To rebrand, or not to rebrand?

Summary

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MarTech Podcast ™: "To rebrand, or not to rebrand?"

Host: Benjamin Shapiro
Guest: Danielle Peterson, CMO of Amaze
Date: December 1, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the complex decision of rebranding through the real-world example of Amaze, a creator commerce platform. Host Benjamin Shapiro interviews Danielle Peterson, CMO of Amaze, about orchestrating the unification of multiple distinct creator-centric brands into a single, cohesive platform. The discussion dives into the methodology, challenges, and benefits of rebranding—not just as a cosmetic change, but as a business growth strategy that protects brand equity and operational efficiency.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Why Rebrand? Identifying the Problem

• Danielle shares that Amaze inherited multiple creator solutions through acquisitions, each with strong individual identities but lacking a unifying narrative.
• Internal confusion became apparent during a company exercise: “We asked our employees how they would explain what we do at Amaze...Most of them had no clue...That was sort of an aha moment for us.” (Danielle, 02:54)
• Rather than a "brand problem," Amaze faced a "clarity problem" that impeded both growth and scale.

The Strategy: Taxonomy Over Mission First

• Amaze chose a phased approach, starting with taxonomy and naming conventions before developing a unified mission—a reversal of the typical rebranding playbook.
• Danielle: “Instead of starting with a mission statement...we felt it was more important to start with the architecture...so that any new solution or sub brand we acquired could plug into it immediately.” (Danielle, 08:26)
• Sub-brands were not deprecated but recontextualized under an umbrella (e.g., "Spring by Amaze," "Teespring Marketplace by Amaze"), allowing gradual transition without abrupt disruption.

Technical and Operational Considerations

• The rebrand involved visual cohesion and, eventually (not yet fully realized), technical integration such as a unified login system.
• “Adding the 'by Amaze' was sort of phase two...The goal would be to bring all of that under one login so that a creator comes...and is presented with multiple solutions based on wherever they are in their journey.” (Danielle, 06:44)

Marketing: Balancing Corporate and Sub-Brand Promotion

• Amaze functions as the corporate identity housing multiple solutions; it's introduced primarily through the sub-brands rather than being heavily promoted alone.
• “Amaze is the corporate identity and what allows us to have the cohesive story. But it doesn't necessarily need to be promoted outside of having a corporate website...With 'Spring by Amaze'...Amaze becomes front and center.” (Danielle, 09:59)

Timing & Execution: “Repairing the Plane While Flying”

• The rollout was incremental, protecting operational continuity.
• Memorable moment: “We made a joke internally that our rebranding exercises were while we were scaling were like repairing a plane that's flying...you can't land the plane, but you can fix it in phases.” (Danielle, 11:15)

Value and Measurement: Moving Beyond Vanity

• Convincing the CEO centered on efficiency—not aesthetics.
• “The conversation wasn’t around vanity, it was around velocity. In order for us to move as fast as he wanted us to move, the rebrand was so important. Without that unified brand, our marketing spend was fragmented across all the ecosystems…a long term growth strategy.” (Danielle, 13:42)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the need to rebrand:

  • “We realized that we didn't really have a brand problem per se, but we had a clarity problem.” (Danielle, 02:55)

• On the approach:

  • “It's kind of just like re-architecturing a city without really tearing down the landmarks.” (Danielle, 05:59)

• On the phased rollout:

  • “We made a joke internally that our rebranding exercises were like repairing a plane that's flying...you can't land the plane.” (Danielle, 11:15)

• On marketing spend post-rebrand:

  • “By unifying Amaze, we could focus all of our dollars on one story and one funnel and one set of KPIs and really turn vanity brand into a growth strategy.” (Danielle, 14:00)

• On lessons learned:

  • “The tech stacks don’t create clarity. The strategy does.” (Danielle, 17:05)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 02:35: Why Amaze decided to rebrand
• 03:41: Common themes between the acquired brands
• 05:16: How to unify brands while preserving equity
• 08:04: Purposeful reversal of conventional rebranding sequence
• 09:56: Marketing dynamics with umbrella and sub-brands
• 11:15: The importance of phased implementation
• 13:27: Persuading leadership to invest in rebranding
• 15:23: Hindsight: what could have been done differently

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Lightning Round: Danielle Peterson on Martech, Public Companies, and Creators

• Biggest Martech fail: Integrated three CRMs with incompatible data, realizing later the importance of unifying strategy before tech stack.
  • Danielle: “Those CRMs, man, that gave us a run for our money.” (17:05)
• HubSpot chosen as unified CRM. (17:56)
• Difference between private and public CMO roles:
  • “A private company, you sell a vision, and a public company, you sell proof. Every brand decision has to map back to investor confidence, predictability, transparency.” (Danielle, 18:09)
• On Roblox as a brand platform:
  • “Virtual merchandise can drive the same emotional value as physical products...Marketers should stop thinking about Roblox as sort of a niche platform.” (Danielle, 19:20)
• Advice to new creators:
  • “It’s really less about the platform to me and more about how they’re able to build connections with people online.” (Danielle, 21:13)
• Monetization for creators:
  • “You come in, you design products...and sell them to your fans...If you have a connection with your audience, the monetization part happens naturally.” (Danielle, 22:29)

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Conclusion

This episode offers a practical, nuanced view of rebranding—not as a superficial marketing exercise, but as a strategic imperative to drive clarity, scale, and resource efficiency. Danielle’s experience at Amaze demonstrates that successful rebrands require system thinking, phased execution, and always keeping the core value to both customers and employees at the center.
Memorable closing:

• “It was less about logos and colors and more about how we go out and tell our story.” (Danielle, 15:33)

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

From advertising to software as a service to data across all of our programs and clients clients, we've seen a 55 to 65% open rate. Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs better than TV advertising. Typical lifespan of an article is about 24 to 36 hours. We're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call to action. Then it's just a matter of timing.

[A]

Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world class marketers that you use technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's the host of the Martech podcast, Benjamin Shapiro.

[B]

82%. 82% of marketers have worked on a rebranding project, but only 39% say they've achieved a unified brand experience. More than half of rebrands end up with confused customers, wasted resources and lost brand equity. The challenge becomes even more complex when you're dealing with multiple brands with their own audiences. So how do you unify disparate brand voices without destroying what made each brand valuable? I'm Benjamin Shapiro and joining me today is Danielle Peterson, the CMO of Omaze, a publicly traded creator commerce platform that serves over 137 million creators across 163 countries. And today, Danielle is going to walk us through her methodology for combining amazes 4, 5 distinct creator brands into one cohesive platform without destroying the company's brand equity. Danielle, welcome to the Martech Podcast.

[C]

Thanks, Ben. Happy to be here.

[B]

Excited to have you on the show. Congratulations. Rumor has it this is your first podcast.

[C]

It is my first podcast.

[B]

How exciting to have you here telling the story for the first time of Amaze, combining five companies into essentially one creator platform. Let's start off at the top. Walk me through what happened with Amaze and when did you realize you needed to rebrand?

[C]

Sure. So we found ourselves in a really unique position of having multiple creator solutions. We call them solutions. Each one of those solutions had a strong individual equity, but not really a cohesive story. So as you can imagine, our customers were confused. There was different logins, different tones, different really just different levels of trust. Even internally, we couldn't really tell one consistent story to our investors, to our creators. Obviously, or to our partners. So we actually did a pretty fun company exercise and we asked our employees how they would explain what we do at Amaze to their favorite relatives or to their kids. And most of them had no clue really how to package this up. So that was sort of an aha moment for us. Um, we realized that we didn't really have a brand problem per se, but we had a clarity problem. And the rebrand became about building one unified narrative that would help us scale across the current audiences that we had, but also which was really important to us to be able to scale across every new acquisition that we made.

[B]

So I'm familiar with Amaze because I remember the brand Teespring, which was like a hot startup back in the day. Now it's an established sort of long standing company, but you have a series of other creator centric brands. Talk to me about how. What's the common theme between all of those brands?

[C]

Of course. So each one of those brands sets out to help creators monetize their fan base in one way or the other. So we have a Spring by Amaze platform, which helps creators launch their own products and merch lines. We have Teespring Marketplace, which brings visibility to those products. We have Studio Biomaze, which helps creators design and create more compelling digital websites, so to speak. So yeah, we have. We really try to acquire companies that help creators do better at what they're trying to do, which is create content, and then we can do the rest by helping them monetize that.

[B]

All right, so the common theme is all the platforms that you own or solutions were all related to supporting creators and they were distinct brands. So essentially you were a portfolio or a holding company and you decided to move away from individual properties, combining them into one.

[C]

Correct? Yes. And they didn't necessarily exist as creator companies when we acquired them, but that was the overall goal we had in mind for them as they came into our ecosystem.

[B]

So how did you think about unifying those brands without losing the independent brand equity that each one of those companies had built?

[C]

Sure. So we started with taxonomy and naming conventions, interestingly enough, to build an entire system, not necessarily just a rebrand campaign. So we designed an umbrella brand, which is a maze, and our sub brand sat underneath that umbrella to help transition the equity and familiarity of those sub brands rather than start with a mission. So we rolled everything out kind of in phases, first internally and then to the public. But we didn't deprecate any of the brands. We sort of just graduated them, if you will, spring or Formerly Teespring, as you, as you mentioned, became Spring by Amaze. Our Teespring Marketplace came Teespring Marketplace by Amaze, which was sort of the bridge that helped creators and fans connect the dots, is kind of just like re architecturing a city without really tearing down the landmarks, if that makes sense.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, I understand the sort of. You mentioned taxonomy, but essentially you're tacking on by a maze, so you're adding a brand as a modifier to the existing brands. I'm assuming there's a technical component to this as well. You mentioned that you had like login unification or. I don't know, you didn't say you had login unifications, but as you're adding the buy a maze, are you sort of changing the back end to make all the infrastructure the same as well?

[C]

Yeah. So it's interesting that you bring that up. We. So. So adding the buy Amaze was sort of the phase two in the rebrand. The phase three would be unifying it all under one one login. So right now we. We kept the platforms as they exist. There are still multiple logins. There's just more brand cohesiveness because visually they all make sense together and they're all brought under one storyline. But the phase three really was bringing everything under the Amaze umbrella, allowing people to log into Amaze and to. I should say this is the goal and objective of what we're trying to do. We haven't done it yet, but the. But the goal would be to try to bring all of that under one umbrella and one login so that a creator comes to our company, logs into Amaze and is presented with multiple different solutions based on wherever they are in their journey.

[B]

As a creator, you said you started with this notion of taxonomy, which to me sounds like you figured out the name first and then worked backwards from there. Most of the time when I hear the rebranding story, it is. We had a mission. From the mission came the name, from the name came the marketing, Correct?

[C]

Yes.

[B]

Why did you go essentially what is backwards from the traditional way of thinking about what's the unified story and then creating the name?

[C]

Yeah. So we really didn't want to disrupt the solutions as they currently existed. Each, each of the sub brands already had its own mission and audience. And so instead of starting with. With the mission statement, as you said, we really felt it was more important to start with the architecture so that when we netted out, we would have again, we would have the architecture built so that each one of the brands leveled up to the core corporate brand. That meant we needed a corporate framework that could unify everything, which I spoke about earlier. And like you mentioned, we essentially went backwards on purpose, building that strong corporate identity enough so that any new solution or sub brand we acquired could plug into it immediately and make sense to our creators, investors and partners, rather than us having to scramble and be like, okay, now we need to figure out how this fits in. It really was meant to be very flexible and the mission ultimately evolved from that ecosystem we built, not the other way around.

[B]

I'm curious to hear how you think about marketing. You went from three or five brands which became sub brands with essentially a corporate brand on top. You went from five to six brands and now one of them is supposed to rule them all. And you still have the exercise of marketing each individual solution. What used to be a brand and now you have this umbrella brand. When you're thinking about marketing, are you extracting marketing resources from promoting the individual solutions to promote the brand? Did you get more budget? Like, how do you think about, well, let's promote Amaze, let's sell Amaze as opposed to let's sell Spring, let's sell our creator solution.

[C]

So what's interesting in what we did and what we built was that Amaze was Amaze is the corporate identity and what's what allows us to have the cohesive story. But it doesn't necessarily need to be promoted outside of having a corporate website that houses all of our solutions in one place. Because when you have Spring by Amaze, when you have Teespring Marketplace buy Amaze, that Amaze becomes front and center in the conversation. Which is why I call it phase two and phase three being, you know, we have one central login. So. So we do continue to answer your question, operate each of the businesses individually, but the Amaze piece is sort of built into that marketing and the goal again, and the objective is that one day that becomes the main source of truth for our creators. And they recognize it because it's been in their face using the solutions all this time.

[B]

Yeah. So the exercise of rebranding never ends. Right. You don't just slap a new logo on and say you're done. There's this constant tweaking and repositioning and it is a long standing thing to go from one brand to another. Um, give me your advice for timing a rebrand where you don't stop your operations, but you're doing this phased approach.

[C]

Sure. So we made a joke internally that our rebranding exercises were while we were Scaling were like repairing a plane that's, that's flying. Um, you can't land the plane, um, and you, you. But you can fix it in phases, maybe. So the phases became really important. We rolled out all the visual and name changes incrementally so that each one of the touch points that we built, the phases. I've said phases a lot, but super important. Each one of those had time to build trust with our employees, which was important, but also with the audiences that we served. And this really did, it seems pretty basic, but it really did allow us to retain operations at close to 100% because we were really protective of our engineering and operation teams while, while we were doing this.

[B]

All right, so the internal employees are sitting around saying, I don't know what the heck I'm doing. I'm working on five different companies all at once. I'm super stressed. And you said, look, I'm going to clean this up for you. Here's your company identity. Now you can get back to work. You've got one company that you're working for five separate phases. Not phases, look, now I'm doing it. Five separate solutions products that you're selling that all umbrella into one. And you're slowly making the migration from brand to brand so the customers get this buy. Amaze experience.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

What's the future of Amaze as a brand? Now that you have this cohesive, well thought out, unified brand experience, you're going to do a central login to make some utility for the customers. But are you running your Amaze super bowl ad next? What happens now that you have this unified brand?

[C]

Hey, I, I won't deny that completely, but. Well, I won't, I won't confirm or deny that I should say. But I think that the objective long term is that when people think of the creator economy, when creators come in thinking about how they would like to make money, they. That Amaze is at the forefront of those conversations. And that really is the, the, the long, the long goal.

[B]

How did you convince your CEO to commit rebranding resources when it can't be measured? Like something like performance marketing?

[C]

Yes. So our CEO likes to move fast. And so our conversation wasn't about vanity. Right. A lot of times people think that rebrands like, oh, someone doesn't like this color or like again, logo like you mention. The conversation wasn't around vanity, it was around the velocity. So in order for us to move as fast as he wanted us to move, the rebrand was, was so important. Without that unified brand, our marketing Spend was fragmented across all the ecosystems. Like you mentioned. By unifying Amaze, we could focus all of our dollars on one story and one funnel and one set of KPIs and really turn vanity brand into a growth strategy. A long term growth strategy.

[B]

Yeah. It's funny, as I think about the rebranding stories I've heard, normally it is new CMO comes in, tries to rescue the brand and says we gotta start all over. We're gonna even rename the company. And now all of a sudden we're wasting marketing budget, resources, cycles doing things like having logo discussions, buying domains, like all the headaches that go around rebranding. And what's interesting to me about your story is there is a unification that actually impacts your marketing spend. Right. You are able to combine resources once the rebrand was done, as opposed to a more traditional one brand rebrand just tends to be a distraction. If you could go back and do it again, what would you do differently?

[C]

That's tough. Thinking back, we definitely could have been more protective of engineering and operations resources. That was definitely something that we set out to do. But again, being in growth mode as we are, I think we could have done a better job at that. Otherwise, I don't think we could have really done much too much different. I'm really happy with the way that this came out and the story that we built. And yeah, it was less about logos and colors and more about how we, how we go out and tell our story. And so I think, yeah, I think it came out really great.

[B]

I love the cohesive story about combining brands and taking that central theme that you have and not only unifying it from a logo and a nomenclature, not only unifying it from a logo and a nomenclature perspective, but also allowing the company to reallocate its resources to focus on promoting one thing that broadly speaks to the company's mission. And even though to me, the way that you went about it, you thought name instead of mission first, you still ended up at this place where it helps preserve marketing resources, which is kind of the opposite of what I hear from most rebranding stories. So kudos to you. Congratulations.

[C]

Thank you.

[B]

All right, Danielle, I want to move on to our lightning round where I'm going to ask you a couple of Martech related questions about you, your company, your experience, and specifically a little bit about rebranding. Are you ready?

[C]

I'm ready as I'll ever be.

[B]

All right, here we go. What's the biggest Martech fail you've ever experienced?

[C]

So during our Rebrand we integrated three different CRMs, if you can imagine, before realizing none of those spoke the same data language, which was really kind of detrimental to that exercise. So it taught me a lot about tech stacks and migrating brands together. But the tech stacks don't create clarity. The strategy does. Um, but yeah, those. Those CRMs, man, that gave us a run for our money.

[B]

Was it that each individual property you were merging together had its own CRMs, and you realized you had three or so?

[C]

It was that. And then it was this exercise of trying to not lose all the data that lives within each one of those CRMs. Right? You're trying to piece together things, you're trying to band aid things, when really you should have just started from scratch.

[B]

I won't ask you who you dumped, but who did you go with as your one CRM?

[C]

We went with HubSpot.

[B]

There you go. I've heard of them. All right, let's move on.

[C]

All right.

[B]

What is the difference between being a CMO of a private company versus a public company?

[C]

Sure, I can ask this a lot. A private company, you sell a vision, and a public company, you sell proof. So every brand decision has to map back to investor confidence, predictability, transparency. It really forces you to lead with data. But again, never lose that story that you've built.

[B]

It seems like the spotlight is always on you when you are at a publicly traded company, but you're also reporting to the quarter. Right. Since you're reporting to the street, have the metrics and KPIs changed for you as a CMO?

[C]

No, they haven't changed. They just become more visible to the world. But, yeah, I mean, this is my first time leading marketing at a public company, so it's been an. It's been an exciting learning curve for me. But again, yeah, just really. It's so clear as we made the transition, that private company is really more about the vision and what you're trying to do. And the public company is like, okay, here's. Here's proof that we were able to do that, which is actually really exciting.

[B]

So here's a question for my kids. What should marketers understand about Roblox as a serious platform for creators?

[C]

Love it. So we recently launched a platform called Amaze Digital Fits, which exists on Roblox. And it showed us that virtual merchandise can drive the same emotional value as physical products. So I'm sure your kids will tell you that in Roblox, they get to play games as an avatar. And we've created a product where you can dress those avatars in specific types of clothes, but then also go back and. And print physical products so you can match your avatar, which is really fun. So I think marketers really should stop thinking about Roblox as sort of a niche platform and kind of understanding maybe it's a frontier, maybe of brand experience in general.

[B]

One of the things that I feel like people miss about platforms like Roblox is they are as much as they are games, they are communication platforms. Right. For the younger generation, you don't run to the schoolyard to hang out with your friends and light things on fire anymore. You. Not that I would ever do that. You connect with the headset on and your iPad and you talk to your friends and you get to have all that sort of camaraderie. But most of it's a digital experience.

[C]

Exactly.

[B]

So the communication platform and being part of that conversation amongst friends tends to be more powerful to me than the actual physical gameplay.

[C]

Yeah, 100%. And we are all about figuring out a way to make those communities and those communications more exciting. And I think that's what we sought out to do with Amaze Digital Fits.

[B]

All right. We're going to keep it in the creator realm. I want to ask you, what platform would you suggest a new creator who is starting from square one use to make their first hundred thousand dollars?

[C]

As a creator, it's really about building an audience. And the building an audience piece comes from being authentic and from being able to talk about something that you really care about. And so I suggest that any creator who is starting out at square one really find the thing that they're passionate about and that they can be authentic about, because that comes through in their content. It's really less about the platform to me and more about how they're able to build connections with people that are online. That's really all that people are looking to do online is build those connections. And so I would say start from there. And then once you get some traction and your audience is growing, you can come to our platform and. And we can help you monetize the fan base that you've built.

[B]

Talk to me a little bit about that. You know, I totally agree with you in the sense of the platform has to be a fit for who the creator is. You're great at video editing. You got a beautiful face. You're traveling around. There's always good scenery. Be a YouTuber.

[C]

Sure.

[B]

You want to sit at home and talk in front of a microphone, start a podcast. Right. You're a great writer. Okay. Be on Substack. Like that stuff. Just keep doing. Do something great. Do authentic, have a clear position. Build an audience, be authentic. Now you've got an audience. How do I turn that into dollars?

[C]

Yep. Well, that's where Amaze comes in. You come in there. Well, there's multiple ways that you can turn your audience into dollars. One of those ways is. Is launching your own merch line and. And selling products to your fans. So you. You come in, you design products based on whatever vertical that you create content in, and you add those designs to products, and you sell them to your fans. And the idea is that you've created such a connection with them and they've been so excited about the things that you post that they would want to buy them from you. Um, and that. That's one of the main ways that we. That we help creators monetize their fans.

[B]

So I need to start making Martech T shirts to. To make my first.

[C]

Did you sign up?

[B]

Well, there. There's that. And I honestly, I think of the merch aspect and, and what Amaze does very specifically focused on primarily consumer content, right? And there's sponsorships, there's advertising revenue, you know, and then some people have products and services, and they're using their content as an ABM strategy. So on the consumer side, I totally agree with you. Merchandising, advertising, that's the end. Sponsorship seems to be the way. In my world, it is abm. Build a brand, sell your service. And a lot of that has to do with not only the relationship between you and the audience, it's the relationship with the person that you're. You're talking to and creating the content with as well.

[C]

Mm, 100%. It's very similar for content creators, though. It's really about authenticity and connecting with your audience across all those things. If you have a connection with your audience, the monetization part happens naturally.

[B]

Well, Danielle, I have to congratulate you. I think threefold. Number one, congratulations on executing a wonderful rebrand and combining five relatively disparate brands into a unified voice. Congratulations on your first CMO job at a publicly traded company. And also, most importantly, congratulations on completing your first ever podcast.

[C]

Thank you so much. Times three.

[B]

All right, and that wraps up this episode of the Martech podcast. Thanks to Danielle Peterson, the CMO of Amaze, for joining us. If you'd like to contact Danielle, you can find a link to her LinkedIn profile in our show notes or on martechpod.com or. Or you can visit her company's website, which is Amaze Co. If you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app or subscribe on YouTube and we'll be back in your feed in the next week. All right, that's it for today, but until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy. Foreign.

[A]

Thanks for listening to the Martech podcast and I hear everything. Production Looking to launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand? Then visit iheareverything. Com.