Table of Contents
ToggleBuilding a Brand – Redesigning a Business Start to Finish

Mode Rebranding Briefing Document
I. Executive Summary
In early 2025, Matthew Ascena joined Mode as Chief Design Officer with the mission of reimagining the company's brand. Mode, a mechanical keyboard company founded five years prior by Jacob, had grown steadily from a hobby into a business with a clear vision: "Mode isn't just about keyboards—it's about how thoughtful design transforms everyday experiences."
The rebrand aimed to reflect this evolving vision, refine their market position, and ensure future growth. Using the "double diamond framework" alongside creative collaborator Ben Burns, the process explored the brand's identity, customers, and competitive landscape. Key outcomes include a refined brand vision centered on "warm tech," a new visual identity, overhauled website, and a strategic shift in products and marketing—all to create a curated, human, and joyful experience.
II. Background and Motivation for Rebrand
Mode began with Jacob’s quest for the perfect typing experience, evolving from a hobby into selling their first 50 keyboards without external investment. Over five years, Mode reinvested profits into better keyboards and matured as a company.
"Over the last 5 years we've grown and developed clearer opinions on what we want Mode to be, what values drive our design, and how we want to do business. So we want to update the brand to reflect that." — Matthew Ascena
Core questions driving the rebrand:
- Where have we been, and what's our vision for the future?
- How might we position our brand and products distinctly in the marketplace?
- What should we keep or change for sustainable growth?
This effort moved beyond visuals, acknowledging that "a brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product or company, shaped by every interaction."
III. The Branding Process: Double Diamond Framework
A. Phase 1: Discovery
This phase focused on gathering data to understand Mode’s goals, products, customers, and the market.
- Team Alignment: Goals included establishing a distinct voice, understanding current and new customers, refining the catalog, and increasing revenue.
- Research: Quantitative (traffic, sales data, surveys) and qualitative (video interviews with community members).
- User Personas:
- Tim (UX manager, Austin): Values quality, community, wants detailed product info.
- Jay (software engineer, SF): Seeks workspace upgrade, values quick, simple purchase with clear guidance.
- Brand Self-Examination: Explored Mode’s values, voice, and look.
- Competitive Mapping: Revealed crowded space and sparked questions on how to stand out.
B. Phase 2: Define
Insights were synthesized into a clear vision of "warm tech": making technology feel human and joyful, focusing on quality and innovation.
- Strategic Decisions: Discontinue some products, overhaul visual identity, website, and messaging.
- Design Challenges:
- How to create products that feel crafted and joyful?
- How to design a brand that's high-end yet humble?
- How to guide all users seamlessly online?
C. Phase 3: Develop
Creative exploration led to stylescapes (mood boards):
- Serious Fun: Clean, curated, colorful.
- Crafted Narrative: Editorial, rich contrasting colors (most popular).
- Bits of Joy: Bright, playful, nostalgic.
The final direction, "The Story of Craft," combined the best elements—editorial typography, hand-drawn details, rich colors, warm photography.
D. Phase 4: Deliver
Focused on refining the identity system:
- Maintained logo for equity, developed cohesive typography, deep green palette, honest brand voice.
- Guidelines covered everything from custom icons to photo style.
- "Warm tech" became the guiding star for products and experiences.
IV. Core Mission and Strategic Shifts
Mode’s new mission:
"To bring joy to workspaces and everyday experiences, creating products that deserve to exist and carving out our warm tech niche."
This translates into:
- Curated product ecosystem: More thoughtful designs.
- Transparent marketing: Sharing stories and behind-the-scenes.
- Focus on in-person experiences: Where people connect with Mode by trying keyboards firsthand.
V. Current Progress and Future Plans
- Website redesign: Completed, with easier shopping for Jay and deeper info for Tim. Gradual feature rollout continues.
- Eco-friendly packaging: Encore keyboard now uses recyclable molded pulp.
- Boston studio: Built for richer photo/video content.
- Next-gen products: Design nearly done, engineers overhauling components to cement innovation leadership.
The team acknowledges there’s still more to do and time needed to see the impact of their work.
Frequently Asked Questions
Mode decided to rebrand after five years of steady growth, realizing they had developed clearer opinions on their identity, product values, and business approach. The rebrand was initiated to ensure the company's external perception aligned with its internal evolution and future vision. Key questions driving this decision included assessing their journey over the past five years, defining their future vision, identifying how to stand out in the market, and determining what aspects of the existing brand to retain or change for continued growth.
Mode defines a "brand" as a person's gut feeling about a product, service, or company, emphasizing that every customer touchpoint shapes this perception. A strong brand boasts an outstanding reputation, is perceived as valuable, stands out, and fosters genuine customer connections. Their branding process followed the "double diamond framework," encompassing discovery, definition, development, and delivery phases. This comprehensive approach examined all aspects of their business—positioning, product, culture, and customers—to determine necessary changes for achieving their goals.
In the discovery phase, Mode focused on understanding their brand vision, business goals, and challenges, while gathering data on products, customers, and the market. They conducted extensive research, including analyzing website traffic, sales data, customer surveys within the keyboard community, and in-depth video interviews.
These insights informed user exercises where they identified and segmented current and future customer bases, creating detailed user personas like Tim (an experienced enthusiast valuing quality and community) and Jay (a busy software engineer seeking simple solutions and relying on recommendations). This deep dive into customer types provided valuable perspectives on improving products and the overall customer experience.
Mode analyzed its competitive positioning by examining its brand through multiple lenses: values and beliefs, features and benefits, voice and tone, and look and feel. They used an X and Y map with opposing brand qualities to plot competitors and brands from other industries, visualizing their market standing.
This exercise revealed areas where Mode was undifferentiated, prompting them to ask critical questions about carving out a unique space and creating distinction. This refinement led to a clearer vision for Mode's future, centered around themes like "warm tech" (making technology feel human), "creating joy in everyday experiences," and "making products that deserve to exist" (focusing on quality and innovation).
The "warm tech" concept emerged as Mode's north star, aiming to make technology feel more human, inviting, and bring joy to everyday experiences, rather than feeling cold and manufactured.
This vision deeply resonated with the insight that a "nice keyboard can be like a piece of furniture that ties the room together." This guiding principle shaped their product design, leading them to explore different forms, colors, materials, and finishes that evoke warmth and craftsmanship. For their visual identity, "warm tech" translated into a preference for editorial-inspired typography, hand-drawn elements, maker marks, rich colors, and warm tones, aiming for a high-end, curated yet humble and human aesthetic.
In the develop phase, Mode utilized "stylescapes" – carefully curated mood boards – to transform abstract ideas into concrete visuals. Drawing from the discovery and define phases, they identified key themes for each design direction and gathered visual references to match these themes, arranging them to create visual harmony.
They developed three distinct stylescapes: "Serious Fun," "Crafted Narrative," and "Bits of Joy." After presenting these to the team and gathering feedback, they combined the most resonant elements, resulting in their final stylescape, "The Story of Craft." This approach allowed them to explore different design directions quickly before investing significant time in custom design work, ultimately serving as the foundation for their complete visual identity.
Mode's new visual identity encompassed several refined elements. While they retained their existing logo with slight refinements, they developed a cohesive visual language with carefully chosen typography, combining serif and sans-serif fonts for headers and body copy, a selective use of bitmap-style typefaces as a nod to computing history, and a monospace font for technical copy.
Their main color became a deep green, supported by a set of secondary accent colors. Photography principles were established to feature strong directional lighting, warm and natural tones, and scenes that feel lived in. For their brand voice, they focused on being professional yet friendly, using clear, simple language to avoid technical jargon and marketing buzzwords, prioritizing honest and straightforward communication. They also introduced a "lowfi bitmap imagery" as an "alter ego" of their brand, driving their custom iconography and logo variants.
The rebrand resulted in a clear vision and strategy, with Mode's core mission being to bring joy to workspaces and everyday experiences by creating products that "deserve to exist" and carving out their "warm tech" niche. This led to a more curated approach in developing their product ecosystem.
For marketing, they plan to emphasize transparency, sharing their story and behind-the-scenes content. Recognizing the "aha moment" customers experience when interacting with their products, they plan to attend more in-person creative and tech events to foster connections.
Key ongoing projects include a completed website redesign (with a warmer appearance, simplified purchasing, and more brand information), development of eco-friendly packaging, a new studio setup for capturing media, and the ongoing design and engineering overhaul of their next-generation keyboards to strengthen their position as innovators.