It was pretty shocking yesterday morning when a life sized chimp mascot showed up at the office. Little did we know that Chief Customer Officer Dan had secretly been working with Maydwell Mascots for about two months to make it happen!

Bear with me for a sec for a quick jaunt down memory lane. The first iteration of the MailChimp logo was quickly thrown together by Ben in 2001 using Fireworks. Over the years, each revision of the logo made it slightly less clumsy, but it still wasn’t quite right. So in late 2007 we got in touch with Jon Hicks (who designed the Firefox logo and most recently worked on the user interface design for Opera Mini 5), and he was really busy at the time. But good things come to those who wait, and by August of 2008 we had a shiny, new Freddie complete with a body and everything! (If you’re interested in reading more, check out Ben’s original post here.)

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MailChimp customers, if you enjoyed the story of Jon Hicks and our Freddie logo, you’ll love the story and technical details behind Mozilla’s dino logo. There’s even a creative brief posted there, for all you Brand New snobs. And in case you missed it, our own DesignLab submitted a little creative love to the Mozilla Community store, with this retro Thunderbird t-shirt.

BTW, a lot of people ask me, “who’d you hire to do your logo?” I used to say, “Jon Hicks, but he’s not freelancing anymore.” But it looks like he’s back on the market.

People Love Free Stuff

It’s hard for me to believe that we ever thought it would be difficult to give away 1,000 tshirts. On September 10th when we launched the promotion, all 100 shirts we made available were claimed within two and a half minutes. That’s one tshirt every 1.5 seconds. I was well aware that people love MailChimp, but it was amazing to witness in that way.

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In celebration of of our Forever Free Plan, we wanted to launch a promotional t-shirt giveaway. Free email marketing, free t-shirts.. makes sense right? In the marketing world they call it synergy, but it just seemed like a great way to help spread the word about MailChimp while celebrating our users at the same time.

Our goal wasn’t necessarily to amass more Twitter followers or Facebook fans just for the sake of increasing our follower count. After all, with both Twitter and Facebook the number of fans or followers you have isn’t significant in any real way. Sure, the more fans you have the larger the group of people who will see your message, but that doesn’t necessarily dictate their level of interaction/engagement with your brand or business.

Chart showing a 42% increase in our Facebook fan growth

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In case you missed it, last Saturday at 12:01 AM EST Facebook gave both individuals and fan pages the ability to register their own vanity URLs. The main reason this is awesome is that it allows you to market your Facebook page much more easily. Instead of a long string of letters and numbers, you now have the benefit of something short and tidy. Like facebook.com/mailchimp. During the recent NBA Finals, for example, I noticed brands like Vitamin Water promoting their fan page URLs instead of their main company website in their commercials. And this type of cross promotion is definitely working! Vitamin Water currently boasts over 500,000 Facebook fans.

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