Vend Brand Refresh 

Brand Design
Art Direction
Photography
Video & Animation
Illustration
Project Management

Vend creates award-winning, cloud-based retail software. After ten years as one of New Zealand's leading start-up success stories it was acquired by North American retail brand Lightspeed in 2021. I worked with founder Vaughan Fergusson to refresh the companies brand shortly before its acquisition.

Vend had initially received industry praise for an off-beat identity that stood out in a crowd of similar-looking tech offerings. As it grew, it had struggled trying to find a tone of voice that balanced it’s previous disruptive tone with it’s matured product offering. My goal was to define, refine and update what was usually a more ‘instinctive’ approach to the brand. A key part of this work was also building better creative cohesion between product and marketing visuals.

Simple product imagery was paired with hand-drawn illustrations and geometric shapes in an energetic, signature style. Friendly, humorous retail moments were depicted to communicate to retailers that we understood their world. Photography and video were shot in-house or curated to defined brand guidelines. This helped us to avoid the pitfalls of an industry full of copycats, stock photos and sterile iconography. 

We experimented and refined designs using the blog and landing pages as a testing ground, then rolled a more hi-fi refresh into other marketing channels. A second phase of this work brought the visual style in-app, where I worked with junior designers to create icons, design systems and a more diverse, inclusive illustration set.