EVOC

Evoc is an interesting one-off brand and product services account. I joined Elance,com (now Upwork.com) in the heart of the recession to bring in side jobs from across the globe. This being one of them. Many accounts in my region were suffering the tightrope act caused by the national emergency. Clients lost jobs, budgets cut—to this day, I still have open invoices for payments owed by evasive clients and firms that my lawyer advised to let be due to the small amounts owed in many directions. All adding up to one big headache on my end—and I refused to return to working for anyone else, let alone another regional ad firm seeking to abuse my skillset and overqualified experience. And so I trudged through the low end of the roller coaster.

Evoc was being represented by a brand consulting firm in Florida that contacted me via Elance. It was a cloudy account from what I could tell—the account executive who contracted me stated that it was unfinished business for her, and was taking it outside of the firm which originally contracted Evoc to develop the company branding and product design on her own due to bad blood between her bosses and the client. Hangups in brand direction apparently occurred between the firm’s leadership and the client, and the A.E. decided to go lone wolf mode, finding me online to fulfill the client’s business on the side—and in a rush.

Sounds fishy, and it was, but nothing about the work was sketchy. I came up with a few ideas to pitch for company and product branding based on where the ideas were left to die. After doing a bit of research into water-based, eco-beauty products, I took into account Social Media marketing which the A.E. explained was going to be a priority of the client moving forward. Everything had to be Social-ready but also easy to reproduce on product packaging. I took an icon logo approach with alternate icons for various products falling under the company brand, and off we went. From there I designed a few products and technical illustrations to showcase the brand direction on its base product line.

It was an easy, smooth process and she paid me top dollar via Elance without a hassle. It was smoother than anything I was dealing with on the homefront with regional businesses evading their financial responsibilities left and right. I wish I could remember the A.E./rep’s name—the Elance account was associated with an old Mac email account which I have no trace of. I’d like to know what became of this account, company, and where in the world they were located. Everything was client confidential thru Elance.

She contacted me a few times through 2009 and 2010 to assist with brand services on other accounts while she attempted to launch her own business down in Florida. Not sure what happened—but thanks for the easy work and for paying me without abusing my services, time, energy and work ethic on a rush turn-around during the recession. (Ya listening, Rockford area scumbags? You know who you are.)