intandem: Creating the branding for a pioneering corporate innovation startup

The Challenge 

Produce the branding for a pioneering innovation startup that would resonate with its large corporate prospects. 

intandem aims to revolutionise the way large corporations innovate. Its vision is to work in partnership with these businesses to enable innovation at scale, in a way that delivers tangible commercial outcomes. 

As it prepared to launch, intandem needed branding that it could apply to its website and other material. As well as portraying the company’s values, the branding needed to strike the delicate balance between exuding the freshness and agility associated with innovative businesses, and being credible in the eyes of the large corporate clients it’s targeting.  

As if that wasn’t challenge enough, it also had to empower intandem to compete successfully with much larger corporate innovation businesses. 

Our Solution  

We worked with intandem to create unique branding that would stand out and could be applied to a range of digital and physical assets. 

We listened to the intandem team’s vision and inspiration on how they wanted to portray their business. Our designers then worked closely with them to evolve these concepts and logo ideas into effective branding. This included ensuring we created something genuinely unique that could be used on a variety of digital and physical media. 

This process was iterative, and we explored different options at each stage, highlighting limitations of certain designs and showcasing alternatives. We also ran a number of co-creation workshops to develop and refine ideas in partnership with intandem.  

Softwire came up with the ‘intandem with’ brand concept, to portray the ethos of intandem innovating in partnership with clients. This would enable proposals, presentations and other material to be branded as ‘intandem with’ followed by the customer name. 

Having finalised all the concepts, we produced the visual material for the website and other key business collateral. We also provided content design expertise, to structure, refine and sharpen the messaging across the new site. 

The Result 

The branding is a hit with intandem’s prospects, underpinning its successful launch and drawing praise from global marketing experts. 

With the branding and content finalised, and its business cards, presentation decks and other core assets ready, intandem launched its services to market. The brand has been exceptionally well received, portraying the innovative nature of the business and appealing to its target audience of large corporations.  

Daniel Mueller, founding partner at intandem, explains: “We’ve been talking to organisations in financial services, medtech, energy, telecoms, aerospace and defence – and people absolutely love the branding, commenting on how it stands out compared to other, much larger innovation agencies.  

“We’ve even had marketing directors from major global businesses tell us how much they like it. This sort of feedback from branding experts is something we’re incredibly proud of. 

“The ‘intandem with’ concept is working fantastically well too. It’s different and it fits so nicely with what we want to communicate.” 

The Softwire branding has formed the foundations for other assets intandem has produced since its launch, including videos and social media content. Other physical assets are also in the works, including clothing. 

Mueller reveals: “The social media campaign we’ve been running, built on the foundations Softwire gave us, is achieving some really impressive metrics, because it genuinely looks distinct and grabs people’s attention.” 

He concludes: “Softwire took the ideas we had and turned them into something fantastic, achieving that simplicity that’s often so hard to realise. And what we liked most was the way they involved us throughout the process, taking us on a journey that’s ultimately empowered us to lead the marketing of the business ourselves.”