Dreamers & Doers got started “by accident” out of a personal need more than six years ago. I’d recently left the corporate world after working for a large healthcare hedge fund, with a few stints at venture-backed startups on my resume.
I was ready and determined to start my own company, but quickly realized my past experiences hadn’t quite prepared me for the journey I was embarking on.
I hit a lot of roadblocks. Some external and others, internal. When you’re a first-time founder, there’s a lot to figure out. The self-doubt and overwhelm can feel debilitating at times as you try to make your way along the winding, unpredictable path of entrepreneurship.
It didn’t take long for me to realize that I could significantly increase my chances for success while finding joy along the way by joining forces with other entrepreneurial women. What began as a necessary “side project” of bringing together women who were building something of their own for weekend co-working sessions, grew into a community of several thousand entrepreneurial women supporting one another within a year.
After witnessing what’s possible when extraordinary women connect with and elevate each other, I dropped my other entrepreneurial pursuits. I knew I had to fully devote myself to maximizing the positive impact Dreamers & Doers could have.
Today, we’ve created an ecosystem of over 30,000 women globally. At its core is Dreamers & Doers’ private collective - a highly curated community of over 600 extraordinary entrepreneurial women who fuel each others’ success by offering mutual support.
The journey to get here has been anything but easy and still has its challenges. Yet, we’ve had so many wins along the way, too #brag. Most importantly, we are so proud of our members. We pinch ourselves daily that we get to work with such extraordinary women. We’re also proud of the incredible team we’ve been able to put in place. This team allows us to amplify our members’ work by connecting members to each other, providing high-impact visibility opportunities, and access to game-changing resources.
For over half a decade, we’ve been hyper-focused on creating value for our members and supporting them to the best of our ability on their journeys. Serving them is, and always will be, our greatest honor, joy, and highest priority. We’ve grown a lot over the years, both as a community and a brand. After being heads-down in execution mode for so long, we felt it was finally time to make sure our brand reflected who we've become - a brand that honors our members.
So here’s to our next chapter: a new look that reflects where we want to go with a mission, set of values, and visual identity that represent our essence for being.
Our goal for embarking on this process was to better reflect the caliber and beautifully diverse backgrounds and personalities of our members, as well as the profound impact we’ve been able to have on so many of our members’ lives.
What does this actually look like? Here’s what we’ve been working on over the last five months:
Our Definition and Mission
We’ve updated our definition, or how we describe Dreamers & Doers to “a private collective for entrepreneurial women.” This reinforces the fact that we’re doubling down on our commitment to serving entrepreneurial women, which we define broadly.
Whether our members are entrepreneurs or intrapreneurs — founders, leaders within startups, innovators within corporations, investors, journalists and more — they are challenging the status quo for women in business, and we want to rise to meet the efforts of these disruptors, innovators, and creators.
The one thing that all of our members have in common is that they can benefit from joining forces with other brilliant trailblazing women. Now more than ever, we’re here to help make that happen, which is reflected in our new mission: “to catalyze the success of women leaders and their ventures through community and mutual support.”
Our Values
Dreamers & Doers isn’t your average community — and we want to keep it that way. That’s why we dove deep into solidifying the values we look for and expect from each of our members.
Mutual Support: We are a collective of givers who turn mutual support into a competitive edge. We set healthy boundaries. It's the only way we can continue giving and show up as the best versions of ourselves.
Authentic Vulnerability: We show up as our whole selves, honoring both the personal and the professional. By showing up as our authentic selves, we build stronger connections.
Genuine Positivity: We pick positivity over judgement (including self judgement), while leaving room for constructive feedback. We lift each other up and never ever tear each other down.
Total Accountability: We can't be #bettertogether or pursue audacious dreams without follow-through. We pride ourselves in taking responsibility for our actions and for our own destiny.
Our Branding
Next up was creating a visual identity that reflected our new direction!
This was no easy process. Being a community-focused “product”, our “product experience” is strongly influenced by how our members behave, interact with each other, and what expectations they bring into our collective. We knew that our brand strategy and visual identity would strongly impact all these facets and could either have a very positive or negative impact if we didn’t thoughtfully execute.
For example, we highly curate for our collective, yet once members are accepted we create an environment that embraces authenticity. We knew that we had to bring across exclusivity while still exuding warmth. We also value quality over quantity when it comes to our members. It’s about attracting the right people instead of being appealing to everyone, and we wanted our brand to reflect that.
Furthermore, we’ve created a wider ecosystem of over 30,000 women globally that functions vastly differently from our much smaller, highly curated private collective. It was important to effectively distinguish between the two as part of our brand strategy and visual identity.
We’re so thrilled to share that the rebrand (both strategy and visual identity) were executed by Dreamers & Doers members Scout Lab. An unfathomable amount of brain power, talent, thoughtfulness, and ingenuity went into all aspects of the process and the Scout Lab team was the best strategic and creative partner we could have asked for. Through countless meetings, emails, and iterations that incorporated feedback from members (all done remotely, thanks to COVID!), they created something we are truly proud to share with you today.
You’ll be able to check out the updated visual identity — a.k.a., the beautiful, dreamy yet equally strong and bold gradients, the modern yet classic fonts, the brilliant, welcoming and symbolic logo — on our website, including *this blog post*. We also put together this deck to run you through all the different aspects of our journey and elements of this rebrand.
And the funnest part of all, here is a snapshot of how our website, logo, wordmark and so on used to look like...and how they look now:
We hope you enjoyed this reveal! It was a long time coming.
Even More Fun!
Our updated branding is just the beginning. Alongside this work, we’re focused on continuing to grow an ecosystem that supports women who go against the grain and carve their own path. That’s why we’re thrilled to launch our blog, “Leading Visibly”, as well a thoughtfully curated monthly newsletter, “The Digest” - a go-to resource for trailblazing womxn. In it you’ll find thoughtfully curated resources and inspiration to help you dream and do. Sign up here to get the first installation next week.
We’re also thrilled to share that we were able to secure the www.dreamersdoers.com domain (moving away from the www.dreamersdoers.me domain we've been using for over half a decade). Woo hoo!
Beyond that, we’re committed to delivering ongoing, ever-improving and impactful value to our members in the Dreamers & Doers collective. There’s so much more we can, want and will do for you! Our top priorities are providing visibility opportunities, support, and access that power your entrepreneurial pursuits and change the game for you as women in business.
We’re in this for the long run. We’ve committed to tirelessly working on our mission of catalyzing the success of women leaders, catalyzing you.
Dreamers & Doers
Turning mutual support into a competitive edge.
