This post was supposed to be about the name “Servinity” – how we came up with it, what the other options were, and what it means. But an interesting question came up after the last post: What would our business have looked like if we had kept the name “Pick Up A Shift”?

As it turns out, we actually spent a good deal of time and money creating identity materials for Pick Up A Shift, or PUAS as we called it for short. (The less-than-appealing nickname PUAS is yet another reason we changed to Servinity.) The process of creating a logo is another start-up “growing pain” notch we proudly wear on our belt.

Rather than trying to explain the inefficient and, at times, backwards steps we took during this process – setting a budget, finding a graphic designer, communicating our ideas, selecting a design – lets just say that we spent too much time, too much money, and were never even happy with the final choice. We worked with three different graphic designers and looked at over 30 different PUAS logos before finally deciding on one. Here are some of them.                                                                                                                                                                                                                      These were two the first logos we saw. The themes were very specific to the service industry, but ultimately we decided we needed a logo which would appeal to a broader audience.

Theme:  “In The Weeds”

Theme:  “Cocktail Napkin”

Each of the next three was considered a possible winner at one point or another:

This is the logo we eventually chose.  The colors for Servinty were based on this one: 

Finally, here is a promotional card we had designed:   

In the end, all of these materials became irrelevant, but we learned a lot from the process.  Because of the mistakes we made with PUAS, we did it better with Servinity.