New look, sharper mission

This is how Shiftbase looks from today.

When I joined Shiftbase a year ago, I spent my first few weeks talking to customers. One of them told me he always sneaks a look at how the first bite lands. A satisfied face, a smile or a small approving nod were exactly why he kept doing the work.

He said it as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. His face and the way he sat up told a different story. The glint in his eye and the enthusiasm he told it with have stayed with me ever since.

I've been collecting stories like that since I started at Shiftbase. At first I heard them from colleagues, later straight from customers. And it plays out the same way every time. Ask someone about their business and a light comes on. Ask about the admin and it goes out again.

Obvious? Maybe. But it's the reason Shiftbase looks different from today.

Eight hours a week

Small business owners spend an average of eight hours a week on admin. A full working day, as far as I'm concerned. Every week. And as I said, for most people those aren't the tasks they got into this line of work for. At businesses with several sites or franchises it builds up so far that someone gets hired to handle it. Sometimes a small team.

Admin isn't the only thing making life harder for shift-based businesses. Staff and materials cost more. Finding new people is harder than it has been in years. And it feels like every year brings new regulation to keep up with. Growing is a good thing, of course, but the more you add, the more admin comes with it. That's true across every sector we work in. From restaurants to care, and from logistics to leisure.

Plenty of our customers know the late evenings spent finishing the schedule, or making sure everyone gets paid on time and correctly. You would rather spend that time on family and friends, on sport, or on your colleagues.

Our mission got sharper

Shiftbase has been around since 2010. Kars and Jurrien started with something that was mostly about schedules and later about hours. That's still what most people know us for, and fair enough, because we got good at it.

But what we see at our customers goes well beyond the schedule now. People admin is a sum of parts. Leave, contracts, sickness, reviews and the payroll run at the end of the month. Each piece on its own is manageable. Together, there goes your evening.

So earlier this year we sharpened our mission. We take admin away from businesses that work in shifts, step by step. Step by step, because this obviously isn't a switch you flip. And we would rather promise something we can show you next month than something for two years' time.

You can already see that direction in the product. HR PRO has just launched, Performance before it. And we're building AI into Shiftbase that does the digging for you. You keep the decision, we make sure the groundwork is already done.

Our brand fell behind

And then there was our old logo.

Blue, with an icon standing for time and for ticking things off. Well made and perfectly legible. The trouble is you'll find that same icon on hundreds of other apps. Scroll through the most popular apps in the Play Store or the App Store some time. Blue is the default colour for a lot of software companies, and an icon with a tick is the obvious way to draw a productivity app. We came to the conclusion that we looked too much like the average.

Is that a problem? Not in the short term. It got us thousands of businesses across Europe. But it did feel like a ceiling. We couldn't show who we really were. And as Brand Manager, that started to nag.

There was something else too. A clock and a tick are about tracking time. We're about what you do with that time.

Zero Admin, Full Spark

At heart, the new look comes down to one thing: taking admin away. Because when you manage that, something comes back. That glint in your own eye, or in your people's. Zero Admin, Full Spark.

The idea runs through the whole design. Three choices I'm most attached to.

The colours. We now work with six colours that flow into each other. A gradient is energy on the move, and that's exactly the feeling we were after. Our blue hasn't disappeared, by the way, but it has shifted towards purple. The standard category blue and the feeling we want to create don't sit together particularly well.

The logo. The old one was about time. The new one is about shifts, because that's what Shiftbase will always be about. What's in the name, as they say. We also played with the perspective of the two shifts in the icon. That was our way of leaning into what makes us different.

What we didn't do. Somewhere along the way there was a round shape with a literal spark inside it. Warm, recognisable and exactly what you'd expect from a company with the word Spark in its essence. We left it where it was, because it would have walked us into the same trap as the old logo. Have a look at what most AI and tech company logos look like these days.

And it doesn't stop at the website. Our product has had a fresh coat of paint too. On top of that we've reworked our typography, shot new photography with real customers and real colleagues, and rethought how we talk. We'll keep building on it over the coming months and years.

What isn't changing

Worth saying plainly: you can do exactly what you could before. Same login, same schedule, same time tracking, and the same people on the phone when you need them. The change is on the outside.

If you do come across something that looks off, let us know. On a change this size something somewhere will go wrong, and we'd rather hear it from you today than find it ourselves in three months.

What comes next

In this new look we'll keep adding things that take admin off your plate. And we're pushing further across Europe. More than 8,000 European businesses use Shiftbase already, and there's room for plenty more.

We need you for that. We want to know which bit of admin costs you the most evenings. Call support, raise it with your success manager, or join Labs and try new features before anyone else. Sending us a message works just as well.

Tell us what can go. We'll take it away.