Hostel Rocket

When you hear the name Hostel Rocket, think Airbnb for hostels. The use case is essentially the same: democratize affordable lodging on a worldwide scale, just for hostels. They came to us in their infancy, a blank canvas in need of creative help.

Creative Strategy

Challenge

Hostel Rocket was on the precipice of something big. They had the funding. They had the connections. They even had their audience. They just needed the creative. As a brand, Hostel Rocket was a name and logo without much else, and this is where we came in.

Solution

We deconstructed Hostel Rocket into its individual pieces: mission, brand, and product. Starting with the mission, we were able to distil this down into clear differentiation that directly influenced and directed the brand—especially the Visual Identity. Having a powerful and purposeful brand to work with, we took Hostel Rocket through a from-scratch product design process and kicked off their  rst Social Media campaign.

Results

Hostel Rocket was able to gain significant traction with their Social Media campaign, engaging more audience than they ever had before. Combined with their brand and redesigned product, Hostel Rocket was well on its way to real success, changing the hostel travel culture forever.

Visual Identity System

“Are you next?” As a travel brand, we wanted to build something that clearly reflected the intrepid and nomadic spirit of the hostel roomer. After much exploration, we came up with a hieroglyph concept that profoundly conveyed a nomadic feel and lent itself well to travelers visually documenting their adventures. This concept was the inspiration for the logo. We then extended this concept into iconography. It’s this extension that created a system of glyphs as icons that perfectly complimented Hostel Rocket’s logo. Each glyph was given a unique meaning, further tying it back into a pictographic language (such as hieroglyphs).

For Hostel Rocket, the logo and glyphs provided a visual language to use in everything from their marketing to their hostel listings. For the traveler, it was a way to identify with the brand, using the logo and glyphs to “sticker” each and every place. We put this to practice with “Are you next?”, Hostel Rocket’s first ongoing Social Media campaign.

Social Media Campaign

In the “Are you next?” campaign, travelers were challenged to sketch the Hostel Rocket logo on anything from sand to stone, much like nomads did eons ago. It was a constant competition to see who can “leave their mark” in the most exotic places. Simply put, we breathed life into their brand by involving their community in a uniquely ownable and shareable way.

Product Design

When it came to building their product, Hostel Rocket needed a platform that had the perfect interactive path. People were planning adventures all around the globe, so their website needed to be thorough, yet easy to use. So we gave them exactly that. We deconstructed their current customer experience and idealized it into the ideal path. From there, we were able to pursue information architecture of the website—i.e., how it would visually be laid out. We heavily employed the glyph system as a legend for each listing. Hostel Rocket’s product was a cohesive representation of their brand, seamlessly coming to life across devices and platforms.