Shopify Tax
A calming brand personality & marketing campaign. Go from taxing to relaxing.
Making sales tax delightful
A framework for launching Shopify Tax as a dependable, calming source of support and learning.
The Challenge—
A complex and stressful subject for businesses while lacking educational, supportive content.
From user experience to content, tax platforms are very dry and minimal in favor of getting serious information across. We wanted to reinvent how we present tax information, showcase our product, and how our audience feels about taxes with a more approachable brand. Our challenge was to bring the Shopify Tax product to life and develop a new, innovative brand strategy with a full-scale launch across the marketing website, admin tool, email campaigns, and social press.
Goals & Approach—
Creating a new comforting perspective on sales tax.
The goal was to create a branding strategy and website from scratch for the new Shopify Tax tool while changing how our users view their tax obligations as less stressful and more relaxing. As a corporate enterprise, Shopify has a documented and built design system with governance for building sub-brands under the Shopify umbrella. We had to work within the guidelines and limitations while making a brand that could stand independently. As the lead designer, I worked closely with the lead content strategists to analyze existing competitors and develop a powerful brand concept.
Collaboration—
Seamless collaboration across teams to ensure brand consistency and impact across all assets.
Video production
Collaborated with the video production and motion design teams to create assets and concepts while providing feedback for their produced explainer videos and animated visuals.
Engineering sync
In building our website, we collaborated closely with our lead web developers from the beginning of the design process to ensure transparency about the planned UX structure and address any red flags.
Cross-team alignment
To ensure success, we sought alignment and feedback from multiple teams, including product marketing managers, product engineers, web developers, and the enterprise design system teams.
Stakeholder sign-off
I also presented the brand to chief officers and stakeholders with the marketing team's support to showcase our final concept with supporting assets, receive any feedback, and get launch approval.
Campaign Launch—
Launching a friendly, knowledgeable tax brand that simplifies the complex with warmth and clarity.
"Go from taxing to relaxing." We launched the Shopify Tax brand and created our content as a dependable, calming source of learning and support. I executed a comprehensive brand guide outlining our voice & tone, personality scale, and visual brand principles. Working with multiple teams, we successfully launched the brand across various platforms and media formats, including web, email, admin, and video. Balancing human approachability and business professionalism, we implemented a vibrant color palette and a friendly, encouraging tone to each piece of content.
The friendly, helpful nerd
We developed a brand personality that understands the subject matter and is excited to teach you how to be your own expert with a voice and tone that is confident, knowledgeable, and friendly.
Results & Impact—
After launching the Shopify Tax brand and marketing strategy, we immediately saw increased user engagement, high email conversions, and high-performing informational videos on social media. The website also received an overwhelmingly positive response from users and internal stakeholders. It was highlighted in the corporate brand guidelines as an example of a successful brand implementation using the configurable design system.
Conclusion—
I had a lot of fun leading and collaborating on this brand because of how much joy and delight was infused across the content and visual assets. With a topic like sales tax, it can be comfortable to go with a safe approach and design minimal, serious content to ensure clarity. However, I learned that you can find the balance between creating something powerful that stands out and providing knowledgeable, clear direction for businesses. I also discovered that finding joy in your work and creative process can lead to a better, more human connection with your audience.
