Grain
At Grain, I used design to help grow and scale the company from its inception to $4.7M+ in ARR and 80K+ customers. I led my design team through a rebrand and brand extension project, which helped us launch two new products and eventually pivot, saving the business by successfully landing a signed client contract for the new product in less than three months. In addition to design, I contributed to product management, growth strategy, leadership decisions, investor and board presentations, and marketing. My work continues to live on and provide structure to current and future Grain products through product design strategy, a comprehensive design system, a brand system for B2C, B2B, and B2G products, and design philosophies.
INITIAL LAUNCH
I designed the branding and mobile app by which someone would apply for a credit line, receive their credit offer, verify their identity, and then manage their credit. This version of the app and branding carried us from our initial launch on the App Store at the end of our Y Combinator class of W’20 to 63K customers, hitting Number 13 on the App Store Finance Top Charts.
I collaborated closely with our Head of Engineering and CTO to refine our mobile and web app’s design and with our Head of Marketing to define standards for our visual and verbal branding, lead brand values discussions with our founders, and direct and craft advertising campaigns.
The theme of the visual branding choices I put together was to balance “cold” and “warm” to communicate a friendly yet serious visual tone necessary for fitting well in the consumer credit market.
MOBILE ADS
We ran product-focused campaigns to highlight the most essential parts of our app experience: receiving a credit offer and transferring your credit to your linked account.
“WHERE YOU ARE” CAMPAIGN
We highlighted the concept of Grain being available “anywhere for everyone.” Through this campaign, we intended to portray that anyone can access credit and get approved for a credit line anytime, anywhere, regardless of their financial background.
rebrand
After two years of scaling the brand and product, we surpassed 80K customers, reached $4.7M+ in ARR, and scaled the team to 38 employees. I led a team of four designers (one internal visual designer and three external web designers) through a rebrand to give the product a more mature presence, scale the business, and provide a brand ecosystem for us to launch multiple products under.
Our Head of Marcom and I crafted and pitched a strategy to the founders to unite our new products under a single brand and create an organizational structure of sub-brands that would pay off in brand equity over time. We decided to focus on our algorithm as the core of the ecosystem and named it the ‘Velex Score,’ to be similarly branded to other credit scores in the market and allow other businesses to accept it as a means of creditworthiness, furthering our mission to make credit accessible by enabling users to understand and own their cash flow as a realistic representation of customers’ identity.
INITIAL ECOSYSTEM CONCEPT
This would make it easier to spin up new products for consumer credit users and sell our B2B product more effectively, given that we could pre-qualify users for new products from both us and other businesses once they were in the ecosystem and had a Velex Score. I pushed the team towards representing this under a sub-product logo system so that new product additions could fit underneath the umbrella Grain brand.
We had established credibility and stability in the market, but the company needed community and culture around the product. I pushed the team towards giving the brand more life, highlighting how our product adds value to people’s real lives and creating a lifestyle around credit for everyone, from credit newbies to experts. I directed my team in defining new styles for typography, shapes, photography, color, animation, and general composition. Below is an excerpt from my project kickoff with the team of how I guided our conversations using visual examples.
I directed the team towards sharp and bold typography, intentionality between using the Grain Blue swatches for app-related items, a new secondary palette to make credit-at-large concepts more approachable, abstract use of shapes, and an overall balance of feeling warm yet sharp and precise. I collaborated with our visual designer and the Marcom team on social media to refine our themes by putting bite-size visual explorations out. Below are examples of social graphics and defining colors and font styles we ended up with.
We redesigned the website to show our new look on the consumer side of the business and announce our B2B product. We faced the challenge of balancing the architectural and visual coherence of the company's product while determining which side should take precedence in specific scenarios. Underneath our defined visual styles, a framework for our logo, and website design, we could effectively spin up new products and have them make sense underneath the brand and add to each other by being there.
LAUNCHED WEBSITE
Part of my strategy was to use color to help indicate where a viewer should know which product side of the ecosystem they are viewing: leaving the consumer side of the business the Grain blue to feel comfortable to consumers and the B2B side with dark branding. The dark branding was meant to indicate that the product was solid, serious, trustworthy, and something they could count on. We brought over all of the visual themes that we thought worked best from our social media explorations and kept the theme of a balance of bold and warm.
FINAL LOGO CONCEPTS
The final part of the project was exploring how a new logo system could add clarity to our product ecosystem and fit under our redefined visual values. In between presentations to the founders, I directed the team through multiple iterations of a few logo concepts. They landed us in a place that could give the brand a balance of sharpness, seriousness, and comfort and indicate upward mobility for financial success. By creating a framework for how our logo could work as a system with sub-products, we could spin up new products for whatever came our way business-wise.
The end of 2023 brought changes to the company as the startup ecosystem, and the finance space faced challenges that trickled down to us. We shifted our focus from consumer credit to our business’s newly formed B2G arm. The rebrand project I led my team through served as a framework for us to pivot with and allowed us to launch our new sub-brand and product, “Grain Loans,” while keeping the consumer and B2B products up and running. This strategy and re-purposing our previously defined design standards allowed us to assemble the new product and get our first signed client contract in less than three months, successfully holding our position in the finance market and keeping the business alive.
“POWERED BY GRAIN”
After research sessions with clients, we decided to white-label our new product to fit better in the B2G industry. Our Head of Marcom and I pitched the founders on keeping our brand equity present by letting our clients own the colors and keeping a grounding “Powered By Grain” visible on the front-facing pages of the app and other touchpoints.