You may already have noticed that the Binocs website looks quite different today than it did a week ago. As founder and Executive Vice President of Binocs, I wanted to take a few minutes to explain why things have changed—why we have to say adios to the owl, our long-standing mascot—and what it means for the journey of the Binocs brand more generally.
The Binocs idea took root in 2014 supported by a small team with a simple premise: to provide an optimized method of managing capacity in pharmaceutical labs. It started as a macro-enabled Excel tool and, soon, clients were asking for added functionality to help guide their day-to-day scheduling. At that time we had already inaugurated an owl as our logo – where the name ‘Binocs’ (short for ‘binoculars’) conveyed the long distance vision offered by our capacity management product, the owl represented the full 360° oversight that we aimed to provide with our increasingly advanced suite of planning and scheduling solutions.
Today Binocs boasts more than 50 international experts working across a wide range of functions, from customer success and product support, to engineers and product architects, and beyond – and we’re recruiting more specialists all the time. We have certainly come a long way!
Although the Binocs team has always been part of the Bluecrux family, this fact hasn’t always been well reflected in our brand and product messaging. Behind the scenes, Binocs and Bluecrux have always been one: many of the concepts in Binocs are based on know-how from our supply chain planning consulting teams and our implementation methodology (FastTrack) is strongly inspired by our digital operations and transformation consultants. This sense that we’re all part of the same broader team is exactly what we wanted to ensure was explicit in our new branding.
That’s why it’s time to say good-bye to our much-loved owl logo. While it’s sad to bid farewell to our feathered friend, we couldn’t be happier to communicate our elevated value proposition, as represented by the new look and feel of both the site and the Binocs brand. And we’re proud to call ourselves part of “the Cutting X”, that new community formed at the convergence of our customers’ knowledge and Bluecrux’s expertise.
For Binocs users, rest assured that (with the exception of the new logo) nothing about the look and feel nor the functionality of the SaaS product is going to change – we will continue to provide the same market-leading functionality with the same high quality implementation and support, and the product website (mybinocs.com) will not change. What this rebrand does offer our customers is a greater synergy between Binocs and the other Bluecrux offerings (such as our Consulting services and the Axon digital supply chain twin product), all coming together with a greater consolidation of energies dedicated to optimizing the value chains of tomorrow.
And, while you will no longer see the owl on our website or product, the panoramic spirit of that silent sentinel lives on in the background, with our Binocs test servers named ‘strigo’ (‘owl’ in Esperanto) in its honor. This means that every time we issue a new product update, you can rest assured that our pre-release preparations have been graced with the guiding touch of that feathered wingtip.
If you have any questions or queries regarding the Binocs and Bluecrux rebranding, please don’t hesitate to reach out for a chat. In the meantime, I want to personally thank all of our customers for their continued support.
Geert has over 30 years of experience in supply chain and quality operations consulting. He began his career as a product manager for a MES/LIMS application at Compex (later acquired by Siemens). After co-founding Bluecrux, he dedicated his expertise to designing the first iteration of Binocs which, under his stewardship, has since gone on to become the market leading planning and scheduling solution for labs.
