We've spent decades working with clients to understand who they are, what they do, and why it matters. After recently launching MORE’s new brand, we were faced with our most challenging client we’ve worked with to-date: ourselves.

Redesigning MORE’s website was a true labor of love. We are passionate about the work, dedicated to the mission, and we live and breathe the brand every day. We expected it to be fun, exciting, and at some points, stressful. What we did not expect was how much the process would deepen our empathy for the client experience, and how much it would reinforce what we always tell the organizations we partner with: great work takes focus, intention, and time.

The Hardest Story to Tell Is Your Own

In our website projects with clients, the challenge is invariably the same: how to make so much meaningful work easy to navigate and understand. To get there, we do a lot of work before we start building. We ask questions like:

• What’s the most important thing your organization does? 

• If you had five seconds to impress someone, what would you say?  

• How could you describe the work you do in one sentence?

We often say that positioning is the art of sacrifice, partnering with clients to distill and dig down to the core of their mission. This is how you find the heart of your story.  

As it turns out, that’s much easier to do from the outside. When the work is yours, every service, capability, and point of pride feels essential, and deciding what leads requires a level of objectivity that is far easier to offer others than to find for yourself.  

What the Process Taught Us

Every step of the way was a learning process, one that will make us even better collaborators with our clients.

Flexible brands are the best brands
We developed the new MORE brand earlier this year, and the website was the next key milestone in its implementation. We always build brands to be nimble and flexible, and this was a true stress test for ours. How would the color palette play out? How would our voice stretch and remain consistent? (Hint: it worked out great.)

Plan, then pivot
We did all the tests, frameworks, and approval-wrangling we possibly could upfront. Then, when it came time to combine all of that into a live site, we realized certain things weren’t working. The planning gets you 90% of the way, but the willingness to pivot is what takes you over the finish line.  

Get input at every phase
Getting buy-in from key people is critical. Key people mean more than just leadership. For us, it meant everyone who works at MORE, past clients, and people within the industry we respect. Buy-in can’t just happen once—it’s got to happen at every step—a lesson we’ll build into the approval process for clients going forward.  

People make it possible
Behind every image, word, and piece of input are people. The what is critical but the who is just as important. Understanding roles and responsibilities upfront, identifying decision makers, and knowing how to keep things moving forward are skills we flexed throughout the process. We ground all of this in our own values of inclusivity, partnership, and respect when we work with clients. Being on the receiving end of this philosophy deepened our commitment even more.  

The process is the project
The way we approach the work ends up shaping the work. At MORE, we believe in a process that leaves room for second guesses, what ifs, and have we thought about this?-es. That’s not anti-process. That is the process. That level of integrity led us to a website that felt not only well built, but like a true reflection of the work we do at MORE.  

What We Bring Back to Our Clients

Being our own client gave us a clearer view of what we ask of the organizations we partner with. Handing over your story requires trust, and honoring that trust requires care, rigor, and patience. At MORE, we've built our practice on integrity and empathy. This project strengthened both, and we're proud of the result.