To start, we talked about who Twelve Springs is as a company.

Twelve Springs is a company with a vision for your next vacation. If you want to family time and communal spaces of a vacation rental, but also want the luxury and certainty of quality that comes with booking a great hotel, Twelve Springs wants to be your solution.

They offer professionally managed, carefully crafted homes that you can rent for your family vacation or business trip, along with 24/7 concierge services so you never have to worry about the details while you’re enjoying your trip.

While they are currently focused on Anaheim (specifically, historic neighborhoods and of course those close to Disneyland), they plan to expand in the future to anywhere you’d want to go, like Hawaii and Palm Springs.

Their CEO, Philip, shared with us his vision to be the Four Seasons of vacation home rentals. We talked about the desire we all share to be together with the people we love, and how Twelve Springs homes enable families to truly be together on vacation, rather than split up in hotel rooms.

We worked with their leadership team to hone adjectives that describe their brand — words like:

• effortless
• beautiful
• modern
• tech-savvy
• attention to detail
• luxurious

And of course, we knew it all needed to be bursting with photos of their beautiful architectural homes, and the bright colors and energy of sunny southern California.

During our trip, we stayed in one of their homes: Peach Knoll in Anaheim. The second we walked in the front door, we were swimming with ideas for what their brand was all about.

We also took a tour on our first day in town of a number of their favorite homes, some of which were under construction but on their way to being beautiful additions to their lineup.

And that night, we gathered at Peach Knoll for a barbecue with the whole team.

After we ate our fill of burgers and fresh fruit, we gathered around a table by the pool to talk about the Twelve Springs tagline.

What did it need to say?

It needed to get across a complex idea — that a brand new kind of vacation is possible.

Not only that, it needed to express a complex feeling. A feeling of luxury and relaxation that comes with knowing every detail of your next trip is going to be perfect, combined with the excitement of getting precious family time back where you are all together.

We needed to show that you can have the communal space of a vacation rental, without the musty smells and other people’s stuff; and at the same time, you can get the luxury of a hotel with concierge services, but with a full home, private pool, and communal spaces to bring your group together as much as possible.

Chris and I sat on the couch brainstorming ideas for a few hours after everyone had left. We emerged with a list of ideas that we hoped would spark inspiration for the Twelve Springs team the next morning.

The next day, back around the conference table at Twelve Springs HQ, we pitched our ideas to the team and landed on the winner:

“Bring everyone. Have everything.”

We dropped it onto the wireframes for the one-page site, and started choosing bright new colors for the site, and some of the best photos of their properties to draw viewers in and get them excited about what Twelve Springs has to offer for their next big trip.

On Friday night, we left the sun behind and flew back to Seattle. By that time next week, we had launched twelvesprings.com with their brand new tagline “Bring everyone. Have everything.”, and took an excited first step in taking this vision for the future of vacation travel to the next level.