By Dr. Robert Ang, President & CEO
If we meet a random stranger and get asked the question, “Who are you?” – how do we respond?
The same goes for companies. Vor Bio employees (we call ourselves Voracians) have dedicated years of our lives to building the company. Of course, one of the major channels for understanding who we are is our website – but creating that website is again, complicated. What should the website look like? What should we describe? What design and imagery should we choose? What most accurately reflects the company that we are?
Today, we are excited to launch our new company website resulting from this work, and we are proud of the result. But the journey to get here started quite some time ago, eight months to be exact, and it is worth now reflecting on the experience.
Nothing was fundamentally broken with our website or the information on it, but, as with many small and rapidly growing biotech companies, we built our original site quickly with a tactical approach and it has served us well. But, after our successful IPO in 2021, I wanted our website to reflect not just what we do, but how our approach is completely unique and cutting edge compared to anything being done in the genetic medicines and cell therapy field, towards the ultimate goal – to cure blood cancers. What we do is non-traditional and multi-faceted. As such, we also needed to communicate our science, platform, and programs more clearly.
I wanted to show that “how” we do our work is just as important as “what” we are working on here at Vor Bio. All of this was foundational work that needed to be done in a thoughtful way, and I felt strongly we should invest time and resources into the process.
We started by interviewing key stakeholders internally and externally. Using insights from these interviews, we conducted an in-depth workshop with our leadership team where we explored in-depth some key questions: How do we define what we do? How are we different to prior efforts? Who are our most important audiences (now and in the future)? What do they need from us and how can we address those needs? We asked these, along with additional important foundational questions about Vor Bio and we openly shared our thoughts and perspectives. We engaged our people at all levels for their feedback. It was great to see strong alignment as well as thoughtful challenges to some of our assumptions.
Three main themes came through:
- Our Values, Vision, and Mission remain core to Vor Bio and are well understood and embraced by Voracians.
- What we do is completely novel, and we can do a better job of explaining it and inspiring our stakeholders about our vision.
- Our rigorous scientific approach and the strength of our science platform are core to our success and really define Vor Bio.
With this in mind, we embarked (which we will admittedly continue to refine over time) to create clear and succinct messaging for each of our stakeholder audiences which speaks to their needs and at a level that meets their background and expertise. At the same time, we began to define the brand identity and look and feel of our first implementation of our messaging – our website. We spent a lot of time photographing our people – opening our lab, manufacturing space, and offices to really get a feel for the beating heart of our organization. I must give a special thank you to our people for their patience during these photo shoots, especially our scientists who were busy in the labs but took the time to share their important work with the outside world.
We’re especially humbled and inspired by the words of Voracians in our new corporate video. They proudly shared their insights into our culture and what it means to work at Vor Bio.
Additionally, we recently launched our new publications library and we are excited to showcase our cutting-edge science published by our talented Vor Bio scientists.
Building out new website has been an exciting and insightful journey. Importantly, the foundational work we undertook to get us to this launch will be invaluable as we continue to communicate our scientific story and make clinical progress with our first-in-human trial, which is now underway. Our website is ever changing, dynamic, and evolving and that’s what is great about it – though hopefully you enjoy this revamp, and it reflects the same energy, professionalism, passion, and excellence that we feel in our pursuit of cures for cancer patients.
Yours,
Robert