Challenge
Wrike’s product had evolved faster than its brand. Inconsistent visual language and legacy patterns across web, campaigns and content made the experience fragmented and production harder than it needed to be.
Wrike / Refreshing a global B2B SaaS brand at scale
Case at glance
Role
Head of Brand Design. I initiated and led the refresh from research and creative direction through C-level alignment, reviews, prioritisation and rollout, working with six designers in the core refresh team and partners across Product, Marketing and Web.
Scope & scale
Brand research and audit, visual-system evolution, product-brand alignment, templates, libraries, guidelines and brand portal. Rolled out over 11 months across 1,500+ web pages and 50+ templates while regular design delivery continued.
Output & impact
A more coherent brand system that better matched Wrike’s product maturity and could scale across channels. The team gained reusable tools and clearer principles they could extend independently instead of treating the refresh as a one-off launch.
Solution
A controlled evolution, not a reset
Wrike’s product had changed substantially, while the marketing brand still carried patterns from an earlier stage of the company.
I started with a comprehensive audit of Wrike’s main brand touchpoints and developed Brand Emotional Navigation (BEN) — a framework for how one brand personality could adapt its expression across audiences and stages of the journey.
BEN defined four emotional modes, from professional–rational to inspirational–emotional, with principles for how each should work visually and verbally, aligned with the content team’s tone-of-voice guidelines. The core personality stayed consistent; its emotional register changed with the context.
In parallel, I initiated brand-personality research to map Wrike’s existing characteristics and define where we wanted the brand to move: more modern, human and technologically confident. The research wasn’t finished when the refresh started, so this was a strategic direction rather than a completed research finding.
The direction was later supported by customer research after the refresh: respondents predominantly described Wrike as dynamic or engaging, transformative or strategic, innovative or modern, and collaborative.
The goal was therefore evolution, not reinvention: bring the brand closer to the product and the company Wrike had become without throwing away recognition.
Turn the direction into a usable system
Together with the team, we evolved the colour palette, graphic elements, layouts and information hierarchy. Every change needed to do a job: strengthen recognition, improve clarity or make the system easier to use in everyday production.
We translated the direction into reusable templates, libraries, guidelines and an online brand portal. That turned the refresh from a visual update into something teams could actually work with.
Roll it out while everything stays live
There was no pause in normal marketing work, so a big-bang rebrand wasn’t realistic. We prioritised the rollout and migrated the system gradually across the website and other formats.
Within 11 months, the refresh reached 1,500+ web pages and 50+ templates while the team continued handling its regular workload. I also worked with Product to bring selected brand decisions closer to the product experience and reduce the gap between discovering Wrike and using it.
What changed
The main result wasn’t simply a new visual style. We left behind a system the team could keep evolving across web, campaigns, video, presentations and future brand work — with clearer principles, reusable infrastructure and stronger continuity between brand and product.
