Duckpin

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m one of the partners and co-founders of Vision Financial firm, a wealth management firm in Columbia, Maryland. We work with high net worth families and businesses.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Duckpin?

We needed Duckpin for a rebranding, or brand evolution. We hadn’t really looked at our brand, logo, or website colors, so we decided it was the right time to evaluate and evolve into a more fitting and mature business.

For ten years, even though we weren’t marketing to people, everything involving our brand had been created by us. We wanted to differentiate ourselves. Our brand should resonate with our clients and speak what we think we do best and add the most value. That way, when we get referrals, they could land on our website and feel like we’d understand their needs and be a good fit for them.

We thought it was the right moment to be able to tell the story of who we are and what we do effectively so that message could come across. We hired Duckpin to take care of all this.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Duckpin has created a multi-phase project for us. We’re still in the first one, which involves rebuilding the brand right to the logos. We're going to change the name, the colors, and everything else involved in it. From there, we're going to put it all into a new website with new collateral pieces, or as I like to call it, new swag. In the third phase, we’ll roll that out to ongoing outbound communication with clients and prospects.

In this first phase, they’ve also interviewed everyone at the firm, from partners to our staff people. They've asked us about our business and how we perceive it, and how we think people perceive us. They've also asked us very creative questions, like what type of fictional or historical people do we think best represent our values and what type of things are most important for people to understand about us. I've found it extraordinarily helpful that they've also interviewed eight different clients of ours and requested them to share their experience with us. 

The Duckpin team has been able to put together and come back with six very different logo concepts to pick from. We've narrowed it down to three and then further to the one concept that we've thought made the most sense. We've made some revisions to it, and that's where we are now.

What is the team composition?

We started working with Sean (VP), who’s essentially the sales guy and the first person we talked to when we reached out. We’ve also been working primarily with Chad (Co-founder/Creative Director), who’s driven the visual process so far, and Dustin (Client Care Manager) who's involved in everything. We’re now moving forward with Cara (Co-founder/COO) because we're rolling out the website. She's responsible for the copywriting.

How did you come to work with Duckpin?

In October 2020, we went through a process where we interviewed five different firms, with the goal of selecting one kicking off the project in January 2021. Duckpin seemed to be the best fit for us.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent around $32,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in January 2021, and it will probably keep ongoing by summer or fall, since there’s still quite a bit of work before we wrap it up.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We don’t have any metrics since there’s nothing to measure yet, but we’ve had some feedback from all of the clients who've shared the logo and brand concepts with, and it has been overwhelmingly positive. The feedback we’ve gotten has been that it looks very professional, refined, and high-end, like a boutique exclusive look, which is exactly what we were going for.

How did Duckpin perform from a project management standpoint?

We’ve communicated through phone calls and video chat. They’ve also come to our office 3–4 times. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

I like the Duckpin team. They put a lot of work in and show they’re not just some big firm and we’re not just another client for them. From the beginning, we could see they were very excited to work on this project with us.

It’s almost like they're building the representation of what they can do through their work. We feel Duckpin is very invested in the process with us, which gives us the confidence to know the project we’ll get is going to be superior to anything we’d get from anyone else. They stand out for how much they care, their attention, their and responsiveness. Duckpin makes it clear they want this to be as great as we do.

Are there any areas they could improve?

There’s nothing to improve. They’re doing exactly what we've hoped they’d do.

Any advice for potential customers?

Be very clear and upfront, and say exactly what it is you're trying to accomplish because Duckin is going to be very attentive to every word you say and try to take that into what you want. 

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

During my time at Tessco, I was the lead User Experience Researcher. It was my responsibility to discover and deliver the types of experiences both our consumer and commercial customers wanted.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Duckpin?

We mainly partnered with Duckpin for WordPress development help. The developers we had in house were both too busy and not familiar with WordPress. 

What were your goals for this project?

The goals for the project were to fully implement a checkout process on our leading e-commerce site using WooCommerce. We also wanted to update a handful of other marketing sites. 

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

We talked with other vendors in a similar price range and skillset. Any vendor that said they could do "any job for any price" we shied away from. From there, we left it up to technical ability. It wasn't a hard decision to choose Duckpin. We very much appreciated their authenticity and honesty about what it would take to launch the product in the time we had.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

They performed WordPress development to update our sites. Andrew (Managing Partner & Co-Founder) helped transfer the site to the vendor we were migrating to. He was also helpful in integrating Amazon fulfillment pieces for our business partners.

What was the team composition?

The team consisted of myself and one other UX Designer were liaisons with the business, who had touchpoint meetings with Andrew from Duckpin.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

It was fantastic. Our new Ventev site had a 12% lower bounce rate and a higher session duration by one minute. There were more page views, more returning visitors, and a higher percentage of mobile users (56% were mobile). This was all before any significant marketing campaign investment was made to promote the new site. These numbers were calculated when there were over 250,000 sessions and over 170,000 unique users.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

As a liaison, I acted a bit as the project manager. We had such a good repertoire with Andrew that everything went super smoothly.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

It was easy to communicate with Andrew and he was very responsive. He was also knowledgable about WordPress development. I highly recommend Duckpin.

Are there any areas for improvement?

The main areas of improvement would mostly fall on the Tessco side. Duckpin accomplished everything and more of what was requested of them.