ShopMy :: Brand Strategy, Visual Identity, Motion, UI

In 2022, a small team with a big idea was entering a crowded market. Today ShopMy is a $1.5 billion company that leads the premium creator economy, a position written into their brand strategy before most people had ever heard their name. We've been their creative partner every step of the way.

The Problem With the Word "Affiliate"

When we first met the team, ShopMy was still called Shop My Shelf. The platform was built by three technologists out of MIT and Harvard, and the whole company was the founders plus a handful of teammates.

The idea was already special. They had built a genuinely creator-friendly way for expert tastemakers to monetize their recommendations. But the business had a catch built into it. Its success depended on attracting the most credible experts in beauty and fashion, and those were precisely the people who wanted nothing to do with affiliate marketing. To a world-class makeup artist or a skincare expert, the word "affiliate" invited eye-rolls. The category's whole vibe, with its hype-y tone and its promise that anyone can be an influencer, was the opposite of how these creators saw themselves.

So the platform faced an identity trap. Look and sound like the category you're in, and you repel the very talent your model depends on.

The founders sensed there was room at the top of this market and nobody was claiming it. What they needed was a brand with the strategy, name, and look to actually claim it.

The Strategy: A Cut Above

We started, as we always do, with a brief developed hand-in-hand with the founders. We researched the competitive landscape and mapped every player, and the picture confirmed the team's instinct. The entire industry was crowded into the same casual, everyone-welcome territory, leaving the premium space wide open.

The strategy sharpened into something we could all build on. ShopMy would be positioned as the premium platform connecting top-tier brands and expert tastemakers, with an elevated experience that matched the caliber of talent on it. We gave the idea a name, "A Cut Above," and a personality to match. Think of the smartest friend in your circle, the one you rely on for good advice over brunch. Confident and approachable, never intimidating or salesy. The tonal shorthand we used internally was SoHo House meets Slack.

We also gave them a vision statement that, at the time, was pure ambition: to define and lead the premium creator economy.

The Rebrand

Following the brief, the name came next. "Shop My Shelf" was literal and limiting. It said beauty products on a shelf, when the company was already headed toward fashion, home, and eventually an entire commerce ecosystem. We recommended retaining what was great about it and shortening it to ShopMy, which was cleaner, more confident, and left room to grow.

Then came the identity. We rebuilt the visual language from the ground up, refined and editorial, closer to the pages of a fashion magazine than the dashboard of a SaaS tool. Typography, color, photography, and a voice designed to signal expertise without ever having to claim it. We wanted the next great skincare brand or world-class makeup artist to land on ShopMy and feel it was built at their level.

The new brand launched alongside ShopMy's $8M Series A. The new name and a much bigger ambition arrived at the same moment.

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Growing Up Together

What started as a foundational rebrand became a creative partnership spanning every stage of the company's growth.

Over the years we've launched products, built campaigns, shaped the app experience, created educational animations, designed the pitch decks that helped tell ShopMy's story to investors, designed email systems, branded their podcast, and evolved the identity as the company grew into it and then beyond it.

ShopMy now has an outstanding internal creative team and works with a roster of agency partners. Our role today looks different than it did when the whole company could fit in one room, but we're still the partner with the longest memory. We know the brand inside and out, making out collaboration seamless, productive and rewarding.

The Results

Read ShopMy's press coverage today and you'll find the same words written into that 2022 strategy: premium, curated, taste. The vision statement about defining and leading the premium creator economy stopped being aspirational somewhere along the way. It's now simply what the company does. Many of the platforms on our original competitive map have faded, while ShopMy became the category's defining name.

Shortly after the rebrand, ShopMy closed its $8M Series A. Then came an $18.5M round led by Inspired Capital, a $77.8M raise covered by the Wall Street Journal, and another $70M that brought the company to a $1.5 billion valuation.

It was not the brand that achieved that – the product and the team did. But when a company grows this fast, the brand has to keep up without losing itself, and four years and four funding rounds later, ShopMy still feels unmistakably like a cut above.