People trust their money with established, long-running financial institutions. So how do you get them to put their faith in a new startup? A LINE’s branding for Raizr offers a masterclass in squaring that particular circle.
Websites and apps have helped single people find the right romantic match for decades. But now, a cutting-edge startup called Raizr is applying the same principle to real estate.
Raizr is a matchmaking platform that facilitates commercial real estate financing by creating instant connections between lenders and borrowers. Headquartered in New York and developed by Surya Capital Partners – a leading Nationwide CRE finance advisory founded by wall street veteran Adi Chugh – they had all the financial insight they needed. But in the 2020s, every business needs smart branding too.
To craft a brand experience and website that could support their revolutionary approach, they turned to , a brand strategy consultancy and digital design studio based in London and San Francisco.
Concept and logo
The new brand needed to balance being modern and precise with being trustworthy, a quality normally associated with decades-old institutions. The team began with an in-depth immersion phase and a series of work sessions. This led to the brand idea of ‘absolute accuracy’: a binary-feeling notion that felt both technical and precise.
Diving into the brand identity and behaviour, A LINE built conceptual worlds that felt precise, engineered, high-performance and future-facing. They explored visual cues that could support the brand idea and act as the cornerstones of the Raizr digital experience.
When exploring the design, the team created a uniquely engineered and precise ‘r’ symbol that felt sharp and razor-like yet still accessible. The balance of sharp and rounded corners felt different and interesting and offered an opportunity to create a unique identity system from this idea.
From this ‘r,’ they crafted the logotype, and for the typeface, they used from Optimo, which mirrored the use of sharp and rounded corners. They opted for a black-and-white theme for the colour palette, using cobalt blue as an accent colour.
Photography and website
A LINE also shot bespoke photography for Raizr: a mix of sharp-feeling black-and-white architecture and portrait images set in an interior space. They also harnessed motion principles by using the ‘r’ in the logotype as arrows that come together to create the idea of pinpointing a match.
After finalising the core design system, the team stress-tested by extending it across additional core applications, including homepage look and feel, billboards, key product pages, and digital campaign assets. TOV (tone of voice) and key messaging were focused on the principles of precision matching, instant results and cutting-edge technology that underpin the platform.
When it came to the website, the primary focus was conversion, so it needed to tell Raizr’s story quickly. This led A LINE to design a simple, minimal UI that leaned heavily on animation, creating a set of motion assets to communicate the value proposition before navigating users to find their precise match.
“A LINE did an amazing job of understanding our core business and translating it into the new Raizr brand,” says Adi Chugh, founder and CEO of Raizr and Surya Capital Partners. “They were an incredible partner across all areas of brand and website creation and development. Everyone at Raizr is thrilled with the results.”
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