Sojourn Turkey

During my time working with Sojourn, I assisted in creating itineraries, revamped affiliated websites, developed copy for the sites, and headed up the preliminary stages of rebranding.

For me, the highlight of working with Sojourn happened while I was conducting interviews to nail down brand messages. During these interviews I listened to staff & owners talk about their love, dreams, and hopes for Sojourn.

Copy for Brand

Where we Started

When we first considered rebranding, the owner of the company Angela told me she wanted the Sojourn she saw online to feel like the Sojourn she knew. Sojourn crafts customized, beautiful, serendipitous tours of the Mediterranean— but she worried the site and other media used didn't reflect how great the company actually was. The site felt outdated and the words felt wrong. She told our team that if Sojourn was going to do a rebrand, she wanted it to be done right. The rebrand needed to capture the true heart and essence of the company and if that wasn't doable in the amount of time we had, then we would drop the project.

My primary area of operation in the rebrand was articulation. That is, I was in charge of discovering the words we'd use to articulate the values, purpose, and vision of Sojourn. In order to best understand what this vision was, I compiled all past information on Sojourn's purpose and values I could find.

Once I had compiled all the information, I developed a list of questions to help me better understand the heart of Sojourn. With these new questions, I began conducting interviews. It was time to see if the words previously used to describe Sojourn on paper truly aligned with the words the staff and owners would use.

I documented everything from the interviews and then began brainstorming and synthesizing. Every common thread or similar idea was pulled out and set aside until finally the main phrases, words, and ideas were found. I iterated through the key words and ideas with the owner until we nailed some down that could get the rest of the team started on developing brand design.

To the left is an initial outline of Sojourn's customer story. It starts with the customer, and continues into who Sojourn wants to be as an answer to that customer's problem. I used this outline to explain to the brand team what information I had gathered through staff and owner interviews. Once the design team was able to see Sojourn's vision, they could begin designing.

The design team took over selecting colors, fonts and developing the new logo- as I continued to focus in on the company's key messages and developing new copy to be used across the Sojourn network. If you'd like to view some of the copy I developed, click the link to the right.

View Copy