MIC recently sat down with Jo ChunYan for our monthly podcast, Wingrove Street, and discussed her intelligent design solutions for branding her client businesses.
Jo ChunYan is a brand designer, coach, and owner of her own design studio, Jo ChunYan. Jo specialises in rebranding businesses to help them scale and grow and has created intelligent design solutions for over 40 brands in the wellness industry. Jo also brings her six years of extensive experience in product and packaging, product rebrands and marketing, successfully launching new products for the FMCG, food, and wellness space within Australia and overseas.
Jo’s creative journey in branding started when she was a student doing a double degree in engineering and pharmacology. At the end of her final year, she felt an intuitive nudge to explore a more creative avenue and signed up for a graduate diploma in graphic design. From her first lecture, she felt she was in the right space and knew she wanted to pursue design.
After graduating, she worked for six years launching products and marketing for FMCG companies before moving to Japan. “I ended up starting my own company when I was there,” Jo shares. “That gave me a lot of space to build it up because I was already in this new country and studying part-time, so it gave me the freedom and flexibility to really build it up.”
Jo took her business full-time as soon as she came back to Melbourne. She enjoys how it uses both parts of her brain. “Design is very creative, but it is also very rational because it’s also about problem solving. So I think it allows me to tap into both at the same time.”
Jo works on international branding with companies in the wellness space. “Holistic yoga teachers, healers, counsellors, psychologies, and companies in the health food space as well,” Jo says. “I help them create a visual brand identity that really captures the essence of who they are and what their business is all about.”
Branding is a broad and often misunderstood concept. Jo explains, “There are a lot of things that make up a brand. I look at brand identity, which includes the logo, the colours, all of that, but it’s really about exploring and helping my clients understand exactly who they are.”
Jo’s journey with her clients takes them back to the story of why they started their business. She helps them to understand their bigger vision, their mission, their objectives, who they want to speak to, who their clients or customers are, and what their offerings are in the world and how they want to serve.
Jo has her clients ask if their brand were a person, how would it make other people feel? She then works to create a brand identity from their story and articulate that through design.
“Maybe the brand personality is all about freedom,” she shares. “So it’s like they want to make people feel free. What visual aspects could you control in some way that can convey that sense of freedom? So it might be the layout or the colours or the textures. All of those things have a story that arcs back to the feelings that you want people to feel.”
She calls this process intelligent design solutions. It involves a deeper strategy than simply looking at the aesthetics. Jo wants to ensure that each design component is not present “just because we want something to fill the space. There is a conscious decision behind each and every decision. If you’re not requiring something, it needs to go. Everything has a functional purpose for being [in the design], not just aesthetic purpose.”
In terms of pain points for her business, Jo feels the main challenge is going through the feast-or-famine cycle. “As a designer, it’s really common to hear from other designers as well that they’ll get booked out months in advance and be working late nights and into the early hours of the morning. But then after a period of working consistently, they’ll find that they don’t have any clients and it’s because they haven’t continuously marketed their business and kept those new leads.”
One of the turning points for Jo in avoiding this pain point was bringing someone on to help with her business. She has a VA to assist with accounts, invoicing and social media.
She also values taking one day every week to work on her business rather than on her client. She calls these her “CEO days” and uses them to step back and reflect on the business, processes, and complete admin tasks.
Outside of her brand design business, Jo has written a book. It’s called The Intuition Journal and she describes it as a guided journal or workbook to help people deep dive and uncover their thoughts to find insights into who they really are.
This further emphasises Jo’s purpose of helping people find the essence of who they are.
Find Jo on her website jochunyan.com and on Instagram @jochunyan.
We thank Jo ChunYan for participating in our Digital Solution program wellness event, Remotivate, Reengate, Revitalise, and for sharing her experience and wisdom on our podcast!
Melbourne Innovation Centre is delivering the Digital Solutions program across Victoria. To learn more about how this program can support your small business, click here.