Zivaro
How a Legacy IT Brand Rebuilt Itself and Grew from $142MM to $247MM
The SERVICES
Brand Strategy · Brand Development · Creative Direction · Visual Identity · Environmental Design · Web · Sales Enablement · Advertising · Trade Show · Merchandise
The TEAM
Produced in partnership with 4B Marketing.
Tyler Jacobson – Marketing Director
Aaron Rosenbluth – Content Director
Josiah Mothershed – Design Lead
INDUSTRY
B2B Technology / IT Channel
The STORY
Blue and a globe. In the IT channel, that was every brand, and GTRI used both. The company was a legacy IT firm and the brand told you exactly that: dated, indistinct, and the company knew it. They had already brought in a consultant to run a renaming process, and once the new name was chosen, they handed us the keys to everything that came next.
That name was Zivaro. A coined word with an available .com, easy to say, and quietly sophisticated when you heard it out loud. No competitor was moving in that direction. My job was to build a brand worthy of that ambition, and to do it in an industry where everyone claimed to be disruptive but almost no one looked the part.
The Challenge
Reinventing a legacy company is harder than starting from scratch. You are not filling a blank canvas, you are overwriting years of equity, habit, and internal comfort with the old way. The brand needed to signal brilliance, sophistication, and premium quality without losing the trust GTRI had spent decades earning. And it needed to give the sales team something they could actually win with.
MY CONTRIBUTION
I led strategy and creative direction across the entire rebrand and everything downstream of it. That meant the identity system, the launch, the office environment, the website, and the sales tools that carried the brand into real deals. I was not handing off a logo and walking away. We embedded with Zivaro to the point where our account managers worked out of their offices, nearly fully dedicated to the business. When your account team is working out of the client’s office, you are not a vendor anymore. You are the creative department, and the work gets bigger because of it.
The Work
Everything started with the brief: brilliant, sleek, sophisticated, premium. I anchored the palette in rich black backgrounds, which no one in the IT channel was doing, and that single decision made the gold read as unmistakably premium the moment you saw it. The tagline, Brilliant IT, gave the whole system a north star.
The wordmark used a modified Gotham Light for a timeless, minimal feel, and we rendered the letter O as a gold ring that we carried into iconography and patterns throughout the system. The extended palette pulled in metallics and jewel tones to reinforce the brilliance concept. From there we built backgrounds, textures, geometric collage hero images for each practice area, and a full custom icon set.
Then we activated it everywhere. Environmental design in the new office, exterior signage, a stationery suite, a new website, sales enablement collateral, decks, swag, and trade show materials. The launch event was branded DAY ONE, using the same gold O from the wordmark. It coincided with the company going public and issuing shares to the team, and the energy in that room is something I still think about.
After launch, the work shifted to arming the sales team. One-pagers, decks, and collateral that helped them close large contracts, including federal government work. At one point a new leader brought in a cheaper agency to cut costs. Within three months, Zivaro brought us back.
The Results
Zivaro’s revenue grew from $142MM in 2018 to $247MM in 2020, and the rebrand is credited as a significant catalyst for that growth. We took a tired legacy brand, gave it a premium identity at a pivotal moment, and handed the sales team tools that let them compete at a higher level. Throughout the seven year partnership, we grew our monthly agency retainer from $12k/month to $36k/month. In Q1 2025, Zivaro was acquired by Trace3, one of the largest technology solution providers in the country. That is the kind of outcome that tells you the brand did its job.
