When a startup grows up
VP, Brand Voice for Twill: Creative Direction, Creative Strategy, Brand Development, Product Naming, Writing, Art Direction, UX and Brand Architecture Consulting
Happify Health started as a science-based wellness app and grew into Twill, The Intelligent Healing Company. I started as one of about sixty employees; in less than twelve months, the group grew to 200+. We introduced multiple support communities, launched a first-of-its-kind app for digital therapeutics (DTx), and completely re-imagined our go to market plan. While the growth was impressive, it was non-linear—resulting in a disjointed narrative, and a brand presence that had outgrown itself.
The creative shown here is the tip of the re-brand iceberg, as we transformed Happify Health into Twill: The Intelligent Healing Company.
This re-brand started from the inside out and hit upon every imaginable touchpoint: from loyal daily users to B2B pharma, insurance, and healthcare clients; from employees and prospective talent, to investors, our founders and the board. Along with our partners at Proto we have re-named the business, re-architected the product and messaging frameworks, implemented a new brand identity and persona, and introduced a flexible and unifying visual system.
In the months after launch, traffic to twill.health increased 148% YOY, and requests for demos jumped 79%, helping to drive a 126% increase in business development meetings.
By introducing Twill, we untangled the complexity of eight years of company lore, to weave a brand narrative that speaks to where the company—and the healthcare industry—is headed tomorrow.
As part of the rebrand, we created a short video to introduce Twill to the world. As The Intelligent Healing Company, we focused on four primary needs and conditions—organized into what we called Sequences—covering Mental Health, MS, Pregnancy, and Psoriasis. Each of these was supported by both DTx and Care communities, so our members could benefit from solo and/or collective health experiences.
Created in partnership with Proto and Made by Radio.
To create a more cohesive presence, we shifted the product strategy to a branded house model. We re-named our apps—previously known as Kabinet and Kopa—Twill Therapeutics and Twill Care. Going deeper, we unified the aesthetics of our offering within one visual system, so that each product and community felt part of the Twill brand.
Excerpts from our Brand Playbook demonstrate how the Twill re-brand touched everything: including go-to-market strategy, persona and tone of voice, product nomenclature, color theory, typography, design system, photography, and more. This new brand language is at once unifying and flexible, inclusive and personal—bringing cohesion to the brand and member experience.
Far from a solo project, the final 150+ page document stitches together the talent of in-house and partner contributors from strategy, writing, design, UX and photography backgrounds.