Hello, my name is Mike Gowen.

Kysio is Born

My girlfriend (@HeatherOT) is busy getting her own business off the ground. She specializes in a form of holistic therapy geared towards helping professional athletes recover faster and perform better overall. As such, she was in need of a few basic things to enable her to begin bringing her services to market. This included a name, a logo, a website, and a solid brand strategy. With these goals in mind, we got to work.

The Brand Strategy

One of the core components of her therapy involves a light massage that clears toxins from the lymphatic system, otherwise known as Manual Lymph Drainage (MLD). Originally Heather had decided on SportsMLD as the name of the company. While straightforward, this had 3 negative aspects. First, it would be difficult to brand given it’s rather sterile and soul-less nature. Second, it effectively closes the door on any additional techniques that could be bundled with her services outside of MLD. Finally, it didn’t let her “own” her technique, as the name was already inherently tied to as existing well-known technique (MLD). That being said, the first step was the decision to package her process as a product rather than a service. If you’re familiar with The Secret, you’ve witnessed this type of approach firsthand. Its very hard to own and brand The Law of Attraction, but wrap a very appealing and compelling brand strategy around it and suddenly you have something much more palatable sell.

The Name

The next step was to come up with a name. Being that MLD is considered to be an alternative medicinal technique, we didn’t want the name to draw upon any stigmas that might be attached to that sort of topic. Alternative medicine is largely regarded as having its roots in spirituality. Professional athletes and trainers who are looking for concrete and measurable results are going to be less responsive to this type of positioning. After a solid 2 days of brainstorming we chose Kysio (pronounced “Kee-zee-oh”). This was a play on words starting with the base word, “Kinetic”, then playing off the interesting “lym” letter pairing sequence in “lymphatic”, and finally appending the “sio” letter sequence from the word “physiological”. Together, Kysio sounded fresh, high-tech and still retained a bit of the zen-like aspect of it’s core technique.

The Logo

Kysio allows athletes to obtain heightened performance levels by stimulating the body’s natural recovery system. This made it important to design a logo that created a juxtaposition between biology and the kinetics. After playing around with a few ideas I stumbled upon two symbols that were visually similar, and spoke to both of the aforementioned concepts: a strand of DNA, and a spring. After a few hours of exploring their visual relationships, I had something we liked. A few rounds of refinement later and I had the basic logo complete. From there I chose a typeface that further clarified the direction, and gave the logo an overall fresh and confident look. Finally, I settled on a blue color scheme to convey a sense of rejuvenation and trust.

We’re both very happy with the finished product and I’m excited to begin working on the website. So without further ado, I present to you, Kysio…