Why We Rebranded to Paloma

A little history lesson

You may be surprised to learn that this isn’t our first rebrand, nor second for that matter! Paloma originally started out being called ‘Nash’, named after our co-founders Nick Frandsen & Ash Fogelberg – and thank goodness that didn’t last long. We still take the piss out of the name to this day.

Once we started making a few more ripples as a business, it was time to take the professionalism up a notch. Nash became Dovetail Digital, which aligned with our first logo and lockup officially being introduced. The Dovetail name emerged from the strength of the dovetail joint in woodworking joinery.

For us, it meant creating robust software that had a ‘resistance to being pulled apart’. As a business, we bound different facets together to differentiate ourselves from traditional product agencies and distinguish ourselves in the market, thus forming a stronger whole.

In 2017, as the growth of our digital product agency started taking off, and we introduced a venture studio into the mix, we decided to shift from ‘Digital’ to simply ‘Dovetail’ (or Dovetail Studios). This spoke to the creativity and innovation that sits at the heart of our business.

Our logo also underwent a transformation, from something reminiscent of a bird to a brand mark more reflective of the dovetail joint itself. The design formed the letter ‘D’ and had the feeling of movement from the more literal ‘Dove’. It also contained trapezoidal shapes, notable in the joinery.

And now, we’ve reached our third evolution – and hopefully last, at least for a while.

Why Paloma

We wanted a company name that had a deep connection to our past, not just some random word with missing vowels that didn’t mean anything to our team or our clients.

We wanted our brand to have strong visual appeal – an identity that would look great on merch, billboards, or social media.

Our team is extremely culturally diverse, and we have clients from all over the world. We wanted a name that people from all walks of life can easily spell, and a name that we can really own in our key markets.

Paloma speaks to our company’s evolution, and puts a fun twist on who we’re becoming. Translated from Spanish to English, paloma means ‘Dove’. It resonates beautifully, and it’s easy to pronounce and spell. No detail has been spared.

Our team members have always been and will continue to be called Doves. The new brand mark is a motif that represents a literal dove’s tail, which is an homage to our origins as Dovetail and continuous evolution onward and upward.

It also seamlessly morphs into sub-marks for each of our three business units to have a life of their own: Paloma Digital, Paloma Ventures, and Paloma Capital.

Same Doves, new vibes

We’re one epic cocktail of product thinkers, design experts, and technology enthusiasts. That will never change.

Paloma remains one part digital product agency, one part venture studio, and one part VC. At our core, we de-risk the experience of building and launching new digital products or businesses. We build new ventures for a diverse range of companies, from day one, pre-product, pre-revenue startups, to mammoth multi-billion dollar unicorns.

Our mission remains to drive the world forward by transforming ambitious ideas into unstoppable businesses, while our updated vision is to become the birthplace of the most successful digital products and technology companies. Sounds like an easy feat, right?

One of the main goals of our rebrand was to showcase a friendlier face to the world, and reveal ourselves as the truly approachable team we are. We hope this shines through and opens doorways to work with even more aligned companies and likeminded founders on exciting, innovative ventures and products.

We’ve also recently introduced new Design Principles at Paloma that speak to our personality:

• Good vibes only
• Disruptive and anti-agency
• Scrappy sophistication
• Intelligent rule breakers
• Rebellious sweethearts

Aren’t you forgetting something?

Oh yeah, back to that whole “keep it candid” thing…

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, especially in Australia, you would have seen our friends over at Dovetail (dovetailapp.com) – internally monikered ‘the other Dovetail’ – go from strength-to-strength over the last couple of years as the country’s up and coming stars, being compared to the likes of Canva and Atlassian.

Surprise to nobody, the brand confusion between us was rife. You may have even felt it yourself! Dare we say, even LinkedIn was confused about the who’s who, mixing up where employees worked. But, the story is actually even more coincidental than most people realise.

Back in 2016, a mere three months apart, we registered our businesses in Australia just a few blocks away in the same postcode (Darlinghurst). We both had at least one co-founder (in our case two), who was originally from New Zealand and studied at the University of Otago. Our co-founder Nick Frandsen and Dovetail co-founder Benjamin Humphrey both majored in Computer Science at uni, two years apart. We knew New Zealand was small, but seriously? What are the chances!

All of this is to say that against all odds, two companies with a shared name, both born from humble beginnings and fantastic founders, went on to be extremely successful more than six years later.

We are so impressed with what the Dovetail team have achieved, the loyalty they’ve established with their customers, and the strong reputation of their platform. After some very friendly chats between the Otago alumni themselves, we decided that it was the right time on our journey to stir things up as Paloma, and watch Dovetail continue to soar to brilliant heights as the one and only.

Hopefully now we can also finally use their product for our user research, and not create further confusion by having Dovetail using Dovetail.

It’s time to spread our wings

We are extremely proud of what we have achieved thus far, through all of our ‘kaizen-ing’ and phases as a business. We’re confident that this next offshoot will take us even higher.

We are chuffed that after seven years of growing and changing, we finally have a brand that reflects who we truly are, what’s important to us, and the DNA that’s been the root of it all.

We hope you like it, too.

Cheers to glowing up.

Love,

The Doves 🕊