Going Grae: rebranding with intention
If you are reading this, you have landed on our beautiful, rebranded website (we are pretty excited about it, can you tell?). While you’re on the site, you can of course read more about who we are, what we do, and the wins we’ve had, but let us start by sharing the why behind going Grae.
The turn of the decade ushered in our desire to take a deep breath and deep dive on why we do the work we do, the core values we want to align ourselves with, and how we want to interact with you: our clients, partners and vendors.
We believe that the process of making a decision can be as informative as the final outcome, and, in the interest of transparency, we wanted to share how we got to the brand you see today.
A little history
Meg Alexander Events, an experiential marketing agency, was founded in early 2019 by, you guessed it, Meg Alexander. While Meg's name gave the agency credibility thanks to her expertise in the industry, it was not a reflection of her vision for the company. So, she set out to build a brand focused on the already existing team, the team that would grow in the future, and the ways in which that team would work both internally and with our clients.
Deciding to go Grae
If we weren't going to be Meg Alexander Events, who were we going to be? After several rounds of naming ideations that centered around who we were as a team, we decided to go Grae.
Grae is derived from the word graeae. The Graeae were three sisters in Greek mythology who shared one eye among them. If you are thinking of a scene from Hercules, you’ve got it, we think of that too. Thankfully we don’t have to share an eye, but we do work to make sure not only our team, but our clients as well, are always aligned on one vision, whether that is the vision for the event, product or company.
Aligning on core values
Having a name that reflected who we were and achieved the goal of representing us as a team was a great step, but the name alone wasn’t going to guide us as we grew. We needed to develop our core values. So we took the time to explore our past experiences and asked ourselves questions like: What were the best moments and the worst moments? What did we learn from each of them when they happened and what are we still learning as we reflect on them years later? What moments still give us goosebumps? What do we still wish we had done better? What do we want to change? And, perhaps most importantly: What are we going to do differently in the world of events and experiential marketing?
Looking back isn’t always easy, but it made a few things clear. The areas we felt passionate about, the areas that we raised our voices when we spoke about, the things that got us really fired up, led us to acknowledge that it is vital our team lead with transparency and that we put people at the core of every event we produce. Ultimately we believe that keeping these two things front of mind builds trust, and that trust is that essential component that allows clients and vendors alike to wrap up projects together feeling proud, and excited to dive into the next adventure.
You can read more about our promise to uphold these values here, but know that it is an iterative process. We have a number of things built into our workflow to ensure that we use these values to guide what we do, but we’re always looking for new opportunities to reinforce them into every corner of our work.
Bringing Grae to life
Equipped with our name and core values, we’ve worked to bring our brand to life visually with a logo and website. To lean into our humanity requires communication. With this in mind, we have launched this blog to keep you up to date on exciting things happening internally, with our clients, and in our industry. In the interest of transparency, we promise to keep you informed as we grow and will keep in touch regularly via this blog, Instagram and LinkedIn. But we also love dialogue, so drop us a line or give us a call whenever you want to chat!