Two entrepreneurs and a back-to-school trip.

Yoobi began with a shopping trip that did not go the way its founder expected. Fast Company, reporting on the launch on 3 June 2014, said Ido Leffler remembered back-to-school shopping as an exciting adventure from his own childhood, and that when he took his daughters down the school-supply aisle they ran past it without looking left or right. Leffler told the magazine he had been “so enamored by school supplies” as a child. The aisle his daughters ignored gave him the idea for a new brand.

Leffler did not start Yoobi alone. The company’s own About Us page says Yoobi was founded by Ido Leffler and Lance Kalish, and English Wikipedia’s article on Leffler says the two founded Yoobi in June 2014. They had worked together before: the same article says they founded Yes To Inc., then known as Yes To Carrots, in 2006, a company making natural hair and skincare products, and that they co-wrote a book on business, Get Big Fast and Do More Good, published by Harcourt in 2014. Fast Company introduced Leffler to its readers as the founder of the Yes To natural beauty brand.

The name carries the brand’s message. On its About Us page, Yoobi says the idea of “you be anything you want to be” became the driving force behind both the name and the mission, and describes the line as vibrant and built to inspire creativity while supporting classrooms in need.

From the start, Yoobi set out to look different from the plain supplies on the shelf. Fast Company described the debut range in detail: a fuzzy, cylindrical pencil case covered in soft nubbins and sold in bright colours such as purple and chartreuse; push pins and paper clips in an assortment of colours and shapes, including pink hearts and bright yellow doughnut holes; and even the plainer items, such as notebooks and pens, offered in shades of pink, purple, yellow and blue.

One for you, one for a classroom.

The colour was only half of the idea. Yoobi was built around a give-back model, and the company still puts it at the centre of how it describes itself. Its About Us page calls it a one-for-one model: for every item purchased, an item is added to a Classroom Pack and donated to schools in underserved communities. The footer of Yoobi’s own website sets out the terms in a single line, saying that for each qualifying Yoobi item purchased, Yoobi Global, LLC will donate a Yoobi item to the Kids in Need Foundation.

That partner has been part of the brand since its launch. Fast Company reported in June 2014 that Yoobi, together with the Kids in Need Foundation, had identified kindergarten-to-third-grade schools where many students qualified for the national school lunch programme, the measure Yoobi had chosen to decide need. The magazine said the classroom packs would be Yoobi-branded but would not contain exactly the products sold in stores: a standard pack would hold pens, pencils, glue sticks, rulers, folders, scissors, crayons, coloured pencils and markers, because, as the article put it, children need pencils more than jumbo highlighters. Yoobi says today that it delivers the supplies directly to classrooms through the foundation.

The retail side was just as deliberate. Fast Company reported that Yoobi went on sale at Target, its exclusive distributor, on the day of the article, and that Leffler had used the relationship he already had with Target through Yes To to get the line into stores across the country. Leffler told the magazine that Target “firmly believes in the cause and what we’re doing.”

The same article placed Yoobi alongside other buy-one, give-one businesses of the time, naming Warby Parker and Toms, and noted that the Toms model had drawn criticism. It also observed that the donations put Yoobi’s products directly into the hands of its own customers: schoolchildren and their parents.

Design and documentation.

School-supply brands sit in an unusual corner of design. Their products are bought in a short season, often by parents for children, and are then carried, opened, dropped and swapped for months in classrooms and lockers. A pencil, a binder or a notebook has to work at the scale of a box on a shelf as well as a cover held in the hand, and its look often changes from one school year to the next.

The identity of a school-supply brand is often carried less by a logo than by a colour, a cover design or a familiar format, because the company behind the name may have merged, changed owners or moved its production far from where it began. That makes the plain questions worth asking: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its look has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A small company with a classroom mission.

Yoobi still presents itself as a mission-led business. Its About Us page says the company is on a mission to stock classrooms, empower teachers and give every child an equal opportunity to succeed, and it lists a short set of values under the heading “The Yoobi Way,” including “Small But Mighty” and “Two Sides of the Same Coin.” The same page says Yoobi works as a fully remote team.

Its shop today is organised around writing supplies, paper, bundles and collaborations, with separate pages for the company’s impact and its sustainability work. The company also publishes yearly impact updates on its own blog, which it titles “Toucan News.”

The brand’s look has stayed close to the one Fast Company described at launch: bright, saturated colours applied to everyday classroom objects, from pencil cases to paper clips, so that ordinary supplies read as playful. That is the core of its identity more than any single logo or typeface, and it is the quality the magazine singled out when it called the range a “neon makeover” for pens, pencils and push pins.

Yoobi’s launch coverage also placed it in a longer line of colourful school supplies. Introducing the brand, Fast Company recalled the fun of stocking up on Lisa Frank Trapper Keepers, Five Star notebooks and gel pens, and quoted Leffler’s view that children no longer looked forward to the trip to the shop.

For a design guide, Yoobi shows how a newcomer can build an identity out of colour and a clear promise rather than heritage, putting a give-back line on its own website next to the products themselves. Compare the school-supply names its launch coverage looked back to in our Lisa Frank brand guidelines and our Mead brand guidelines. For this guide we use chartreuse, hot pink and grape purple with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Yoobi’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.