An updated UI style overlayed onto refreshed brand imagery to highlight the real ways people use Venmo to power shared experiences and co-create joy.
Venmo Rebrand
Repositioning the Venmo brand for its next evolution
Opportunity
To reimagine Venmo’s core brand identity, differentiate it from the competition, and ensure it continues to define how the next generation moves money.
Solution
Venmo is a leader in the peer-to-peer payments space and a brand known and used by 90+ million people. But in the increasingly crowded fintech landscape, Venmo needed to remind customers of its value and invite them to use it in fresh ways. To truly shift customer mindsets and continue to add value, our brand team got to work evolving the core value proposition and positioning, sharpening customer and cultural insights, and pushing the brand forward with a refreshed verbal and visual identity. Venmo’s rebrand has been a huge cross-functional effort two years in the making.
My contributions included:
Holistic brand architecture, value prop, positioning, and core messaging territories for testing.
Qualitative research inputs, personas, and customer insights development and socialization across teams.
Revised product value props and external messaging guides featuring copy thought-starters grounded in research-backed RTBs.
Lead brand stakeholder in agency reviews of new brand guidelines and assets; key collaborator with go-to-market teams working on a corresponding app redesign.
Rollout coordination across marketing and product teams and channels.
Brand training and foundational resources for new hires.
Led a brand library photo shoot using the new art direction.
My role
In the rebrand: brand strategy lead.
Note: My role at Venmo began on the creative team as a senior copywriter in 2021. After advocating for more brand clarity and cohesion, I moved to the brand strategy team to create foundational resources like cultural calendars, design targets, and messaging frameworks. I reported to the Brand Director.
The team
The in-house brand, creative, research, and experience design teams at Venmo, in partnership with an external design agency.
Process and results
The project began with the company’s three-year strategic plan. We used it to inform value prop territories for testing, align with cross-functional teams on an evolved value proposition, design target, and brand positioning. The resulting strategy and approach was grounded in what makes Venmo unique: not the transactions, but the stories and interactions behind every payment — the ever-moving currency for shared experiences and emotional connection.
Next, we collaborated with agency partners to develop a design signal from our finalized holistic brand value proposition: “life beats louder when our money moves through the people and brands we love,” with presentations to cross-functional teams and leaders to bring them along at key decision points. Then we got to work creating and implementing refreshed brand elements, including:
A slightly refreshed wordmark and updated monogram anchored in a new brand blue
A new proprietary typeface
An evolved color palette with expressive range
Updated iconography, illustration, motion, and 3D visual language
A new vibrant-candid photography style
A refined, easier-to-follow articulation of our brand voice
Brand guidelines for all elements and a cohesive brand ID
Venmo’s new identity is flexible, vibrant, and bold — designed to center our customers and underscore the joy of shared moments. We are in the process of rolling out our newly refined brand elements and are monitoring the effects on brand health metrics as we go, paying special attention to opportunities for brand reappraisal.
