Letgo Acquisition

Summary

In May 2020, OfferUp announced that it was acquiring competitor marketplace letgo. The two apps had existed as rivals in the local marketplace space since the mid-2010s.

OfferUp’s strategy in acquiring letgo was to have all of the letgo users migrate to the OfferUp app, temporarily branding the OfferUp app as “OfferUp & letgo”.

I was tasked with art directing the migration, writing the vast majority of the marketing copy, and designing most of the marketing creative on both the letgo and the OfferUp side. One of my favorite parts of this project was learning letgo’s brand guidelines, and producing materials in their visual design style.

Overall, the launch was a success, with millions of letgo users migrating to the OfferUp app and engaging with the OfferUp marketplace. The co-branded OfferUp/letgo app peaked at the #2 app in the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store on August 31st, beat out only by Zoom.

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Planning & creative direction

When I began planning the creative for the letgo acquisition, the first and most obvious hurdle was the adoption and integration of letgo’s brand guidelines. While letgo has a very distinct color that is eye-catching and easy to recognize, it also clashes with the OfferUp green. I had to be thoughtful in how we would marry the two brands in a way that wouldn’t be an eyesore, or look “too much like Christmas”.

The most effective way I found to start sketching out ideas was the “working backwards” approach of testing out how the brands could appear in the wild. An easy exercise was visualizing how we would picture the two brands in the confines of the small size of an in-app modal. You can see some of the early explorations of the co-branding below.

I also did some explorations into the top-of-the-funnel user experience of someone searching for the letgo app. On the left is one of the earlier concepts for how we would position the two brands for someone who was looking to download the letgo app.

On the right are some concepts for letgo-facing marketing encouraging users to download OfferUp.

While I worked on some concepts for the co-branded creative, I also began to explore how we would lockup the two logos to each other. I explored about 50 different options for how the two logos could work together, and put the strongest contenders in a presentation for our executives.  Our executive team chose the winning logo, and I was back to working on creative concepts with the new, approved logo lockup.

All that copy

I was also the main contact for writing all of our marketing copy for this campaign. I owned and regularly updated our “source of truth” document for tracking what type of messaging we were sending when, and what each piece of copy said.

The marketing copy was hotly debated in executive reviews, and the messaging we were planning on sending sometimes changed two or three times a day leading up to the campaign launch. I took charge of drafting new copy whenever an edit was suggested, running it by stakeholders, then making that change on all of our mockups, decks, and our main “source of truth” doc.

Below is an example of one of the documents I managed, with marketing copy I wrote and organized.

Final marketing creative (email, in-app, push, web)

After countless rounds of PM, leadership and executive review, we launched in-app messaging, push notifications, emails, and web landing pages for both the letgo and the OfferUp businesses. All of the final copy was written by me, and designed by myself and my amazing team at OfferUp.

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