Extra, extra! Read all about it! Our first-ever client, Uncanny Unedited, has officially launched — and we’re absolutely beside ourselves. 

Uncanny Unedited, sister brand to Uncanny Content, is a first-of-its-kind book marketing brand for authors. As a marketing agency, the Uncanny team serves mostly online businesses run by marginalized communities — women, people of color, disabled folks, and those who identify as LGBTQIA+.

One community the whole team wished they could serve (but couldn’t find a way)? Authors. The whole team at Uncanny are avid readers, and one of their biggest “wishlist clients” was an author who was ready to market their books. 

Being a marketing agency, though, the Uncanny team (and its owner, Latasha) knew that adding another audience to their list would just muddy their own messaging. The author idea was put on the back burner, as most exciting ideas are. 

One day, Latasha was in the shower — where we can all agree the best ideas start. As she was scrubbing her hair, she had an idea: What if Uncanny had a sister… and that sister served only authors? 

Thus the idea of Uncanny Unedited was born. 

Starting the sister brand creation process

Part of the sister brand process involved mapping out what the offers would be for Uncanny Unedited, and how similar they would be to their current offers.

At Uncanny Content, the team already offers strategy intensives (quarterly content plans that business owners can execute on themselves) and done-for-you content and copywriting. Uncanny Unedited will also offer those same services – but with authors and book marketing strategy in mind. 

Because the audience for Uncanny Unedited is a bit less “marketing savvy” than the Uncanny Content audience, Latasha and her team realized they’d need to add some offers to the Uncanny Unedited brand.

After some deliberation (and more shampooing in the shower), Latasha came up with two new offers:

• The Enemies to Lovers book marketing membership (coming summer 2024)
• The Uncanny Unedited Shop (coming spring 2024)

The book marketing membership will allow authors a chance to build a community and learn something new about how to market their books each month. The shop will contain calendars, checklists, and resources to help them show up and DIY their strategy. 

The other element of starting a sister brand? Creating the visuals, voice, and client experience that extend the Uncanny “reputation” into a new branch — while also having its own distinct flavors.

That’s where Rendezvous came in. 

Building the Uncanny Unedited brand

When we onboarded Latasha and mapped out the project for Uncanny Unedited, two things were clear:

• They already had a robust offer plan
• They wanted to have more fun with visuals

This meant that our main focus was on supporting Uncanny Unedited in identifying the platforms they’d need for their all-new offers, i.e. a community platform for Enemies to Lovers and a shop platform for their digital products.

Once our offer audit was complete (phase one of our Rendezvous Roadmap!), we got to work really nailing down the mission, vision, and values of Uncanny Unedited. While the brand team already has a really robust idea of who they serve at Uncanny Content, the author and publishing space is incredibly different from online business marketing.

So we dug deep into the values and keywords that really hold up the Uncanny Unedited brand. This is what we created: 

The real core of Uncanny Unedited is the idea that traditional publishing has only served the “select few” — but authorship is for anyone who has a story to tell. Plus, they decided to hone in on romance, fantasy, and fiction authors as their ideal clientele, which means there’s an element of sass and cheeky attitude that comes into play.

Nailing down the core values and brand keywords helped with the next step of Uncanny Unedited’s brand discovery: moodboard creation.

This is a draft of just one of the three moodboards we created for Uncanny Unedited 

Because of the whimsical nature of their niche audience (romance, fantasy, and fiction authors), there’s a real sense of imagination and color that comes into play for this brand. And because we’re also working with an existing brand that has a lot of dark greens, blues, and purples, we wanted to pull that out while also creating something distinct.

After some imagery tweaks to the moodboard and ongoing communication, we decided on final colors and a direction for the overall style guide. With the moodboard finalized, we could also move to an all-important element of the brand: Site copy.

Colors chosen for Uncanny Unedited

Site copy and style guides

While Nicole (our head brand designer) got to work developing the style guide, Latasha (our head copywriter — yes, the one who also owns Uncanny Unedited) got to work with the website copy.

This was a completely new site build, and was also an all-important step in fleshing out some of the voice that would both tie Uncanny Unedited to its sister brand and separate it. Pulling out quirky one-liners, references to book tropes, and infusing their love of books, the Uncanny team worked hard on the site copy, welcome sequence, welcome guide, and other assets needed to complete the “voice” element of this brand.

Here’s just a snippet of the website copy doc: 

While the Uncanny Unedited team worked to get the copy and messaging finalized, Nicole also delivered logo options:

To blend the more “harlequin” feel of the left image with the bubbly, “stamp-like” feel of the right image, Nicole reworked the logo to come up with the final version: 

She also mocked up a number of illustrations that would extend the “fictional vibes” to the brand, including skeletons, aliens, eggplant emojis, and more:

(These illustrations are one of the Uncanny Unedited team’s favorite parts of their brand build!)

After hashing out a few minor details about the illustrations and decorative elements, the Uncanny Unedited style guide was finalized.

Next, it was on to web design.

Designing a new website

Creating a one-of-a-kind experience for authors was one of the biggest reasons that Uncanny Unedited decided to work with us. For the website design, Nicole built out a sitemap, mockups, and eventually full page designs that were built in Showit by Megan.

The result? A website that is bold, unique, and fun to explore. Each of the elements also speaks to the exact kind of author Uncanny Unedited wants to support: fun, a little sassy, and always with their head in the clouds.

Prepping for launch

While we were building out the style guide and website, it became clear that Uncanny Unedited would need to launch their core offers — the One Bed Inn Strategy Intensives and the Why Choose copywriting package — before launching their membership and shop. 

This often happens during a new brand build, as it’s a lot of work for an internal team to create new products, new offers, and all the systems needed to support them. As we neared launch, we worked with Latasha and the Uncanny team to prioritize the offers and create a plan for when the next two offers would launch.

We also provided Uncanny’s team with social media templates, email footers, social media avatars and banners, and other critical assets so they could start seeding the launch before everything went live. Uncanny is known for creating “runways” with their clients’ launches, and they did a great job doing so with their own launch. 

With a chosen launch date of February 14th — how fitting, right? — all systems were a-go the week before. Not only did we test the website and each of their funnels, but we also made sure that the Uncanny team had everything they needed internally to throw this launch party properly. 

Launch day: Meet Uncanny Unedited

Today is officially launch day for Uncanny Unedited, and we’re absolutely glowing over this brand build. Not only is the mission important, but the care and attention Latasha and her team put into building this brand is clear in every detail.

So, without further ado, meet Uncanny Unedited! 

You can find Uncanny Unedited on Instagram and TikTok, where they’ll be sharing their most anticipated reads, marketing tips, and author highlights.

You can bet your bottom dollar that we’ll be following along as they book new author clients — and we’ll be helping them build out their membership and shop over the next month. Stay tuned for more updates! 

Want help building your sister brand from scratch

This whole journey with Uncanny has been so much fun, and has us so excited for our next sister brand build! Will it be yours? If you’re looking to rebrand your current brand, start a new business entirely, or develop a sister or sub-brand to your current one, we can help.

We don’t just offer the visual branding elements. Instead, we offer full discovery of your offers, voice, mission, and more — to ensure that every piece of your brand feels custom-made (because it was). 
Schedule a call with the Rendezvous Creative team so we can gab about your branding needs… and start making them happen.