS active lifestyle. The reactions and feedback we have gotten from fitness influences and celebrities has been incredible, we have had amazing press, and coverage. We are also going to be featured on TV in October (think Shark Tank). But now it’s time for PROPS to take it to another level and our goal is to get PROPS out and literally onto the “hands” of everyone! This year our focus is on building out our online presence. We know that with proper and creative branding the opportunities are endless! Having this chance to work with these incredible agencies would be instrumental to the growth and success of PROPS. We appreciate your consideration and look forward to continuing to disrupt the fitness industry with you! Props to you!
PROPS are designed to encourage and empower people to get out and sweat in any environment- from the gym, in the class, to the streets. PROPS launched with a sleek, stylish, comfortable and functional workout glove that transcends and enhances all workouts (from yoga, Barre, Pilates, spin, TRX, bootcamps, rowing, weight training, ropes, Lagree, Cross-Fit, interval training, and tennis, among others).
Our brand is all about making sweat sexy and encouraging people to be active. PROPS has grown from a single concept and is now recognized as an emerging fitness brand. To date, everything we have done has been grassroots and in house. We continue to evolve the PROPS brand by aligning ourselves with fitness influencers and top gyms and studios that already embody the PROPS active lifestyle. The reactions and feedback we have gotten from fitness influences and celebrities has been incredible, we have had amazing press, and coverage. We are also going to be featured on TV in October (think Shark Tank). But now it’s time for PROPS to take it to another level and our goal is to get PROPS out and literally onto the “hands” of everyone! This year our focus is on building out our online presence. We know that with proper and creative branding the opportunities are endless! Having this chance to work with these incredible agencies would be instrumental to the growth and success of PROPS. We appreciate your consideration and look forward to continuing to disrupt the fitness industry with you! Props to you!
We decided to pursue Project 99, because we have experienced the problem we are trying to solve first-hand. In the summer of 2016, Yulkendy was heartbroken upon hearing news of the killing of Alton Sterling but did not feel comfortable discussing it at her internship. Josuel, raised by a single mother while his father was in jail, was forced to endure alienating discourses at the office particularly during the presidential campaign.
Though we are both first generation college students and the salaries of full time offers would be immediate help to our families, we felt the urge of a different calling; to create spaces where we can explore who we are as a whole instead of feeling isolated by an identity category, where we feel like an asset and not a quota. Being a person of color in a non-diverse work environment is challenging, providing a safe space for dialogue and solidarity that was not readily available to us has become our lives. We have an unyielding passion to move the needle in the diversity and inclusion space in corporate America.
That said, despite our passion and early success (company has secured 6 clients including SAP), our biggest challenge by far has been the weak branding of our company (confirmed through the constant confusion of what we do). It would be disheartening if the barrier of weak positioning keeps us from growing. Our ability to market our services and our overall brand messaging simply has not been to par and people have noticed.
We came up with the name of our company and logo in the matter of seconds after an aha moment that both co-founders had while attending a social impact conference. Although Project 99 would forever be with us, we are ready for a brand re-vamp, and we are willing to do whatever takes as long as we are able to create impact in the lives of underrepresented corporate professionals.
David Chang, our Babson Summer Venture Accelerator advisor recommended us to apply for the Brandathon. We are very excited for the potential of our work together and this opportunity comes at a perfect time for us, as we are ready for an exciting brand revamp.
Pyggly is a gamified savings app that empowers users to achieve their goals. No budgets needed. Just concentrate in actions under your control and Pyggly does the rest: take the bus, not a taxi; bring a brown bag to work, no expensive restaurants. Pyggly can check your expenses and save the money for you without complicated spreadsheets. You can share a goal with your wife, compete with a friend, or get incentives from your parents. Personal Financial Management solutions are too complicated and not actionable; Millennials don’t think about financial products before a conspicuous buy. They want the trip to Europe or the new phone, not the credit line nor the savings. Common solutions for planned purchases are (a) not buying; (b) a credit card balance. We just want to empower people to achieve their goals in an effective way. We need help to stand out in the midst of several other so called “savings” or “investments” app. Most of them are just bad products or deliberatly mislead and take advantage of their users. PYGGLY was build with and by real users, so we are confident our solution is the best one for our target (happy to talk about personas, stats, customers profiles, etc).
IoT is coming to many consumer durables, providing a direct and beneficial link between consumers and manufacturers – consumers have relevant, up-to-date information about their product, and manufacturers can learn who bought their product, what they bought, and how they’re using it. But for most consumer durables, IoT doesn’t provide sufficient benefit to justify the effort to connect – do you really want/need a connected coffee maker? Lawnmower? Car Seat? and specific apps that go with them?
RacerX’s Snap4That app. helps consumer durable companies learn who bought their product, what they bought, and helps those customers get the most from their purchase by bringing connected benefits to unconnected products – all from a single app. By simply scanning a barcode included with the product, the consumer gets relevant, up-to-date product specific information such as owners guides, product manuals, how-to-videos, replacement parts and more at their fingertips. No more searching for the documentation you may have thrown away, or stopping what you’re doing and trying to find the model number so you can do an internet search for the info.
We need an agency’s help to hone our product messaging and create awareness for this service. Our website in particular needs to tell a better story and not be so “powerpoint-ish”. Currently product manufacturers are not seeking alternatives to the plastic bag filled with literature (the “Lit Kit”), so when we get their attention, we need them to feel compelled to speak to us.
Reimagine Play is a Boston-based fitness company founded in 2015 that provides obstacle training activities and experiences for children and families. We currently offer pop-up fitness classes for kids that incorporate physical fitness with character building activities. Our mission is to inspire the next fit generation. Reimagine Play is preparing to open its first facility in the Fall 2017 to spur its next phase of growth into the broader adult and family fitness market.
Reimagine Play will open the first state-of-the-art obstacle training park in greater Boston that offers ninja warrior-inspired obstacles and activities with varying levels of difficulty, climbing walls, a parkour/gymnastics area, body-weight training, fitness classes and event space (for birthday parties and corporate team building). This obstacle training park will provide a unique fitness experience and event space for all ages and fitness levels, including youth athletes to adult weekend warriors and elite obstacle racers.
Given the opening of a facility and the shift to a broader adult and family market, we need to rebrand Reimagine Play which is kid focused. We need an agency’s branding expertise to help us launch a new brand and marketing and sales campaign for the new space. Since we are a small start-up with limited resources and our brick-and-mortar launch will consume most of our time, an expert is much needed. A rebranding that appeals to adults and families, and conveys the benefits and excitement of obstacle training as an alternative way to get fit will position our new home for success.
Rustic Marlin has put a new twist on a product that is as old as mankind itself, the wooden sign. After making a few signs as gifts for their wedding, founders Brian and Melanie O’Neil quickly realized that they had stumbled upon a décor need within the marketplace.
With consumers motivated to buy products handcrafted in the USA more than ever, Rustic Marlin has proven the mentality that the most meaningful gifts are thoughtful and handmade, but not everybody has the time, desire or capabilities to achieve this on their own. Rustic Marlin provides consumers the unique opportunity to partake in their own design by allowing them to outline their vision and in turn creating pieces that are special to them. By allowing a customer to personalize our products based on their own interests or for a special occasion, Rustic Marlin is evoking an emotion that transforms its product from a physical piece to a meaningful memory. Due to the quality of its products and the user experience, consumers are consistently returning and spreading the word about Rustic Marlin.
Although the overall wooden décor market is competitive, Rustic Marlin has quickly become a favorite by offering a unique formula composed of limitless customization options, rustic handcrafting styling, high quality and affordable prices. Most recently, Rustic Marlin has secured sports licenses with both the NFL and NHL and are now bringing their innovative pieces to all aspects of a fan’s life. Both leagues (and now subsequently the NBA and MLB) were intrigued by how they were offering premium items for a fan to use anywhere in the house, particularly outside of a basement or man cave as is traditional with their other mass-produced items.
Rustic Marlin is developing into a true New England innovative economic force. With classic Yankee ingenuity, it has taken the ubiquitous wooden sign and made it a staple of modern home décor as well as the souvenir of choice at professional sporting events while creating measurable economic impact throughout New England.
What started a few years ago as a fun little project has grown into a team of hard-working and talented American craftsman, designers and artists who remain true to our vision of exceeding customer expectations with our designs and quality. Our backend staff has also grown with a team of individuals all wearing many hats. With our rapid growth, we are often in the just get it done for now and we can revisit it later mindset when it comes to our branding… which we know is not the best.
As we look to the future, we would love the opportunity to partner with an agency to ensure that as we continue to grow we are cohesive in our branding and marketing voice and presence.
Savvy’s Fantasy Fashion App is the first true gaming app for women! Think Fantasy Football, but completely targeted to women’s interests (although men are always welcome!). Fantasy Sports is a billion dollar+ industry but not one name brand app, or company, is geared towards females. We know that this is a game-changing app, and with some potential help from an agency in our launch campaign we think we will be well on our way to transforming the space. We’ve found developers, legal counsel, game designers, and many other resources on our own, without a lot of guidance or funding. We’ve also received seed funding interest.
Essentially our company aims to help level the playing field for women by giving them the tools to compete in real-time, results driven games for fashionable prizes. Games include reality TV, sports, politics, and awards shows. We have created a proprietary way of gamifying practically anything. If you’re more of a Game of Thrones viewer than the Bachelorette, we can create a game for you. An example of a Draft game based on Real Housewives of NYC would be: draft 3 housewives who you believe will engage in certain actions such as drinking martinis, going on a weekend getaway, or getting in a tiff with her husband. Another type of game, Quick Picks, lets users wager currency on the likelihood of events happening. So a political game might be: The President will Tweet 10 times in the middle of the night (low risk question), Putin will appear on horseback on TV (high risk). Our app is comprised of very fabulous, fashionable themes. When you make your selections on the App, you put your picks in handbags. The currency is called Heels (heel-shaped of course). We’re empowering women to own the fact that they are as competitive, savvy, and successful as their male counterparts.
You can currently find our app in the iOS store under Fantasy Fashion App and we will soon roll out exciting pilot games.
We are looking to an agency to help us strategize on an exciting launch campaign to drive downloads of the app. We have been brainstorming on that Big Idea that will lead people to our app whether it’s an incentivized promotion. We could likely use some website and other overall rebranding to position us as that only gaming app out there for women upon our official launch.
I came to the U.S, from Vietnam, when I was 10 years old. My mom worked really hard to get me through high school. But when I was accepted into Northeastern University, I found out that it cost $60,000 a year to go. There was no way that I could pay for this. So I did what I could. With English being my second language, I wrote over 120 essays to apply for over 40 scholarships. Fortunately, I was awarded $500,000 worth of scholarships. From my experience, I understand the pain point that students have to go through and that’s why I started ScholarJet.
ScholarJet is the future of scholarships. We are changing the way students finance their education and the way that donors give through action-based scholarships.
Action-based scholarships enable students to show their true potential and donors to make a real difference towards what they believe in, through challenges related to STEM, creativity, community service, and health. With ScholarJet’s platform and action-based scholarships, universities will engage more alumni and increase participation rates, while increasing scholarship opportunities for their students. Corporations and non-profits can create a higher visible impact than ever before.
With action-based scholarships, instead of writing essays, students can run marathons, paint paintings or even develop apps for their scholarships. These are the type of enriching challenges that promote learning and experience.
Our vision is to have students as early as their freshman year in high school to start raising money for their education by gaining enriching experiences.
At this point, we have a web platform that is fully functioning. We’re reaching out to universities, corporations, and non-profits, but we believe we’re only displaying a fraction of the message that we really want to convey. There’s a lot of room for improvement, especially on our landing page. When potential clients search us up and see our website today, we want them to immediately understand what we do, who we are, and most importantly, how we can help.
We need the agency’s help because we are challenged when it comes to portraying our public benefit corporation startup brand. With limited resources and multiple audiences, it is hard for us to target our messages correctly. Therefore it is also an interesting challenge to see how participating branding agencies can work with an intricate social impact startup like us, especially when we are driving donor behavioral change. The non-profit and philanthropic sectors already have a hard time engaging donors, so how will well-known branding agencies make action-based scholarships a thing of the future?
She Geeks Out is a certified B-corp, focused on fostering diversity and inclusion through events, networking and education. Our mission is to create an inclusive culture that values and upholds diversity. On our community side, we hold events for women in Boston and New York, connecting passionate individuals from all walks of life on both a personal as well as professional level. The goals of our community events are to educate, help our women get hired, and provide opportunities for them to make meaningful connections. On the corporate side, we offer corporate diversity and inclusion training to companies ranging from small startups to large Fortune 500 companies. We provide the guidance necessary to help companies recruit and retain diverse candidates, and develop in-house talents and skills in order to enact organizational transformations.
We need assistance from an agency because as a 2-person startup, we don’t have access to a great deal of resources, particularly when it comes to advertising and branding. We have established a fairly well-known presence in Boston with our community events. However, we are newer to the diversity and inclusion space, and are still trying to establish ourselves in this arena. A particular challenge for us has been trying to figure out how to best differentiate the community work from the corporate work, especially given that our company name is very feminized, but the diversity training that we offer touches on diversity across the board and not just gender diversity.
Sheprd is the modern School Bus for modern families; making transportation safer, more efficient, more enjoyable, and more convenient to get K-12 students where they need to be. Enabled by smart technology, Sheprd’s mobile app allows parents to easily schedule one-time or recurring rides for their children. Sheprd’s fleet is composed of fully-licensed and insured Land Rover SUVs equipped with school-pupil-transit compliant yellow “School Bus” signs. These vehicles are driven by dedicated Sheprd employees who have gone through extensive background checks (local and national), Sheprd driving tests, pediatric first-aid certification, and 7D School Pupil Transport Certification by the Massachusetts Department of Transportation.
About Us: Founded in January of 2017 and based in Boston, MA Ski Bungalow is a trusted ski community and marketplace for people to list, discover, and book unique winter accommodations around the world.
Create Millions of Memories: Whether a condo for a night, a castle for a week, or a villa for a month, Ski Bungalow aims to connect avid outdoor enthusiast with unique ski destinations, at any price point, in more than 90 resort towns.
Leave the Booking Fees Behind: Ski Bungalow is the simplest way for people to book their ski house with NO worries and NO fees. Our portfolio of homes come in all shapes and sizes, from rustic ski lofts to slope-side luxury accommodations. All of our properties offer Direct Booking with real home owners and save you more money for doing the things you love most.
Have you ever dreamed what it would be like to walk in someone else’s shoes for a day? SLIIIICE is the world’s first provider of subscriptions to human beings and we make those dreams come true. We stream an intriguing personality “live” each day, delivering all-day access from sun up until sun down. At the touch of their smart device, our unprecedented, fully immersive coverage allows users to experience a slice of life from a different point of view each day.
SolBe sees a healthy world: A home where we co-create understanding and explore ideas while celebrating each other’s humanness—one child, one family, and one village at a time.
SolBe Learning, LLC is an early learning center in Boston, MA with a fresh approach: By attending to the needs of parents and educators as keenly as we attend to the needs of children, SolBe creates a learning ecosystem that supports families, reimagines learning spaces, and goes beyond traditional child care. Our goals are to attain better outcomes for children, provide holistic solutions for families and support educators as advocates within the community.
SolBe caters to modern, dual-career families with children under age five. These families are frustrated with the difficulty of finding care that aligns with their values, fits their schedules, and delivers premium service.
Currently, top-quality child care offerings have short, rigid operating hours that are impractical or working parents, and the offerings with flexible, year-round care fail to deliver the highest quality of education.
We understand the importance of brand identity and have worked diligently to craft some brand book basics: a logo, brand colors and fonts — but the underlying storytelling and brevity are areas that we could use help in refining.
80% of America is locked out of the rooftop solar market. Solstice expands access to clean energy by providing participants with community-shared solar power, allowing them to enjoy clean energy with no upfront cost and save money on their electricity bill. Leveraging community organizing and an online customer management platform, Solstice enables institutions and households to easily plug into local solar gardens and spread the word to their networks. And even as it works to make community solar sign-ups absolutely frictionless, Solstice is deploying financial inclusion innovations that will allow low-to-moderate income (LMI) Americans to access community solar for the first time, making solar energy savings possible for every American household.
Solstice is a lean startup in every sense of the word, and as it grows into the rapidly expanding community solar market, it will need help to create the consistent and attractive branding that get consumers excited about spreading community solar to their friends and neighbors. As a social enterprise, Solstice has more potential than most companies to create positive and mutually supportive relationships with our customers. Strong branding from top local agencies is exactly what we need to make the leap and engage new communities.
Spotted is the only data platform tracking, aggregating, and analyzing celebrities’ natural brand preferences.
Our mission: 1) Only show consumers relevant, eye-catching content that provides an inside look at the personal lives of their favorite celebrities 2) Allow brands to highlight the celebrities who use / wear their brand in everyday life 3) Enable celebrities to have more control over the use of their image
Why we need an agency’s help: Spotted is at a highly unique business intersection — data and celebrity. We could use an agency’s help finding the specific tone, voice, and image that will allow us to communicate the intelligence and savvy of our product while also projecting the “cool factor” provided when working in the celebrity space.
Sitting is the new smoking! Too much sitting hurts your back, hips, and heart, and even increases the odds of getting cancer. Standing at work, on the other hand, has been shown to improve productivity and focus. Plus, it’s more fun! At StandStand, we’re fueling the #Standvolution, with our unique portable standing desk.
Dreamt up by Luke Leafgren one morning during a meditation session, StandStand is the only truly portable standing desk. Impeccably designed and incredibly strong, StandStand folds down to the size of a laptop, weighs around two pounds, and takes only seconds to assemble. Made in the USA out of sustainable birch and bamboo, StandStand provides the health benefits of a standing desk at home, your office, a coffee shop, or wherever you choose to use your computer.
Most standing desks cost hundreds or thousands of dollars, and on top of that, they stay in the same place!
Luke created StandStand so that more people could stand up for their health wherever they go. StandStand launched on Kickstarter, where 1,836 supporters helped raise the funds to get this business off the ground. Publications like Slate, Apartment Therapy, and the New York Times have highlighted StandStand’s design and affordability. We are still working to get our post-kickstarter marketing game together. We have a great team with really complimentary skills, but marketing is a weak spot. We continue to experiment, but I believe what we really need is the right marketing partner.
After partnering with a hometown cabinetry shop for its first two years, StandStand has moved production to the Boston area where Luke and his wife, Lindsay Noll, live.
Tagup provides a platform for industrial equipment manufacturers to monitor their install base, classify equipment operating modes, and predict equipment failures. By combining many data sources and searching for patterns across multiple time scales, we find connections that aren’t visually apparent. By incorporating maintenance and utilization data, we can improve equipment uptime, throughput, and safety. Our goal is to organize the world’s equipment information, making it simple to share, analyze, and interpret. We need an agency’s help to clearly explain how our solution works to potential customers (mainly in the industrial sector).
The Tech Connection is a recruiting platform which innovative companies use to assess, attract, engage and empower highly skilled diverse talent. We are dedicated to improving the success rates of underrepresented talent. We work tirelessly to inspire the next generation of future tech leaders.
Thero is making daily life on earth easier by applying aerospace materials to consumer goods. Our first product is a travel mug that actively works to cool your coffee from scalding to just right in one minute. Current travel mugs keep drinks at the same temperature they are dispensed at, which can be anywhere from 30-80 degrees hotter than the ideal drinking temperature. This prolonged overheating makes coffee more bitter over time, turning a great cup of joy into a piping hot mess. Even with the lid off, you are forced to wait for 15 minutes while tepidly sipping or burning your tongue. With Thero, you can enjoy a perfect cup of coffee when and where you want it at the drop of a French press. Founded out of Babson College in early 2017, Thero began as a capstone project motivated by founder, Chloris Yang’s, need for a mug that would let her quickly enjoy her afternoon coffee while keeping up with her busy on-the-go schedule. Thero hopes to use the portable beverageware market as a beachhead. After establishing a foothold in this market, we plan to expand our product line to include other applications of the heat regulating material that makes our products so special. All of our materials are SGS certified nontoxic. We need help because we are working on launching our crowdfunding campaign soon. As second movers in this market, we have the benefit of seeing where our competitors have fallen flat. Despite several strong crowdfunding efforts, the general market is still unaware that products like this exist. With the help of an agency, we could open the door to a new wave of product innovation. Increasing consumer awareness would not only help us sell our travel mugs but a bevy of other products as well. Finally, since a good cup of coffee is something almost everyone can relate to, agencies will be able to focus on creating a fun and engaging campaign rather than spend a lot of time or effort explaining the product.
Today’s Special was born out of need, as are so many forward-thinking ventures that impact the lives of others. Our founder Michelle’s son, Harry, has different abilities. Harry began his employment experience at age 16, working in various positions offered through his school program. Because of the accepting times we live in, Harry enjoyed a life of inclusion with his typical peers throughout school and at various community-based social clubs. His generation, including people of all abilities, is passionately engaged in the inclusion revolution. Now a young adult of 23, Harry has aged out of the school system, transitioning into the adult workforce. Unfortunately, once children age out of the school system, employment opportunities, as well as social opportunities, become scarce. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 8-10 people with different abilities were not in the workforce in 2016. Our citizens of different abilities merit an expectation of inclusion that does not end in adulthood. This employment gap is where Today’s Special expects to make an impact, by distinctively providing employment opportunities to people of different abilities, thus providing a continued and fulfilling life of inclusion.
Today’s Special operates as a small wholesale bakery, using a local restaurant’s kitchen and storage facility to prepare, package, and deliver our baked snacks to charitable events. All phases of operation, including working at the events, includes a staff consisting largely with people of different abilities. Our goal is to use the funds raised from the 501(c)(3) organization to procure our own location with an eye toward ultimately owning a brick and mortar location.
Today’s Special operates as a small wholesale bakery, using a local restaurant’s kitchen and storage facility to prepare, package, and deliver our baked snacks to charitable events. All phases of operation, including working at the events, includes a staff consisting largely with people of different abilities. Our goal is to use the funds raised from the 501(c)(3) organization to procure our own location with an eye toward ultimately owning a brick and mortar location.
Today’s Special has three principal initiatives.
First, our bakeries will offer a line of baked goods with trademarked recipes. Our specialized operation will be designed to employ people of different abilities, consisting of a streamlined assembly, packaging, and cleaning processes. Training will be tailored to discrete tasks, with input from learning specialists and parents, along with assistance from typical employees already experienced and/or educated in working alongside people of different abilities.
Second, we will partner with organizations, companies, and community service programs that provide food as part of their own endeavors. Presently, we have effectively partnered with established non‑profit organizations – Best Buddies (bestbuddies.org), I’m In To Hire (imintohire.org), Special Olympics (specialolympics.org) – providing our baked snacks at their sponsored charitable events. In addition to these non‑profit partnerships, our plan is to invite for‑profit companies and organizations to partner with us (e.g., corporations with an in-house cafeteria, kiosks on college campuses, malls, sports arenas). Establishing business partnerships creates a continued product demand to support sustainability and growth, thereby increasing our fundamental goal of offering long‑term
Third, we will continually educate the public, companies and organizations that may be considering an avenue for (i) providing meaningful employment opportunities to an underutilized group and (ii) joining in the inclusion revolution. Other companies aspiring to use the Today’s Special branding and company philosophy, to join the inclusion revolution, will provide the environment for our third initiative of expanding our footprint.
We need the agency to help us reach a broader base of customers and expand our effort to promote awareness that people of all abilities should have the same economic and social opportunities as their peers. Our mission is to ultimately franchise the model and build a retail storefront to go along with our large scale sales efforts.
MISSION: TUGG (Technology Underwriting Greater Good) is the community engagement platform that harnesses the power of the tech ecosystem to fund, grow, and support the riskiest social enterprises serving local under-resourced youth through entrepreneurial, educational, and life experiences. OVERVIEW: TUGG is the nonprofit arm of Boston’s tech community. Through a variety of meaningful events we make it easy for tech companies large and small to become community leaders by helping them get involved, give back and pay it forward. Our events are among the biggest in Boston tech and raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for nonprofits. TUGG is one of only funders of experimental youth-focused nonprofit startups in New England and fills an important gap in the nonprofit funding landscape. WHY WE NEED YOUR HELP: We have a two-pronged mission that can be difficult to get across – one side community engagement platform for Boston tech, one side nonprofit funder. We are at an exciting inflection point (new leadership) and will be launching some new initiatives next year. It would be immensely beneficial to have the help of an agency to help our brand reflect some of our new initiatives as they pertain to our goals around 1) a programmatic approach to a sustainable future, 2) our democratic, community-driven process for selecting new nonprofits, 3) growing our community of supporters 4) raising awareness about our important role as the “first big check” for startup nonprofits 5) making it easy and fun for tech companies to give back 6) highlighting that our events offer the best networking in Boston tech. TUGG is the most innovative organization at the intersection of tech and nonprofit, and we’re right here in Boston. When people think about what differentiates Boston from other tech hubs, we want them to think of TUGG. We need our brand to be recognizable, to convey who we are, and reflect that we are a community organization at the heart of Boston tech – innovative, welcoming, always fun, and an important lifeline for social entrepreneurs in New England.
Twiage offers a novel mobile communication technology enabling EMS and hospital emergency rooms to accelerate life-saving emergency care and replace the antiquated radio communication. Paramedics and EMTs can use Twiage to capture stroke symptoms in video, EKGs for STEMIs, trauma scenes through photos, texts and digital voice memos. By providing live patient data and GPS-tracked ETA for all incoming ambulances and 2-way communication capabilities, Twiage helps hospitals efficiently improve quality in prehospital preparedness, ER throughput and care coordination among EMS, ER and other hospital service lines, while improving performance measures, patient outcomes, and enhanced EMS referral volumes through reducing EMS turnaround time.
Twiage is being used by 14 hospitals and more than 60 EMS agencies in the Northeast. Among them, six hospitals are located in Massachusetts. The company and its novel solution have received innovation awards from the American Medical Association, the American Heart Association and MassChallenge. Twiage’s mission is to modernize the communication and care coordination for the life critical emergency care.
Twiage has been facing controversy in regards to its name. Many prospective clients do not like the name and think it is not serious. However, most of them can get used to it and think it is not easy to forget. We we like to get professional help from ad agencies to help us craft our brand messages.
[MARKET CONTEXT]
Over the next ten years the second smartphone revolution will impact more than 3 billion people; most of them coming from developing economies. Seeking ways to alleviate the high costs of communicating via text messages and regular phone calls, these consumers have embraced mobile-messaging on smartphones as a way to bypass the offerings of highly profitable telecom players in regions like Latin America and Africa.
Over the next ten years the second smartphone revolution will impact more than 3 billion people; most of them coming from developing economies. Seeking ways to alleviate the high costs of communicating via text messages and regular phone calls, these consumers have embraced mobile-messaging on smartphones as a way to bypass the offerings of highly profitable telecom players in regions like Latin America and Africa.
At Twnel we believe that until now, businesses in emerging markets have been left out of the mobile messaging tectonic shift. Smartphones have become a necessity and the only viable communication alternative, especially for the millions of independent professionals who are seeking ways to increase their income and productivity.
[OUR SOLUTION]
We are a call-center replacement tool for companies that need to stay close to their intermediaries (agents, suppliers, brokers and more) and don’t feel comfortable using personal messengers like Whatsapp or FB Messenger when engaging with those mobile first-audiences. We provide companies with a web-based tool to manage and automate interactions with their audiences and also a free mobile-messaging app called Twnel Messenger that is now used by more than 200.000 intermediaries around the world. Think of it as the messaging-driven “SalesForce” for Emerging Markets.
[WHY WE NEED HELP]
Over the past 18 months we have exclusively and succesfully targeted companies on three specific industries: Transportation & Logistics, Insurance and Direct-Catalog Sales; iterating our product and making it ready for prime-time in new verticals and markets.
We now think we have a solid product market fit and we are ready to become business-focused mainstream tool.
If we want to attract mid-sized businesses all over the world and become the whatsapp and facebook replacement tool for communicating with businesses, we better build a strong brand with a strong and unique message behind.
We want to take Twnel to the next level and that’s why we need help from the best agencies in the world!
At Unite, we believe that real-time service provides the greatest opportunity to improve the way people traditionally experience attractions, nightlife, and entertainment. Our mission is simple, we want to give the average Joe a taste of the VIP experience. Unite is a social nightlife mobile application that provides a real-time ticketing platform service that allows venue owners to sell virtual skip passes that allow direct access and entry to their specific venue.
Once our user base significantly increases, one of our primary goals is to implement a bidding system in which venues set minimum bid amounts, allowing users to bid against each other in line for the skip passes, in order to maximize profits per each ticket sold on a given night.
With help of a prominent agency, our brand can be taken to the next level through the necessity of increased publicity, promotion and customer awareness among the Boston startup community. Our end goal is to disrupt the traditional nightlife industry by creating an innovative real time platform that allows people to essentially buy more time when it comes to going to their favorite venues, while simultaneously allowing businesses to monetize this ongoing demand in a more high tech, analytical fashion.
Founded in 2014, the goal of Velocio is to create exceptional clothing that improves the experience of cycling, to get at the stories told from the sport more efficiently, more comfortably, more honestly. We do this by marrying technological progress in apparel with the natural progress of pedaling. We celebrate design that adds to the conversation, that says “hello” when you pass by and that encourages a little more “so here’s what happened” with every ride. We’re seeking an agencies help because we have excellent product and now aim to connect that product across the whole of cycling culture which is fraught with secret handshakes, leftover bits of European culture and far too much influence from the pro level. Balancing an accessible brand with a high end product has allowed us to launch successfully- growing that brand is now our challenge and scaling the culture we offer will take insight and creativity.
Verb Energy was started by 4 college students. We were tired of making compromises with sugary and artificial caffeinated drinks, so we set out to make a better energy source. We had three requirements: it had to have better energy effects than anything out there (an all-day boost without a crash or jitters), it had to be healthy and sustainable so that we could have it every day guilt-free, and it had to taste really good. We spent countless late nights in rented kitchens developing the recipe for something that would deliver on all three: the Verb Caffeinated Energy Bar. We chose 8 simple, vegan, and gluten-free ingredients, made it delicious with just the right amount of cocoa and just the right amount of sweet, and infused it with 100mg of caffeine from organic green tea for long-lasting, focused, jittery-free energy. It simply delivers better energy effects than anything else on the market. Our bar quickly became a hit on our campus and on several others. Whole sports teams placed group orders. People that were drinking two coffees a day replaced them with one Verb Bar. Area offices caught wind of it and started ordering them for their kitchens. We’ve seen a lot of initial success and we don’t think it was all about the product. We think a lot of it has to do with what it represents. We’re something new in the energy category. We’re not about jumping off cliffs or doing backflips on dirt bikes. We’re about making the most of every minute, and not having to compromise for energy. Our bar is good energy and good for you. It tastes good and is good for the planet. Our goal is to make artificial energy drinks, energy shots, and pre-workout supplements obsolete, and do it while setting an example for sustainable and socially responsible food company.
We have a loyal group of customers now but many of them only know what we’re about because they’ve interacted with us personally. We need help telling our story to many more. Brand will be make or break for us as we attempt to move beyond college campuses. We’re up against huge corporations with massive advertising budgets and vested interests in keeping health and sustainability out of the conversation. We believe we have a product that almost anyone can benefit from and we need an agency’s help as we create a mature brand with a strong product line and a reach that extends beyond college campuses.
Exploding data volumes and types create unprecedented possibilities for businesses of all types to identify and capitalize on opportunities. Unfortunately, much of this data is so complex you need to be a scientist to understand it. Even if you are a data scientist, traditional two-dimensional charts tell just part of the story. Toggling between many charts can be slow and confusing.
We’ve invented an alternative. Our virtual reality data visualization solution empowers quantitative investors, data scientists and analysts across industries to more rapidly discover and communicate insights. Unlike traditional business intelligence tools, our solution enables you to see 14 or more factors or axes simultaneously. And unlike (or to supplement and train) artificial intelligence, we amplify users’ subject matter expertise.
Supporting devices such as the Oculus Rift and Microsoft HoloLens, our product creates entirely new ways of seeing and exploring data. Backed by a mathematical model created with the help of a MacArthur genius tenured at MIT, our solution can accelerate time to insight by orders of magnitude, for example by consolidating 495 4-dimensional scatterplots into a single 12D view.
While we’re starting with quantitative investors, we can help researchers in many fields solve otherwise impossible problems, transform math & science education, improve cybersecurity and even help address medical and population health problems.
We have considered names such as Immersion Analytics, Nth Dimension Analytics and Data Omniscience. We want to convey brand values such as curiosity, creativity, innovation and the human potential to solve currently impossible problems.
We would like the help of an agency to (1) simply convey our value proposition and (2) enable prospective customers, including data scientists and quantitative investment analysts, to understand how this product can make their daily work more productive.
We are Wanku, a beverage startup that is bringing to the US a herbal infusion known as ‘the healing water’ that has been consumed for centuries in the Andes Mountains of Ecuador because of its health properties. It naturally soothes the body and it’s a great gut-health drink. It is a delicious herbal infusion made up with a blend of more than 20 andean herbs and aromatic flowers.
The word Wanku, is a quechua word (quechua is the indigenous language from the Andes) which means ‘together’. The sense of community and togetherness is really important for who we are and our brand. We are working closely ‘together’ with Ecuadorians farmers to source the ingredients needed for Wanku, an infusion made up with more than 20 herbs and flowers blended ‘together’.
Our goal: We want to share this amazing tradition with the world and by doing this we are going to help to improve the quality of life of Ecuadorian Independent farmers. We envision Wanku as one the most consumed beverage of the US.
Why we need agency’s help: in our industry, the brand is the most valuable asset companies have. If we want to achieve our goal of becoming one the most consumed beverage of the US, we need to build a strong brand, that resonates with our customers and stays true to our values and roots.
The word Wanku, is a quechua word (quechua is the indigenous language from the Andes) which means ‘together’. The sense of community and togetherness is really important for who we are and our brand. We are working closely ‘together’ with Ecuadorians farmers to source the ingredients needed for Wanku, an infusion made up with more than 20 herbs and flowers blended ‘together’.
Our goal: We want to share this amazing tradition with the world and by doing this we are going to help to improve the quality of life of Ecuadorian Independent farmers. We envision Wanku as one the most consumed beverage of the US.
Why we need agency’s help: in our industry, the brand is the most valuable asset companies have. If we want to achieve our goal of becoming one the most consumed beverage of the US, we need to build a strong brand, that resonates with our customers and stays true to our values and roots.
It all started with a quiet moment of reflection on a beach. It was late summer and the sun was just beginning its journey below the horizon while out in the distance sailboats drifted by on Long Island Sound. Strolling the sands of Fisher’s Island with our faithful dog Barley and a Bloody Mary in our hand, the worry of life and bills and kids and the work week ahead slowly faded away like the late afternoon shadows.
For one brief moment we were present in the now – the golden glow of the sunset, the sound of waves rolling up on the shore, the light breeze, and the pure contentment of just being.
It was right then that the genesis of Waypoint Spirits was born – the realization that life is too precious not to pause and appreciate all of the little stops that make up our own unique journey through this world.
With that one spark of inspiration a small collection of close friends set out on a journey of their own to make their dream of hand-crafting unique spirits a reality. And even through the months of planning, construction, financing, paperwork, juggling day jobs and more curveballs than you could image, we have always tried to pause and take note of the multitude of daily blessings abundant along the way.
Our hope is that you enjoy Waypoint Spirits with that appreciation in mind – share it with close friends, enjoy it at special celebrations, savor it in the quiet, peaceful moments. Wherever your path may lead, remember to pause at the Waypoints along the way and appreciate every step of the journey.
WEVO’s vision is to enable people to evaluate and enhance all of their digital communications, without having to publish them first. Our goal is to provide instant insight into how all digital communications can be substantially improved. Currently, the online service leverages machine learning and crowdsourcing technology to dramatically increase online conversion for landing pages. Unlike market research and A/B testing tools that can consume considerable time and resources, WEVO provides marketers with new page designs and tailored messaging that have been proven to convert at a higher rate – in days rather than months.
WEVO is a growing team with one full-time creative director and one full-time marketing lead. The opportunity to take a step back from our brand as it stands and leverage a creative agency is a substantial one that we’re greatly interested in. There are many “WEVO’s” in the world, which causes confusion, so we need to find a way to set ourselves apart. We’re also bringing a new product with a learning curve to an existing market, and we need to find a way for the brand to redefine people’s existing mental models within the space, without sounding cliche. This is the perfect time for rebranding input, as WEVO will have a large public announcement in September.
Whole U.™ is a career and life platform that offers advising programs, workshops & educational media that encourage and support individuals to live a balanced, purposeful life. Ranked #1 Career Coach and #1 Life Coach in Boston on Yelp, Whole U. helps clients find clarity, confidence, and connections to pursue their life’s work, and enhance their wellness, career, and service to society.
Whole U. has served people from 22 countries around the world – from San Francisco to New York, and Moscow to Tokyo.
Here are a few client testimonials: http://www.wholeu.info/testimonials
Whole U. has served people from 22 countries around the world – from San Francisco to New York, and Moscow to Tokyo.
Here are a few client testimonials: http://www.wholeu.info/testimonials
Whole U. would greatly benefit from advice from a creative ad agency that could help further clarify the mission statement / language, as its plans to scale – expanding internationally; offering services B2B, and becoming a world-renowned platform that recommends and curates resources and products, that support living a Balanced, Purposeful Life.
Woobo unfolds a world of imagination, fun, and knowledge to children, bringing the magic of a robot companion into children’s life. Relying on cutting-edge robotics and AI technologies, our team is aiming to realize the dream of millions of children – bringing them a fluffy and soft buddy that can talk to them, amuse them, inspire them, and learn along with them. For parents, Woobo is an intelligent assistant with customized content that can help entertain, educate, and engage children, as well as further strengthen the parent-child bond.
We need help on PR/Marketing is to launch the crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter around September 6th. We aim to raise ~$one million through the campaign.
We need help on PR/Marketing is to launch the crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter around September 6th. We aim to raise ~$one million through the campaign.
Our target audience is parents who have kids aged 5-9, more inclined to moms. Upper middle class families who pay attention to education, interactive learning and companionship, and live an active lifestyle.
ZyloTech was started in 2014 as a MIT spin-off, leveraging advanced open-source AI Big Data research.
Our mission is to help companies understand their customers, and interact with them appropriately across multiple channels of communication.
The issue: Companies spend billions of dollars on acquiring new customers, but miss a huge opportunity to generate revenue from the standpoint of retaining the ones they already have.
The causes: Traditional manual methods for curating customer data don’t work, and neither does manual behavior analysis.
These approaches can’t handle the speed, volume and complexity of the customer data that is constantly flowing in.
ZyloTech uses A.I. and machine learning to automate these manual back-end efforts, so that companies can finally understand hundreds, thousands, even millions of customers in near real time.
The results are often a 4-6x lift in customer retention and monetization.
Up until now, the majority of our efforts have been focused on creating a great product and finding new users. Now that we have a dozen top name brands as customers, we are ready for rapid expansion and need an exceptional image—and an ongoing relationship with an exceptional agency—to match our exceptional product.
