T-Shirts, MTV, and Salesforce Developers: How Astro was Created

We’re posting a series of vignettes to celebrate Salesforce’s 20th birthday. Follow our digital scrapbook to get a behind the scenes glimpse of our history.

Many companies have mascots, but perhaps not as unique as our own Astro. Astro Nomical is your guide to everything at Salesforce and helps you become the best at anything you want to be.

As a representative of the Salesforce community and inclusion, Astro embodies many of the same traits as our Trailblazers: welcoming, always encouraging, fun-loving, and adventurous. And funnily enough, Astro’s origin story is similar to many Trailblazer stories.

In 2014, Trailhead Senior Creative Director Domenique Sillett Buxton was the sole designer on the Developer Marketing team. Developer Week was coming up and the team wanted “cool t-shirts” with a cute aesthetic to mark the occasion. They knew they wanted to riff on MTV’s moon landing theme, paired with the recent launch of Salesforce’s mobile app — previously called Salesforce1.

“I probably made about 15 different cool t-shirts for this event and heard lots of ‘NOs’. Then our office manager (and secret illustrator) Rochelle Truong created an astronaut,” Sillett Buxton recalls in her blog post.

This little astronaut landed on the event t-shirts, and the developer marketing team waited for the community’s reaction. You can probably guess that the shirts were an immediate hit.

The community quickly embraced Astro, and the character became a symbol of adventure and empowerment. Today, Astro has evolved to also represent inclusion and diversity. Astro’s gender identity is non-binary (pronoun they/them) to support our values of equality and our community’s diversity. So just like many of the amazing Trailblazer stories we hear, Astro was born out of hard work, team efforts, a little serendipity, and the desire to try new things.

Listen to more about Astro & Friends’ origin stories here on the Admins Podcast.