About the Mark

Every brand mark is somebody's overthought afternoon. Ours took several, and then it took a few more, because the first version wasn't quite right and I'm stubborn about these things. Here's where we landed and why.

The mark is a compass disc. A dark ink circle with four cardinal points pushing out — N, S, E, W — drawn long and clean like the spikes on an old field compass. Inside the ring sits the monogram: S, O, and M, stacked and interlocked in a tall serif you'd expect to see stamped on the side of a feed sack or a railroad crate. It's Southern. It's a little weathered. It looks like it's been carried in a back pocket for a few seasons, because that's the point.

Why a compass. Because the whole reason this company exists is to get somebody back to a place on a map they thought they'd lost. Compass means orientation. Compass means heading somewhere on purpose. Compass also looks right on a tailgate sticker, which mattered more than I'll admit.

Why the monogram. The earlier version of this mark had an 8-point star sitting where the letters are now. Pretty. Nobody remembered it. The SOM monogram tells you who we are the second you look at it — three letters doing the work of a paragraph. Stack them inside the compass and you get a mark that reads at hat-patch size and still has a story at billboard size.

Now the orange slash. That's the part I had to fight for. It looks like somebody took a paint pen across the whole mark on purpose — hand-drawn, a little crooked, running corner to corner. It's not a mistake and it's not decoration. It's the line in the sand. It says somebody decided. Somebody crossed something out and started over. Somebody refused to accept the version of the story where the trail ends at the parking lot.

That orange shows up everywhere on the site, on the brochures, eventually on the side of the machines. It's the hunter-orange vest. It's the surveyor's flag tied to a tree. It's the 'I'm here, come find me' color. On the mark, it's the line you crossed to get here.

Ink for the compass and the letters. Orange for the slash. No gradients, no swooshes, no third color trying to elbow its way in. If you ever see the mark and the slash is missing, somebody printed it wrong. Tell us. We'll send a fresh sticker.