Driving business forward

9 Spokes - brand development (done with Salted Herring)

9Spokes is a business management app that aggregates data between small businesses, their apps & banks. It gives businesses highly personalised, sharable and meaningful insights to help steer them.

As a new SaaS app and even a new category, 9 Spokes was a challenging brand to communicate about. In the middle of the pandemic they struck a deal with Visa. This combined with an imminent US product launch and a need to focus on the D2C model –meant it was time for a fresh new brand. They came back to Salted Herring (we had done their original brand 5 years earlier) and wanted a cohesive brand story and solid toolkit to help direct the business. We kept the original logo but overhauled everything else.

Through a solid discovery process I learnt that small business owners want to be guided on what to do to be successful, in simple terms, to help navigate the confusing world of business. This led to the purpose statement: '9Spokes is here to propel ambitious small-businesses towards the success they deserve.'  Or in shorthand; ‘Business Forward’. The brand ethos focused on celebrating small businesses and the great things they do to make the business world go around.

Brand imagery used in digital ads & trade show material

The new brand personality used very active language, expressing the energy and dynamics that come with small business; we are steering, tracking, propelling, growing, and very forward-facing. The product gives a real-time picture and is constantly changing.

Website homepage

The refreshed visual identity is clean and contemporary with distinctive graphic patterns to give everything a sense of forward movement. There is a comprehensive visual library made up of bold animated graphic illustrations and ‘street photography’ with active business people captured on the go. 

The new brand was applied to social assets, eDMs, presentation decks, and a new custom built interactive website, with designs supplied for the app interface. A full set of brand and copy guidelines were built out to guide internal teams.

A selection from the image library developed

Mock ups of the new brand within the ‘tracker’ (digital product) interface.