Following a successful £2.6m seed investment round, Green Bioactives wanted to “figure out how we present ourselves to the outer world”.
BRAND STRATEGY
BRAND DESIGN
BRAND SOUL
An incredible startup biotech business founded by scientists from the University of Edinburgh, Green Bioactives’ pioneering plant cell culture technology is paving the path to a more sustainable world.
They reached out to us following their successful £2.6m seed investment round, ready to take their products to market and to “figure out how we present ourselves to the outer world”.
To shape their external image, we first needed to look inward towards their Brand Soul™.
Through our Brand Soul™ workshops, we uncovered the single, enduring idea at the heart of Green Bioactives: improving lives. Their vision evolved from focusing on being a "world-leading supplier" to a deeper commitment to people. We also defined three brand pillars to guide their growth: People, Planet, and Progress.
- Values and personality
- Audience challenges and goals
- Vision and mission
- Brand essence
- Brand pillars
After the workshops, we questioned whether ‘Green Bioactives’ captured what the brand stood for.
To find out, we ran a brand survey, asking the target audience to weigh in on five different name options. Although there wasn’t a clear favourite, there were no negative associations with the existing name - and because it was already well known to customers, we decided to keep it.
Next, we turned our attention to creating a product naming system. Even though only three products were launching initially, we knew more were on the way. The system we designed is simple, flexible, and has a clean, scientific feel — blending the brand name, product focus, and active component, with an exponent that grows as the range expands.
Bringing Brand Soul™ to life
With the strategy in place, it was time to bring the visual identity in line with the new vision and three pillars, creating a cohesive look and feel that was attractive to their audiences. Our interactive visual wall workshop creates mood boards that inform the style of the brand.
Before
Visually the branding was quite outdated. Assets were lacking in consistency with a mixture of colours, fonts and styles being used across different collateral. The logo itself was also highly detailed which meant it didn’t scale well.
After
Named ‘Isolation to Creation’, the new visual identity symbolises Green Bioactives’ method of sustainably sourcing and developing ingredients directly from nature. The hexagon shape represents the extracted bioactive molecule. The tree represents nature and the three branches within the tree stand for the core brand pillars of People, Planet, Progress.
We believe every brand has a soul. A fire that makes it different.
For Green Bioactives, that fire is their commitment to improving lives.
Biotechnology is a complex topic. It combines principles of biology, chemistry, genetics, and engineering.
The specialist team at Green Bioactives understand it but we needed a way to simplify it for the non-scientific folk such as investors and distributors. We needed a format that was both accessible and captivating. The result was the Bioactive Chronicles - an illustrated comic series that brings the brand’s work to their audiences in a way that’s engaging, relatable, and easy to grasp.
Chief Business Officer