Describing the last month as exciting would be an understatement. We welcomed Urbanspoon to Zomato, and with our more recent acquisition of Mekanist, our focus has now shifted onto making all these great products come together. 

Integrating websites and apps always comes with its own set of challenges. In the Czech Republic, and Poland, language was one of the biggest. With Urbanspoon, it’s the sheer scale of the information and the number of users we’re going to be moving to Zomato. While pondering the smoothest way to go about this, we were also giving some serious thought to how our two brands come together, because that plays a huge role in the success of product integration. 

Urbanspoon is one of the most recognized consumer internet brands in the United States, Canada, and Australia. By the time we merge the Urbanspoon website and apps into Zomato by March this year, two-thirds of our overall traffic will be coming from just these three countries. It’s important to us that we don’t lose a lot of Urbanspoon users by giving them a new name, a new logo, and a new product. 

With that in mind, we’ve taken a call that’ll help ease the transition – making the first point of interaction with the product a familiar one, by modifying our logo to that of Urbanspoon’s Spoon logo. Zomato will now be using the Spoon in Zomato red (which our team has nicknamed Pomodoro), while we retain our name.

You’re probably thinking that we’re nuts to be doing this only a couple of months after releasing our Heart logo. But for us, this is a simple case of making sure that the transition (of merging Urbanspoon to Zomato) is the least painful for the most number of our users. We want to make sure that when we update the Urbanspoon app for millions of users, we don’t give them a new name and a new icon. Doing that could make it look like they installed the Zomato app by mistake, potentially leading to a large number of uninstalls. 

For Zomato users, they get a new logo, but retain the name. Hopefully, that shouldn’t give us a large number of uninstalls (not much was lost when we moved to the Heart logo a couple of months ago).

We have already begun trying to get Urbanspoon users used to the new red in their life. If you’ve seen the Urbanspoon website recently, you’ll notice that we have started using the red in the logo.

This is the first step of the migration, and you will now gradually see this new logo appearing in the upcoming Urbanspoon and Zomato app updates, as well as in other places online and offline.

By March, we hope to be in a position where Zomato users across the planet will be able to easily recognize this icon on their phones, and fire up the app to find restaurants lightning-quick. We understand this is going to be another change for all of you who have been using Zomato regularly; it’s also the most painful for us – the cost and effort of changing our logo everywhere across the world is humongous. But overall, we really hope we’ll be given another chance to familiarize ourselves with your home screens. We promise we won’t ask you to do this again for a long time to come!

As always, if you have any ideas or feel we could be approaching the migration in a better way (from a product and brand standpoint), we’d love to hear from you.