Le Wagon takes a new turn!

Some of you might think we’ve been pretty quiet these past two years. In fact, we’ve never worked so hard . Today, we’re excited to share with you our new brand identity which also celebrates our ambition to reinforce our status as global leaders in Tech Education.

These past two years, we:

Pivoted from a franchise model to a company-owned model. It means that most of our campuses are now managed by our own employees .
Grew from 40 to 180 Wagoners ‍ (Le Wagon’s employees) making us a globally distributed team able to operate on-site and remotely (70% of our new hires joined during the pandemic).
Grew to hit 15k alumni in a couple of years . We’re now in more than 45 cities across the world and most major Tech hubs.

Now, Le Wagon is no longer a local coding bootcamp, Le Wagon is a global leader in immersive tech training .

Le Wagon not only helps people change their lives, Le Wagon becomes a lifelong learning platform with a strong community that unlocks people’s potential and help them access new opportunities throughout their career .

We think this new brand system is more reflective of our ambition and more adapted to the markets where we operate.

The bootcamp industry is changing and we need to evolve with it

The education and bootcamp industry has grown really fast in the last two years — with hundreds of new online and offline competitors — which were boosted by the opportunities created by the pandemic, the rise of the creator economy, and the explosion of VC investment in Edtech.

At Le Wagon, we always pay attention to what’s new and what’s getting traction. New players bring novelty and interesting perspectives. As an established brand in this industry, we need to welcome change while staying true to our foundations.

The explosion of coding bootcamps worldwide

Our new brand system needs to feel fresh and last

When we discussed with our CMO, Amandine Aman, what to change for our new brand re-launch, we reviewed our last brand rework of 2019 and evaluated what we wanted to keep and what we wanted to add:

Keep our camper logo . Everyone loves it — so we decided to modernize it rather than reinvent the wheel (like we tried back in 2019).
Keep the red ❤️. We care about people, we want to inspire, and support them as they transition to new careers — so red is the perfect color to suggest these values. We’re focusing on pictures, not illustrations. Le Wagon is not a SaaS — it’s all about our students and teachers, not our LMS features.
Stay bold and exciting . Le Wagon is about career change and getting new skills to unlock your potential. It should inspire people and make them enthusiastic (hence more colors) and excited about learning!
Our students and teachers, the essence of Le Wagon

Our new logo — the same but different

It’s simplified, more modern, and looks more like an app icon! (We also lost a window on this branding journey ).

We learned from our past mistakes for this iteration. In 2019, we explored tons of logo variants and spent a lot of time on the logo rework to finally end up with a minor upgrade. This time we sprinted on design, shared a new version with the company, and focused on making decisions to move forward!

The challenge of red brands

It might seem silly to spend a lot of time on a colour scheme. That’s the price to pay when you are a « red brand ». First, we needed to slightly adapt our red brand colour to make it a bit less vibrant and use it with other colours more easily. We explored lots of red variants and red brands, from Netflix to Airbnb, to find the right balance for us.

Once we had our new red, we started working on complementary colours. That was a bit tricky.

If you pick a blue or a green, you end up looking like a French or Italian company. When you are a global company named “Le Wagon,” it’s actually a liability to reinforce your French origins .
If you pick a dark color, it feels boring and institutional. Not exactly the kind of brand that inspires people to learn new skills and re-invent their career.
If you pick a vibrant color (orange, yellow, pink), it conflicts with your primary colour that needs to remain the main star of your system

So after lots of explorations, we landed on purple! Interestingly, this was the secondary colour from our previous palette and was already favored by the design team.

Our previous palette from 2019. The purple was the secondary colour mostly used by our teams in practice

We explored lots of purple variants to finally find the perfect purple that was deeply vibrant and worked well together with our brand color. We also kept our current fonts and added more variants in sizes and weights as part of the new design guidelines!

Here is our new purple along with new color scheme and combinations.

Loop into our new color scheme and combinations

And here you can see it live on our new website (coming ) and our social accounts.

Conclusion

For this new brand refresh we learned a lot of lessons from 2019. We focused on what matters (a strong brand that will stay, a new colour scheme, robust design guidelines), and saved time by making strong calls to avoid reinventing the wheel or exploring too many directions (logo rework, illustrative directions).

This new brand now needs to live. We’ll surely continue to refine our guidelines and design systems as we use it. We love the result and believe Le Wagon is ready to take this new turn.= So welcome to the new look of Le Wagon! !

We hope you like it!

Thank you to the A+ Wagon team ❤️, contractors & friends and family involved in this brand rework.