Iris Works has rebranded to offer business-management system to all creatives
Iris Works, an Indianapolis, Indiana, business-management system servicing photographers, recently announced a rebrand to reflect the company’s evolution in the software space. The rebrand includes a full redesign of the company logo, online presence, graphics, communications and the user experience of the application itself. The new brand brings a sharp visual identity to Iris, characterizing the brand as an innovative, smart and intuitive, the company states.
“When I launched Iris back in 2015, I never anticipated that the company would become what it is today,” says Meredith Gradle, CEO and founder, said in a press release. “But staying stagnant is not something you can do in this industry; you have to evolve. Our new brand represents Iris today and a vision of where we plan to go in the future.”
Today, Iris is a thriving technology company designed to help any creative business owner organize and grow their business. The rebrand includes a full redesign of the company logo, online presence, graphics, communications and the user experience of the application itself. The new brand brings a sharp visual identity to Iris, characterizing the brand as an innovative, smart and intuitive.
“The new brand reminds us that change can be powerful, and reinforces the powerful changes coming to the Iris application.” – Meredith Gradle
Gradle had a career in health-care administration before starting a business in family portraits. It’s this background that made her realize there was a gap in the offerings for running portrait businesses.
“I realized I was dropping the ball with clients,” she says. “I began to look at different programs, but they were geared toward the wedding photography business and focused on how weddings operated. I didn’t need anything that robust, just something that would manage clients and send out emails and contracts. I don’t come from a technical background, but I am pretty proficient with computers, and when I couldn’t figure some of these out, I knew something was not right.”
Gradle soon realized there was a market for an easy-to-use and affordable business management system and, in 2015, launched Iris Works. The business now has a four-person team, offering two subscriptions programs.
Since then, however, she noticed the service’s user base was broadening beyond portrait photographers. In addition to some wedding photographers who “don’t really need the bells and whistles, we have a lot of people outside of the photography industry who are finding out about our system. They may do a search for a management system for small business and try Iris. We even have some real-estate agents.
“We have started to evolve naturally to more than photographers and into other creatives who are trying to organize their businesses, manage their clients and their projects,” she adds, and this is what lead to the rebranding.
“We don’t just serve photographers anymore. We see ourselves being able to serve other verticals in the creative space. The brand needed to be freshened up a bit. We are putting more emphasis on usability and on UI itself.”
And, what Iris Works doesn’t do, the system plays nice with other services. For example, at first, Iris Works had a gallery offering designed for shoot-and-share photographers but Gradle soon found this was not a way to distinguish Iris Works. Instead, Iris Works integrates with ShootProof to allow syncing of client and event information between the two services. A user creates an event in Iris Works and the corresponding gallery in ShootProof will be populated with the proper information, saving time and increasing accuracy for the photographer.
Gradle adds Iris Works will always be centered around making business management easy for creatives.
“No one gets into photography or a catering service to reply to emails or to send out contracts,” she says. “They get into it because their brain works a certain way, as a creative, and we try to be the other side of the brain.”