They say to “never change a running system” — something is working out just fine, so why try to make it better and run the risk of breaking it all? Our system is a mobile games company, and it’s running at incredible speed, yet we decided to make a substantial change: rebranding from “Fluffy Fairy Games” to Kolibri Games.
How we got there
But let’s start at the beginning. Our company was founded as Fluffy Fairy Games a little more than two years ago by a group of friends in their student apartment. Our founders loved mobile games and had the idea of breaking into the market with a really accessible idle game that places a high focus on player feedback… and it worked! A few months later, their first game Idle Miner Tycoon was already captivating millions of players worldwide, bringing them international recognition. “Fluffy Fairy Games” was an ideal name for the takeoff. The almost emblematically funny and friendly name, loved by employees and players alike, expressed the company’s aspiration to make games for absolutely everyone. Fast forward two years and Fluffy Fairy Games, now with eight-figure revenues and over 80 employees, needs a new name — one that better reflects its essence and underlines its status as a serious contender in the gaming industry.
The team is impressed by the new KOLIBRI neon sign.
The process
Although we were a little reluctant at first to throw ourselves into the rebranding process, we seized the chance to reshape something that we really love and make it express who we are even more. First, we created a special task force that worked closely with the Hamburg-based brand profiling studio Karl Anders to find a new name for us. We started absolutely from scratch, throwing around names, going through word fields, playing with loose associations, until, after a long process of liking and disliking names, we found the perfect match:
Kolibri [ˈkoːlibri]
Kolibri is the German word for Hummingbird. The relatively small bird can reach over 1.200 heartbeats per minute. It flaps its wings around 50 times per second, making it extremely agile and mobile. It’s hard to find something that screams agility more than this little guy.
Kolibri perfectly represents what we are as a company: agile and fast moving. We are lean and don’t carry any unnecessary weight.
We tested the word with random users and select industry friends, added “Games” to minimize confusion and set about creating the logo and other assets, again greatly helped by our friends from Karl Anders.
And finally, countless hours of logo design and iterations and adjustments to those later, we arrived at the style guide we have today.
The composition and all variations of the new logo.
Little Bird, Big Name
We are Kolibri Games now, but we are still the same company, with the same values, working on games that our players love. With a new name that reflects us so well, we feel we are even more prepared for whatever challenge is to come.
We stayed truly lean and sought improvement even in something that we were extremely attached to.
So to those saying “never change a running system”, we answer: “No system can ever run fast enough”.
