SOFI
Creative Direction Brand Strategy
Positioning
Identity
Marketing
Culture and Values
SoFi is a modern finance company known for student loan repayment. Broadening SoFi's position meant showcasing a suite of financial tools, rebuilding the brand strategy, evolving core values, and retooling its ID and collateral. More playful messaging and a new visual language led to spectacular ads, and a stickier, more emotive brand story.
SOFI: BEFORE AND AFTER
The original mark emphasizes SoFi's reputation for elitism:
a "tic–tac–toe" of applicants, with only a select few accepted.
While ID was secondary to the rebrand, I wanted to create a new mark that people could attach their own meaning to. Early in the repositioning process, I started thinking of ambition as both a value, and a design device: a window on what we all want.
But, how did I get there?
METHODOLOGY
I found major blind spots in the landscape of stiff Fintech services, leading me to a much more human approach to SoFi's rebrand.
Being "debt–free" should be merely the first point of contact in a bigger relationship with the company. Helping people attain their life goals helps SOFI stand out in sea of financial sameness.
It’s vital for internal culture to reflect consumer-facing values. Once we got the troops behind it, the new mission rolled out nationally – creating memorable campaigns, massive partnerships, and exponential growth. These are the fruits available to any company living up to its own brand.
BRAND STRATEGY
With a simplified, broadened purpose, we can build a more relevant brand strategy around a much larger audience.
Rather than targeting HENRYs ["High-Earning, Not-Rich-Yet"] members, we pivot towards customers who simply want financial independence. Members who are, simply put, DRIVEN.
ID FORMULA
INDIVIDUALISM + AMBITION + FUTURISM = DRIVE.
A new ID system needs to reflect a new Brand Strategy: by embracing members' individuality and supporting their ambition, we create a window on the future.
MODULARITY
The logo's "O" aperture lends itself to a wide array of visual treatments and campaigns for evolving company needs, while also giving my designers opportunities for ownership, and challenging them to try new approaches.
TYPOGRAPHY
I wanted something big, bold, and "anti-financial" for our typography — both in the new mark, and our daily–use. The new "SOFI" mark is fun, but still commands the respect that working with people's money requires.
Clean body copy and simplified UI makes interacting with financial instruments, data, and fine print far more bearable. In this way, typography choices alone can help unclog product bottlenecks.
COLOR
Along the same lines as the bold new typeface, I wanted a vibrant, dynamic color system, atypical of financial brands. By loosely referencing foods and environments, we can make finance less abstract, more relatable, and less painful.
COLLATERAL
EMOTIONAL VS. FUNCTIONAL PROMISES
What’s the payoff of being “debt free”? Logic only goes so far. I present aspirational messaging and imagery at every turn, encouraging the audience to think big, and project themselves into the future.
This required a brand style guide full of visual risk–taking, tempered by the trust and safety that finance requires: the “unexpectedly expected”.
DATA VISUALIZATION
Numbers are the bane of finance. Most people simply don’t want to confront the rude math of debt, making them even less likely to attain wealth. Increasing fiscal literacy to me means increasing design fidelity — allowing people to ENJOY the numbers. With a background in editorial, infographics are my oldest friend.
ACTIVATIONS
As Creative Director, I put the brand on track, build a style guide, and make it as ”open source”. This creates a collaborative, consequence–free culture for the team to try new things, find and weigh trends – surfacing the brand faster, giving us a more sincere line to the audience.
Vibrant Materials Design make SoFi activations unmistakable, while humor and smart surrealism is felt across the system – leaving the door open for in-house and Agency partners to engage with the brand in unexpected ways.
CULTURES & VALUES
Once the vision and strategy caught on, 11 Values came down from an enthusiastic, though somewhat-distanced SoFi executive team.
To get buy-in from the entire company, I brought in copywriters, and collaborated across teams to create palpable deliverables and meaningful rewards for this key step in the rebrand.
Company "Values" are a destination that you never get to, but can only aim for in the unending march towards forming a company culture.
Under my direction, the design team turned 11 "commandments" into a beautiful, engaging, and truthful system. This allowed us to go to market in all sincerity, knowing that everything changes.
CREATING PURPOSE
Financial brands can feel dry, uninteresting, and deliberately complicated. Institutions boast a deeper, personalized relationship, but don't deliver.
My job was to pivot SOFI away from being "that student loan company", to a witty, urbane, empathic organization that can get people out of debt, but continue a relationship through wealth management tools for life. This makes SoFi a partner that supports ambition and drive, rather than a service with no pulse.
This effort is about repositioning and rebranding, but it's also about creating purpose–led institutions: brands that take an active role in people's lives, and reap the business rewards of being useful, human, and real.