Would you move in with your client?

I spoke with James Greenfield, founder of Koto design studio about the inside-approach to Airbnb’s rebrand, the value of seeing a brand from inside the organization, and at what point in a startup journey businesses should consider branding

Who will love this

• Airbnb brand stans

• Anyone who’s ever embedded with a client

• Creative founders

Today

Good morning!

When I wrote about Airbnb a few months ago, more than a few people suggested I talk to James Greenfield, who led the Airbnb team at Design Studio.

So I spoke with James! He now heads Koto, a global design studio that has collaborated with Netflix, Uber, and Airbnb, among others.

Case studies and awards often only show the finished product (always breakthroughs - never breakdowns, know what I mean?). What's interesting here is the process James and his team took to partner with Airbnb.

Rebrands, like organ transplants, succeed not just on their own merits but on integration. Here’s a look at how to do it well. Enjoy!

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

Amanda Gordon: Hi James! One of the first exchanges we had was about the image that came directly from your notebook.

James Greenfield: It's a funny story. If I'd known where it was gonna go, I would have spent a lot longer on it. It was the day before the big presentation. One of my colleagues, Tim said, well let's put your sketch in. I thought I was just gonna scan it, make it pink, and put it in the presentation. Then someone in the PR team asked for the image when it came time to launch the rebrand. I didn't really put two and two together. And then it ended up going out onto the internet.

Amanda Gordon: Most people don't get to concept a brand and execute within the business. Can you talk me through how that happened and what you did?

James Greenfield: One thing that I found was that more and more of the people hiring us were creatives themselves. 

Airbnb had decided that they were going to rebrand. Obviously Airbnb’s three founders are designers by trade. They had built a very design aware internal team who were very actively involved in this rebrand. What it meant was it wasn't a marketing team coming to us asking for a brochure or whatever. 

I can remember it very clearly. It was a very average day and I get this email saying hi, I'm Kenji. From Airbnb. We're looking forward to put together this rebrand of Airbnb, would you be interested? Yes, I think I probably would be. 

The first thing I said to my then boss was, I think I'm gonna fly to San Francisco for the meeting tomorrow. And he was like, what? I said, well, you know what's gonna happen, they're gonna be talking to like five or six agencies. I pretty much guarantee most of them will be in the US proximity - it'll be a challenge. The model that I was kind of building in my head at that moment in time was called ‘Inside Out’. The model was based around this idea that you would kind of turn things inside out. Not only would you not just be consultants from the outside looking in, but you would also get to know the people so you could understand the brand inside and look and look out. 

Myself and my then boss flew to San Francisco. We didn't really tell them we were coming. At the allotted time for the meeting, they were expecting to dial into a Zoom. We emailed and said, actually, just to let you know, we're downstairs. We'd set up the beginnings of what went on to be a successful relationship because we were willing to fly 5300 miles to make sure we took the meeting. 

The meeting went well. The thing that really struck me was that I was going in expecting to meet some creative directors and then one of the founders of Airbnb was in the meeting as well. It was a moment of, ‘wow, okay, these guys have taken us really seriously.’ We then flew home and they gave us two weeks to do a creative pitch (which was paid for). The creative pitch was for a particular part of the Host Program and how you got more hosts into Airbnb. 

So we went on a bit of a mission to understand how to do this. One of the things we did was turn the office into an Airbnb listing and put it for rent on the site, so we can understand being a host.

We did the two week pitch and at the end of the pitch, Joe Gebbia and the creative director, Andrew Shapiro, announced that they were flying to London because we'd flown to San Francisco last time. They came and took the pitch in our Airbnb listing. 

One of them sat on the bed, one of them sat at the table and we delivered the pitch. We won the pitch, and it became this reciprocal thing straightaway: we'd flown there, they flew here. We then subsequently built out a model where there was a team of five of us that did the rebrand. We would go to San Francisco for pretty long periods of time and live in Airbnb’s in the city and work in a one team mentality with the Airbnb team.

Essentially what we did there is build this very successful Inside Out model. We got to know a company incredibly well, both professionally and socially. We spent a lot of time with them. And so we understood the business where it was going in a very immersive way: a good example of what I think the future of branding looks like. We had desks in their offices. I had an Airbnb entry card. I had an Airbnb email address, you know, I acted very much as a kind of like person inside the organization. 

James & team embedded with Airbnb and hosts for 3 months

Amanda Gordon: Now you’re running Koto - tell me about how your relationship with Airbnb developed after leaving Design Studio.

James Greenfield: When the Airbnb work got released to the world I decided that it was time to go and do my own thing. Myself and Jowey, who were part of the team of five, announced that we were leaving Design Studio. And so we started Koto.

And then after a year where we weren't allowed to work with Airbnb, we found ourselves in San Francisco, visiting friends, and I ended up bumping into Brian. And so we went over to this open area where Brian operated. He was building the experiences product which was a massive departure for Airbnb.

Subsequently, also at the end of the rebrand, Jonathan Mildenhall joined as CMO. The rebrand was then starting to translate into marketing and a lot of other things that were happening in the background. So Brian asked us to help. And so we found ourselves yet again, working inside Airbnb, this time in a much less open way because previously what we've done consciously with the rebrand is built, essentially, a pop up studio in the middle of the office.

We built out the experiences product working hand-in-hand with Brian Chesky and a small group of people from brand products and marketing. We debuted that to the world. We then went on to work on the integration of a business called Luxury Retreats, which turned up into Airbnb Luxe, the luxury tier. We built the premium tier on Airbnb, which is Airbnb plus, and a number of other innovations that never made it out. I think this the secret sauce for the whole thing: a business where you had very key decision makers who understood the power of brand and product and marketing to influence their business.

I'm not surprised to hear at a later date that Brian turned off performance marketing because you could see that he was starting to get a sense that this was an uncommon brand and for us to reach his goals, we need to reach all the parts of the world of the audience. I ended up living this very hybrid life where, you know, at one point I was working for someone else as a creative director, but I also worked at Airbnb and then subsequently when I was at Koto, I was the leader of an agency, but I was also a kind of a surrogate Creative Director at Airbnb as well. The last thing I did for them was work on some of the IPO documentation and some of the thinking in that which was in a kind of pre COVID place. Obviously COVID was not very kind to Airbnb, but then subsequently they've gone on to thrive afterwards. Here's why I think it's been successful:

I think the Inside Out model was totally the right thing for them. I think, key stakeholders understanding the power of something and engaging in it and being able to bend our process worked. Rather than having a rigid agency process where it's almost like the client has to go through the sausage machine because of, you know, cost effectiveness or whatever the agency decides. Also, Airbnb recognized that outside brand consultant expert help would really kick them off into that next level. At that moment in time, if you look at it, Facebook had branded themselves and Google had never really gone out to the world at that point in 2013, 2014. They were starting to but they hadn't really gone out.

I think in a way, the challenge 10 years on is what's a tech company and what's not a tech company? The headline I always used to say to people was we have to act and operate as a travel company. We are not a tech company. And people would be like, Oh, you're a tech company. And I was like, we've got an app. We're in a world where everybody's going to have an app and that doesn't set us apart. And yes, we've got, you know, great product that exists underneath it. But for the people that use our product, they don't see a tech company, they see a travel company. And so it's really important that we start to become that in people's minds. And I think 10 years on that has proved true across loads of categories. And actually, I think more and more as we look forward in the world, the tech bit will fall away. It's not my original thought: everyone says everyone's a tech company. But 10 years ago, I really, really really felt that very, very, very, very vividly.

Amanda Gordon: When does it make sense for a business to invest in brand? How do you talk to your clients about that?

James Greenfield: Really, really good question. It's the kind of question I get asked quite a lot as well and I think my answer to it obviously depends on who I'm talking to and where they're at. 

Pre-product. I built a couple of brands at Koto where it was pre-product pre-team. And because the idea was a little bit crazy, we really needed to make this thing feel more real in the mind, otherwise it would never have happened. People would have been like, oh, you know, there's this guy. He's got this 20 page slide deck. He wants X million in funding. And it's pretty hard to imagine any of this ever being real, you know, and an investor is no different than any other viewer of a brand which is: trust has to be imbued through those kinds of repeated interactions, the communication, the succinct nature of it. 

Series A. The simple answer is that if a company gets to a series A position, which is where an investment market happens and it's asking for capital, it's got customers, that's a pretty sweet spot to start to build a meaningful brand. To get to that point, and if you're doing it right, you have probably worked out the product market fit. You've probably worked out what your team looks like in terms of the blend of people you need to be able to make this thing real. You've probably got traction in at least one market and so you understand that there’s kind of the global element of it. 

Missionaries vs mercenaries. But I think there's two types of company founders in the world. There is the addressable market founder: the person who goes, the insurance market is worth X trillion a year, but no one's insuring bikes. Versus the person who is the passion founder who fell off their bike got injured, didn't wasn't insured, had issues with it afterwards. And when I know from my personal experience, that bike insurance is the way forward. And by the way, the TAM on it is X trillion or whatever. I think it’s a lot easier to make a brand with a passion founder because they’re communicating around something that they've got massive, massive insight into.

If there's a passion founder and they've learned enough, it's never too early to get on with the brand. One of my big challenges that I have in our industry again and again is trying to tidy up brands that were too mature when they realized they needed a proper brand.

James Greenfield: What's good about that series A position is you have the capital to be able to do it properly. You have an inclination of where your product is going. But if you have made some fundamental mistakes, that outside help is going to be able to identify them. 

So that said, I think you can still have a great rebranding process with a company that's got 4,5,6,7-10,000 employees, as long as you build the program for it properly. And as long as the appetite for change is there and you understand what you're doing. One of the things that I find, again and again, is you get to this point where people are on this product-only kind of approach where you know, they've got loads of performance marketing, product features, all this kind of stuff. What they can't do is get their existing and their potential customers to really have anything beyond transactional relationship with them because features will only get you so far. 

And so therefore, this kind of mantra I had is that the product is not enough. It's very hard for a lot of tech companies particularly to hear that because what do I mean the products not enough? I've spent you know, X number of months and all this kind of stuff to get to this moment in time. You can have a product passion founder, and you have to kind of lead them to that point in time where they accept and understand that they do need a brand on top of this as well.

Amanda Gordon: Is there anything that you found that really landed that case, to invest in a brand, or is it dependent on who's in the room with you?

James Greenfield: I think in Airbnb’s case, there was a lot of admiration for Apple being just down the road. I think knowing that Apple have been successful by charting that path gave Airbnb confidence.

The irony is that I work with a lot of other companies not because they look at Apple, but because they look at Airbnb. It’s a second order effect. You know, Airbnb’s source was Apple, but someone else I work with sources Airbnb. Partly, the ex-management of Airbnb post IPO kind of created a dandelion effect where the seeds blew everywhere. And that's led to a lot of our current day to day work where people we had great working relationships with now work somewhere else.

Amanda Gordon: Can you give me a little bit of an insight into how long and how deep this process was?

James Greenfield: Yeah, so that three month process, we had five people who pretty much worked full time. We created three futures for Airbnb and that process, and then kind of iteratively worked our way to the one that we saw. I reckon it cost a lot less than a lot of people would think because we did it in a way that was very intensive but as a UK agency working in the US so therefore, you know, lower costs.

I think with Airbnb for it to be really successful is we had to elevate it to this very particular piece of work where we were willing to abandon our attention on anything else for that whole period of time, basically, just to make sure that we could see it across the line. The biggest challenge in the whole thing was the complexity of the result. 

At the beginning of the rebrand Joe Gebbia wanted to do this kind of workshop where he brought in 10 crates of every piece of design that he'd ever liked, or kept. We started off by looking through everything that he loved, as a way of building a shared understanding of design.

I think there's not many agencies that would say that's a good use of our time, spending a few hours looking through 1000 pieces of graphic design…but you’re building a shared narrative with someone. I will always remember that very clearly: like, right - we're building a conversation here.

That’s all! For the record, I’ve embedded with a clients before: it was fun, exhausting, and led to really great work (but also, it’s a). Have you? Be brave and share in the comments - what’s embedding been like? What makes it work well?

Was this message forwarded to you? Need to make the case for brand? Sign up below 👇

Questions? Hot takes? Brands you want to see covered? Hit ↩️ reply.