Vanderbloemen: Evolving a trusted brand and building a website for growth

Project background

Vanderbloemen is a Houston-based executive search firm that serves churches, schools, nonprofits, and values-driven businesses across the United States. Since its founding in 2009, Vanderbloemen has become the go-to partner for helping mission-driven organizations find the right leadership to advance their work. With more than 3,000 successful placements, their team is well known for delivering thoughtful, high-touch search services that reflect the heart of their clients’ missions.

When Vanderbloemen came to us, they had already built an impressive reputation within the church space but saw an opportunity to better engage with their audience online.  They wanted a refreshed brand and website experience that would showcase the full breadth of their expertise, elevate their presence beyond the founder’s personal brand, and set the stage for continued growth.

The challenge

Vanderbloemen’s existing website had been haphazardly built over time by multiple people and departments without a strategic vision. The site felt disjointed and visually flat, lacked an overarching brand vision, and was difficult to manage on the back end. Key challenges included:

• Poor site architecture and a confusing navigation structure that made it hard for users to find content
• A lack of internal linking strategy
• A blue monochromatic, dated visual style that did not reflect the warmth, professionalism, and humanity of the brand
• A site experience that was too heavily tied to the founder’s personal brand
• A dual CMS workflow (HubSpot and WordPress) that was cumbersome for internal teams to use

Vanderbloemen partnered with Stryve to address these challenges and create a brand and website experience that would serve their full audience, drive growth, and empower their team long term.

The approach

Discovery and strategy

We began with deep discovery to understand Vanderbloemen’s brand, values, and positioning. Through collaborative workshops, competitor analysis, and a website audit, we worked closely with their team to define our direction. We also conducted a technical audit of their existing site to identify user experience gaps and performance issues, setting clear goals for both design and functionality improvements.

Visual exploration and mood boarding

Early in the process, we explored mood boards that showcased different visual directions for the refreshed brand. This helped align tone and style while giving Vanderbloemen a chance to respond to new creative ideas. We also looked beyond their immediate industry for inspiration, exploring luxury and editorial sites that matched the aspirational, elegant feel they wanted to convey.

Brand refresh 

With the visual direction established, we did a light brand refresh and formalized it with brand guidelines.

Key updates included:

• Expanded colour palette with warm greens and olive tones to balance the signature blues and introduce a sense of growth and approachability.
• Optimized type hierarchy introducing Baskerville for headlines to create contrast and an elegant feel, while retaining Lato for body copy to ensure readability.
• Designed a new set of dynamic, two-toned icons with layered line work that reflects the brand’s clean and precise look.
• Created a geometric brand pattern derived from their logo to add subtle texture and depth across brand applications.

These updates modernized the brand while preserving brand equity, creating an elevated and sophisticated visual identity.

Website redesign

Once the refreshed brand was established, we moved into the website project, following Stryve’s typical process: site architecture, wireframing, design, development, and QA.

We rebuilt the site from the ground up with clear goals:

• Consolidate the CMS to WordPress, leveraging HubSpot for forms only.
• Create a consistent well-structured navigation to make information easier to find and share.
• Create a flexible site structure that would highlight their four target markets equally.
• Improve their content experience by introducing advanced tagging, filtering, and structure.
• Implement WordPress Block Editor and reusable patterns so internal teams could easily build pages, job postings, and manage content.

We also focused heavily on elevating the site’s visuals. We replaced the dated blue overlays with bright, natural photography featuring people, introduced video and subtle hover effects to add interactivity, and expanded the imagery to better reflect the full range of audiences  Vanderbloemen serves.

The impact

A brand and website built for growth

The refreshed brand and redesigned website now provide a clear, elevated experience for Vanderbloemen’s full range of audiences. Navigation is intuitive, visuals are modern and engaging, and the site structure makes it easy for users to find and share content. Just as importantly, the brand now extends beyond the founder’s personal presence and positions Vanderbloemen as a leader across all of their key markets.

An empowered internal team

Behind the scenes, we set Vanderbloemen’s team up for success with an intuitive, customized pagebuilder built on WordPress’s Gutenberg block editor. Dozens of customized blocks and patterns were created to enable team members across the organization to quickly and easily update content, manage job listings, and support marketing campaigns without significant WordPress experience or developer support.

A faster, more engaging experience

Following the redesign, the new site delivered measurable improvements in both performance and user engagement. Mobile page speed improved from 36 to 50, while desktop speed increased from 52 to 69, resulting in a noticeably faster and smoother experience across devices.

In the first few months after launch, these enhancements translated to stronger user engagement:

• A 17% increase in overall engagement rate
• A 3% increase in average session duration
• A 297% increase in clicks on the “Get Started” call to action, showing greater interest in joining the job board

These results confirmed that the redesigned brand and website achieved the project’s core goal of creating a stronger, more engaging experience for Vanderbloemen’s audiences.

Continued partnership

The success of this project led to an expanded relationship. Vanderbloemen engaged us to apply their refreshed brand to new sales and marketing collateral and candidate-facing materials, ensuring brand consistency across all touchpoints.

As Maddie Profilet, Director of Marketing, shared:

“It was such a pleasure working with Kaleigh and the Stryve team. They managed a complete design overhaul of our brand and website, as well as transferring us to a new CMS that is so well-designed and easy to use on the backend, too. Everyone loves the new site and we’ve asked them to help us with several additional projects. I appreciate how responsive Kaleigh has been with my many questions. We highly recommend Stryve.”