Celigo
Celigo Rebrand
Redefining an enterprise iPaaS brand
2024
When Celigo's new CMO arrived in mid-2023, the company faced a critical brand disconnect: despite having enterprise-level technical capabilities, Celigo was perceived as a point-to-point integration solution for smaller companies. Trapped in a "sea of sameness" amongst competitors, the brand needed to reflect the company's enterprise capabilities. And conventional SaaS aesthetics (blue everywhere, stock photography, technical jargon) weren't going to shift the narrative.
Roles, Tasks
Brand Strategy, Creative Direction, Design, Design System Architecture, Team Leadership, Project Management
The Challenge
Transform Celigo's brand from a perceived point-to-point solution into a differentiated enterprise platform that reflects the company's technical capabilities and human-centered business process expertise.
Celigo needed to shed its legacy perception and position itself as an enterprise-wide integration platform capable of competing for major accounts. The brand had to signal technical sophistication, human-centered approach and enterprise readiness, all while differentiating it from the pervasive "Sea of SaaS Sameness".
The challenge extended beyond aesthetics. The rebrand had to be executed within an aggressive timeline of less than 5 months, with limited budget, utilizing a lean in-house team that still needed to maintain day-to-day creative operations. Success required strategic efficiency: building on foundational systems I'd implemented during my first year, rapid stakeholder alignment, and empowering the team to solve problems autonomously.
Strategic Approach
An artifact from the early whiteboarding session
The strategic approach balanced four priorities: honoring my predecessor's legacy (evolving his "Morse" dot-and-dash system into dynamic motion graphics), differentiating through humanity (authentic photography vs. corporate stock), signaling enterprise readiness through visual boldness, and future-proofing through the token-based design system I'd built in Figma during year one.
Rather than jumping immediately into a massive system overhaul, I spent my first year at Celigo observing, synthesizing insights and improving foundational systems. When our new CMO started in mid-2023, he immediately signaled rebrand readiness, and I was able to rapidly transform a year's worth of strategic thinking into a comprehensive brand concept that aligned creative vision with business objectives.
Competitive analysis revealed a pervasive "SaaS sameness" of blues, stock photos, and sterile technical positioning. Celigo's differentiator was a human-centered approach: 10 years of business process expertise applied to real customer challenges.
Working closely with our CMO, I developed a visual system that abandoned ubiquitous SaaS blue for a balanced color palette, featured real human moments in our photography, embraced motion to represent data connectivity, and paired geometric precision (Area Normal typeface) with humanist warmth (P22 Mackinac Pro).
Process: The "Mic Drop" moment
One month of focused concept development led to a single presentation that earned immediate executive approval without a single change request, accelerating the timeline by 3-4 months.
The rebrand work kicked off in mid-August 2023, with a planning session at our California headquarters led by our CMO. When he, along with our VP of Corporate Marketing, Art Director, and myself, regrouped the next day to begin "mood boarding," I revealed a comprehensive brand concept that I'd been mulling over for months, complete with strategic rationale, visual system, typography, photography approach, motion guidelines, and brand narrative.
After presenting, the room went silent. Then, our CMO (previously at NetApp, and with decades of experience under his belt) said:
"I've been a CMO for a long time and I've seen countless brand presentations in my career. This is the first time I haven't had a single change request. You've absolutely nailed it. Mic drop moment."
We skipped 3-4 months of typical brand development cycles and moved directly to execution. I created a comprehensive project plan in Asana, coordinating 100+ deliverables across multiple workstreams: website redesign with external agency April Six, corporate identity system, internal platform rebrand, branded merchandise, sales collateral, and product design system translation – all while maintaining day-to-day creative operations.
Rather than micromanaging in an attempt to accomplish this, I educated the team on the strategic intent behind design decisions, enabling autonomous problem-solving for unanticipated scenarios. This empowerment approach was critical, given our aggressive timeline and resource constraints.
The design philosophy centered on balance: technical precision paired with human warmth, bold statements balanced with judicious restraint, acknowledgement of our brand legacy but with deeper purpose and timely relevance. Every design decision connected back to Celigo's core differentiator—the human expertise behind the technology. The typographic pairing of geometric Area Normal with humanistic P22 Mackinac Pro embodied this philosophy, as did the authentic photography style that captured real human moments rather than staged corporate scenarios.
Visual System & Implementation
The final brand system combines bold geometric precision with humanist warmth, featuring dynamic motion graphics, authentic photography, and a scalable design architecture that enabled rapid implementation across 100+ touchpoints.
The visual system abandoned typical SaaS aesthetics in favor of bold differentiation. Area Normal (geometric sans-serif) paired with P22 Mackinac Pro (humanist serif) created flexibility for any communication context—from technical documentation to personal CEO messages. Our photography captured authentic human moments in our signature "The Day is Ours" style, eliminating generic stock imagery. Motion graphics evolved the legacy "Morse" system into dynamic shapes representing data connectivity. Bridging the gap between brand and product teams, a comprehensive design system in Figma provided scalable, flexible components ready for both marketing and product implementation, enabling the Product Design team to adopt and extend the brand seamlessly. Key learnings: Patience creates velocity (the year I spent building systems made execution exponentially faster). Strategic clarity beats volume (one comprehensive presentation beat months of iteration). Empowerment scales better than control (teaching strategic thinking enabled autonomous problem-solving). Business impact matters more than creative perfection (the rebrand succeeded because it supported revenue goals, not just because it looked good).
This project exemplified strategic creative leadership: understanding business context deeply, building foundational systems patiently, and delivering enterprise-level work with startup efficiency. The most gratifying moment wasn't the GDUSA award; it was hearing employees across our 700+ global team say the brand finally matched their ambition for where Celigo was headed.
Achievements
"I've been a CMO for a long time and I've seen countless brand presentations in my career. This is the first time I haven't had a single change request. You've absolutely nailed it. Mic drop moment."
— James Whitemore, former Celigo CMO and current CMO at indeed
The rebrand earned industry recognition (GDUSA Award, Gold ADDY), delivered substantial cost savings ($500K+), and supported Celigo in meeting aggressive ARR growth targets while accelerating the company's enterprise market positioning.
The rebrand delivered substantial business impact: Celigo met and exceeded aggressive ARR growth targets following the launch, with a strengthened enterprise deal pipeline and improved market positioning that supported the company's strategic shift toward larger accounts. From an operational perspective, the project demonstrated the power of strategic efficiency. By executing agency-equivalent work in-house, we delivered over $500K in cost savings while compressing a typical 9-12 month rebrand cycle into less than 5 months from concept to public launch—all while maintaining 100% of day-to-day creative operations. The design system foundation I'd built during year one proved instrumental, enabling the Product Design team to fast-track platform updates and adopt the new brand seamlessly. Internally, the response from our 700+ global employees was overwhelmingly positive, with feedback like "This is the Celigo I want to work for" validating that the brand finally matched the organization's ambition and forward trajectory.
Team Output Increase
Total Cost Savings
