The Story of Evreka: Moving Towards a New World

 

Evreka was founded as a leading R&D company focusing on developing Smart City Solutions with its ‘Creates Smart Cities’ motto.

During the early years, the EvrekaCrew (the minds behind the smart solutions) were mainly specialized in IoT and defining product capabilities around the IoT concepts. Today, the company and EvrekaCrew is moving towards an entirely different world.

 

 

THE STORY OF

 

EVREKA

 

SMART WASTE COLLECTION & CITY CLEANING SOLUTIONS

 

 

In this article, you will learn why Evreka had this evolution from the Smart City concept to Smart Waste Collection & City Cleaning Solutions, why it is shifting towards the SaaS (Software as a Service) world, and how the company shaped its product scope accordingly. In addition, you will see how the EvrekaCrew worked hard to reflect this change to it’s audience (this is the fun part!). After many hours of meetings, we succeeded in finding a new logo and tagline that represents the true Evreka brand image of today.

 

    How did this story begin?

 

We founded Evreka in 2015. We were four friends from the same college, which was the best educational institution for studying engineering in our country. The three of us (me - Umutcan, Mert, and Berkay) were studying our for our Bachelor’s Degree while the fourth (Mehmet) was pursuing his Master’s Degree and teaching as an assistant at the same university.

The four of us had one dream, this dream was offering cities tools and services to create Smart City’s, we worked for it night after night. Sadly, in 2017 during the early stages, we lost our close friend and co-founder Berkay. Now, we have him in our hearts and his vision in our minds. Every single day, we ask ourselves what Berkay would do if he were here.

 

 

This is from 2015. Berkay, we are doing our best to make you proud. Rest in peace.

 

From the beginning, we took enough time to observe the insufficiencies of waste collection processes, and did trough out research on how Smart City concepts are optimized and how it could be done better. We had a dream and so we created the EvrekaCrew.

 

We know the best stories are written by the best people. This is just a small part of our EvrekaCrew, to us, it’s not only our team but our other family.

 

A Brand New Specialization: Smart City Cleaning

 

As an R&D company, we developed smart waste collection solutions for municipalities, private waste collection companies, and smart cities. This was performed with our ‘EvrekaCore’ sensors.

Through the capabilities of the sensors, we were able to monitor the fullness level, temperature, location, and movement of all waste containers in the concerned field. With data gathered from the field, we optimized routes for waste collection trucks. In this way, trucks no longer needed to physically visit and inspect each waste container to check for garbage. Instead, we allowed managers to track and manage these operations with our ‘Management Dashboard’ for end-to-end control. Therefore, we achieved great operational efficiency rates.

As we started to serve more clients across the world, we did our best to catch up with the accelerating growth of the company. That meant fewer hours in the actual office but more hours in the field and with our clients. The operations we manage in more than 10 countries around the world, opened up new horizons to us; this vision has expanded and forced us to focus on different requirements coming from different backgrounds.

 

This is me (Umutcan) taking the photo… HereI’m helping a field team to install our sensors in Paris, France

 

As we did so, we understood they were not only having problems with the waste collection but also with their city cleaning operations. The deeper we dived, the more we realized the similarities between these operations around the world; They were being managed almost the same and they all needed the same change: Digitisation and traceability.

With this gained new knowledge, we started to offer our solutions to city cleaners to improve their operations and increase their efficiency.

 

A Brand New World: Evreka as the One and Only Complete SaaS Solution for Waste Collection and City Cleaning Operations

 

As a customer-centered company, we put it first to be there whenever our clients need us. We always knew to be the best solution providers, we had to be the one that understands clients needs the best.

And we did so; now, we know exactly what they need.

We wanted to make our solution low barrier, easy to reach and easy to use by anyone, anywhere in the world. We wanted to let them know that with just one click, they could enter into the modern world of waste collection and city cleaning.

With our specialized developer team, we worked hard to build the easiest to use software tool in the world and make life easier for managers, hauler drivers, street sweepers, in short everyone involved in the collection process.

To do this we proudly present to you the Evreka Platform; the one and only complete SaaS solution for waste collection and city cleaning that will bring you the smart way for the entire waste process, this includes the whole services cycle from contract to invoice.

 

With its new features, Evreka is not only going after waste, dust, and dirt; it is going ahead of them!

 

Thanks to the capabilities of Evreka Platform, Operations, Assets, Fleet, and Human Resources can be managed through a single dashboard.

 

As a result of all these changes, the Evreka Platform is a core component of Smart Waste Collection & City Cleaning Solutions. Of course, with our in-house developed Evreka Sensors and other hardware products including tracking devices, we further increase the efficiency of these operations and provide you a better experience.

 

 

A Brand New Evreka Look: Modern and Smooth Evreka Image

 

Today, we’re also excited to announce our new branding. We’re not only refreshing the entire Evreka experience as we fulfill our global strategy in becoming a global industry leader but also our look.

As you might see, Evreka is maturing and our identity needed to reflect this. Our focus is to expand into new international markets as a leading SaaS company over the next 4 years. In addition to this, we’re introducing innovative new products and services. In order to achieve these goals, it was important to realign on the Evreka brand.

A successful brand is as much an idea as a visual brand expression. As a result, we knew that Evreka would never be a brand of any consequence if the visual components of the brand (color, images, typography, logo) didn’t align with the underlying business strategy. The Evreka brand’s visual tone and attitude must align with the strategy so the visual identity could create a strong impact on people.

 

The design process

 

As tempting as it was, we avoided jumping into the visual side of branding (logo, colors, website, etc.) without doing our due diligence first. Instead, we designed the strategy first to understand our brand experience. This involved many sessions reflecting on our internal processes and ourselves as the EvrekaCrew.

In this process, we used Simon Sinek's "Start with Why" video to guide us. We were particularly inspired by his "golden circle" theory, which is the emotional core of what makes employees and customers buy into a company. From this, we began to define the "why" (purpose), "how" (promise) and "what" (what we do) for our brand.

Brands today are guided by purpose. We asked ourselves our “why” and after long discussions together with the EvrekaCrew, we decided that our purpose was "to improve".

We then determined our “how”. At Evreka, we propose specially-designed solutions in the most appropriate format for our customers. And how do we do it? By always striving to understand and resolve the root of our customer’s problems through continuous and transparent communication.

This is reflected in the core principles that guide our actions at Evreka and help bring our brand to life:

    We care!

    Always people first

    Communicate fearlessly to build trust

    Create fun and a little weirdness

    It is either zero or one

    Be agile!

    Be hungry to improve!

    Do something that you are not ready to do

    Be passionate!

Last, we looked at our brand’s “what”. This was the quickest to define: Evreka is hardware enabled SaaS company specializing in waste management and city cleaning services. When we considered the “why”, “how” and “what” altogether, we realized that if Evreka was a person, it would be a hero! The hero's purpose in life is to improve the world. It inspires, motivates and cheers it’s clients on to do more, to be more and to have more.

 

Brand Expression

 

Although we didn’t want to completely move away from the old logo, we needed a change. Simply put, the old branding wasn’t reflecting today’s Evreka anymore. The old logo had too many details, which made it incomprehensible at first glance and overly complicated. In addition, the ‘‘Creates Smart Cities’’ tagline was no longer valid as it wasn’t an accurate representation of our services.

Our new logo would be a little simpler, a little clearer, and more modern. So here we are.

Using simpler, aesthetically-pleasing shapes in the logo helped to build balance and recognizability, but still contains the spirit of the original logo. So as you can see the new logo is more of evolution as opposed to a complete replacement. This new brand identity designed for Evreka captures our new software solutions (rather than hardware) and updates the original logo to work consistently in different scales and contexts. The color palette is also more refined in order to better reflect Evreka’s “hero” personality.

And to represent our “why” which is “to improve”, we also changed our tagline.

 

 

 

Brand Colors & Typefaces

 

We have two primary colors ( a dark blue tone and a contrasting green color) and four secondary colors.

 

 

As a SaaS company, we wanted a typographic choice that was timeless, modern and clear to read. Open Sans is a humanist sans serif typeface designed with an upright stress, open forms, and a neutral, friendly appearance. It was optimized for print, web and mobile interfaces, and has excellent legibility characteristics in its letterforms.

 

 

Conclusion

 

As EvrekaCrew, we know what it takes to be a sector leading SaaS company and we are more eager than ever before. We are very happy to complete this rebranding process, finalize our focus and share it with you. We are more than ready to change the traditional order with the new world’s requirements.

Please share your comments with us to help us being Always Better!

Sincerely yours,

Umutcan Duman

CEO & Co-Founder - Evreka