In a startup market that’s now increasingly focused on burn rates-how much more a company’s spending than it takes in each month-and inflated valuations, Zocdoc has operated a capital-intensive business catering to small and medium-sized businesses in the individual doctor practices, the size business that traditionally is quickest to evaporate. Zocdoc’s original business model of sending field teams to each new city to sign up individual doctors was expensive and hard, Kharraz admits. Instead, Zocdoc’s logo is a visual representation of a process that’s been happening under the hood for months to reposition the company. Kharraz and Fine say the redesign process took longer than that.

Why so much fuss over a logo? The cynical view would be that after months of trying to raise new funds, Zocdoc scored at least $130 million and its billion-plus dollar valuation in August and had some money for its new marketing chief to spend. All of it’s in yellow, a color Kharraz says is more “optimistic” than the blue and green all over healthcare, and optimized for mobile users, who make up half the startup’s traffic today. Relative cuteness of an anthropomorphized logo aside, Zocdoc also overhauled its app and website and how its search and booking experiences look. An acquired taste to these untrained eyes, Fine says the design tested well with customers. Zee comes in ten varieties from the winking to the sad, a sort-of Zocdoc emoji palette. “Now with our scale and as you see our logo on other websites, we needed a powerful identity.”

“The hard phase had been done of finding the specialists and patients, we’d done a lot of the initial hard work,” says that executive, Richard Fine, who joined the company at the start of 2015. This time around, Zocdoc brought in a high-end brand consultancy (Wolff Olins) and had its first internal marketing chief to manage the facelift. A simple yellow face with two black dot “eyes” and a “Z” for a nose, Zee is the result of a months-long process that cost a lot more than $80 that cofounder Oliver Kharraz says Zocdoc paid for its original logo years ago. Zocdoc’s new logo, which it calls Zee, is supposed to embody that change.

Zocdoc oliver kharraz