Guidewheel Brand and Messaging Development

Catherine Carr

Mar 44 min read

Updated: 2 days ago

How we helped a pioneering IoT startup develop simplified, high-impact messaging for customers and employees in time for a major launch and funding announcement.

A graphic arrangement of industrial spools of thread in shades of white, brown, red, pink, and purple.

San Francisco, CA

Industrial Technology

Focus: B2B, Internal

CONTEXT

Guidewheel’s founder had spent a decade in supply chain and operations and had seen firsthand how manufacturers lost production time to preventable inefficiencies. Large factories could invest in advanced tracking systems, but smaller ones relied on spreadsheets and manual tracking, leaving them at a disadvantage. She launched Guidewheel (with the working name Safi) while working on her MBA at Stanford, using innovative plug-and-play technology to reduce downtime and boost efficiency through real-time insights.

With a major funding announcement and launch ahead, the team needed to bring the company's unique story into focus quickly. Working under tight timelines, Vitamin C Creative partnered with the founder to develop foundational messaging and materials so the team could accelerate marketing and attract top talent.

With a major funding announcement and launch ahead, the team needed to bring the company's unique story into focus quickly.

VITAMIN C SERVICES

Brand Strategy

Brand audit

Stakeholder interviews

Customer insight analysis

Competitive analysis

Articulation of brand purpose, positioning, and pillars

Brand Activation

Messaging maps with variations for current/prospective customers and employees

Voice/tone guidelines

Naming guidance

Brand Expression

Development of core content building blocks including “About Guidewheel,” brand-driven FAQ, and quote catalog

Recommendations for activation across website and other marketing deliverables in preparation for launch

MOMENT OF CLARITY

The team had done a lot of deep thinking and hard work to articulate the unique value of their solution. They had a working 35-slide deck outlining their vision, their ideal audience, and the problems they were solving. It was very detailed, though, and the story needed to be simplified to help get potential customers and employees excited.

The story needed to be simplified to help get potential customers and employees excited.

A powerpoint slide detailing the current elevator pitch - for operations leaders for mid-size manufacturers who are seeking to get systematized, dependable operational excellence, but are struggling with guesses and estimates, constantly firefighting and repeating the same mistakes, and relying on key individuals instead of a consistent system, Guidewheel is the first manufacturing operations cloud that gives mid-size manufacturers the tools to meet goals, save money, and achieve operational excellence that is plug and play and provides automatic, real-time visibility into any machine’s activity. — *The team had done a lot of work to articulate what made their solution different, but the story needed to be radically simplified.*

Since there wasn’t time for 1:1 interviews, we analyzed customer feedback, case studies, and testimonials to pinpoint what current customers most valued about Guidewheel. One of the strongest themes was ease of implementation—factories with limited IT resources were able to get Guidewheel up and running in days, not months. As one customer put it, "Guidewheel is the simplest and quickest implementing IoT solution available to industrial customers. We adopted the solution for two different manufacturing plants, and implementation was less than a week in each plant for approximately 30 different production machines. We are a small company with no dedicated IT staff and really had no issues implementing this solution."

Customers also highlighted the clear impact on their business: "Guidewheel has had an immediate and positive impact on our business goals—so much so that we have rapidly implemented it across our entire organization and made it a cornerstone of our operating philosophy at the machine cell, plant, and enterprise levels."

We synthesized these powerful customer insights and the team's working materials into a new brand platform articulating Guidewheel's purpose (why they exist), position (what they do), and pillars (their unique value) in simple, clear language. We created tailored messaging maps for customers and employees to help them address the unique needs of each audience while ensuring strong brand alignment.

Guidewheel’s plug-and-play FactoryOps platform turns the real-time “heartbeat” of any machine into a connected, actively learning system for continuous improvement. LOW LIFT, HIGH RETURN: Clip Guidewheel onto any machine and unlock big wins right away. EMPOWERED TEAMS: Guidewheel combines shared knowledge and factory-floor truth in smart workflows that empower teams to perform better and better over time. ACCELERATING IMPACT: Expand and progress at your pace—the more you use Guidewheel, the more you get out of it. — *A messaging map for current and potential customers highlighted Guidewheel’s value using simple, powerful language.*

CREATIVE INSPIRATION

Given the tight timelines, the team was driving their naming exercise in parallel. We did quick feedback loops to ensure alignment with the emerging brand platform. Vitamin C created a weighted model the team could use to evaluate different names according to their most important criteria.

A spreadsheet detailing specific criteria, weighting, max score, and weighted score. — *Evaluating potential names against the team’s top criteria, including brand fit, meaning and clarity, creative potential, stickiness, ease of spelling and pronunciation, and availability.*

The team brought dozens of options to the table, looking for the right combination of clarity, stickiness, and availability. We found a winner in Guidewheel, and Vitamin C illuminated the story behind it: "Our inspiration comes from the hard-working guide wheels embedded in critical machine equipment throughout the factory floor, from conveyors to machines of all sizes. These small but mighty wheels keep key processes on track, eliminate friction, and ensure everything runs as smoothly as possible. At Guidewheel, we help hard-working factory teams achieve the same goals on a bigger scale through the power of the cloud."

CONTENT CLIP

What’s your vision for Guidewheel? Our immediate focus is to help manufacturers worldwide reach sustainable peak performance by making the shift from paper and spreadsheets to the cloud. We believe we can help that happen by working with manufacturers to make progress step by step—beginning with greater production efficiency and progressing to other steps that align business value to sustainability.
Where are you located? We’re a remote-first company. We sometimes meet up in person, but we primarily collaborate remotely with teammates in North America, South America, and East Africa. We make good use of remote-first communication best practices and work hard to be intentional about building culture without being in the same office.
Do you anticipate being remote-first forever? So far, it’s working well! Our team uses remote-first communication best practices, and we feel good about the transparency and collaboration we’ve been able to achieve remote-first. — *A brand-driven FAQ helps bring the brand platform and voice to life with content building blocks that can be used for the website and other touchpoints.*

HAPPY CLIENT

“This is terrific. Can't wait to operationalize the heck out of the great new brand messaging!” Lauren Dunford, Founder and CEO, Guidewheel

#brandstrategy #messaging #brandvoice #brandactivation #brandstorytelling #B2B #internalcomms #Guidewheel