When we first made the decision to rebrand last year, we knew we needed to find the perfect designer to bring our vision to life. What we didn’t know, was how much more she would do for our business than the design aspect. We went into this thinking we would get a stunning website, and obviously, it’s freaking gorgeous. However, this whole rebranding process has brought us so much more than that and we just wanted to share a little glimpse into that journey with you.

Right off the bat, we were immediately faced with our first challenge, a new name. Easy, right? Wrong. Just that alone took us weeks, maybe even a month to accomplish. Nothing we were coming up with felt right. We basically live our entire lives based on how things feel. We tried our names, words we thought would fit the direction we were going, nothing. It was no quick process. What did we get ourselves into? Our first task and we were already stuck. Go us. We decided to stop trying to force it and wait for inspiration to find us. Weeks later, while driving across the state in the middle of the night, inspiration crashed right into us. [no, not literally!] We were chatting about anything and everything, like we often do, and got on the subject of beautiful words and languages. We were probably listening to the Harry Potter soundtrack at this point. I suddenly remembered reading an article about German words that didn’t quite translate to English. Languages have always fascinated me and Gabriel is extremely talented in language learning. I searched for the article and read the list aloud. Once I got to Fernweh, we both knew, that was it. It summed us up in one word. Coming from two different countries, no matter which of our home countries we are currently in, we always want to be in the other. Often times, we just want to be anywhere else exploring the world.

Between Brianna encouraging us to nail down our ideal clientele and Fernweh becoming more than just a pretty word to name our business, we quickly started to gather inspiring images to formulate our mood board. Brianna used that to start pulling together the colors and textures of our website. We pulled inspiration from Pinterest and across the web. (So if you recognize one of the mood board images as yours, thank you for creating something so inspiring! And leave us a comment so we can credit you properly!) We loved the very organic, raw and a little moody feel we got from this collection. Once we had the right mood and colors nailed down, we started the process of developing our name. With the help of a very talented calligrapher, our name started to take shape. A couple of revisions later and we had it. Fernweh + Liebe Photography was born…and it couldn’t possibly be more perfect.

From that point on, things started to build and continually develop over the next months. Don’t let our quick glimpse fool you, this process was a challenge, in the best kind of way. We tend to second guess ourselves and overthink at times, but Brianna kept pushing and we started to notice something. We were changing. The further along we got, the more we realized we needed to restructure just about everything. We didn’t just want a pretty website, we wanted to revamp our entire business to reflect this gorgeous brand we’d all worked so hard to create. Are we there yet? No. We’re still making changes and business improvements, but for right now, we’ve got our stunning website complete and the rest will happen in due time. We are so grateful we were able to work with Brianna and how she’s helped us to become a better business and more inspired artists. We cannot wait to see where our new brand takes us and what our past and future clients think of the new experience we’re [almost] ready to offer.

XOXO

Carissa + Gabriel