By Miles Sellyn, VP of Strategy
Four for four, baby! As many of you have noted, I am on a generational run.
Last one in the Koala series, and today I want to clear up something we've been saying wrong, including on our own social posts 👀
The way people (us) like to tell this kind of story is "brand and product, designed together from day one." It sounds great. It’s veritably harmonious! It's a lovely thing to put on a slide! And even though the brand absolutely slaps, it’s not technically what happened
What you’ll find below:
- Why the brand work started after the product work
- Four narratives, all a bit sketch
- WTF is a brand volume dial?
- What we ended up shipping
- The one thing Koala did as a client that I wish everyone did
- Early access to Koala, just for HG OGs 🎁
Together doesn't mean at the same time
Josh, who led the brand development for us, was a part of the project but didn’t start his work in earnest for a few weeks while product strategy and UX found their shape. Here's Justin on why that mattered:
"If Josh had started any sooner, there would have been a lot of wasted time. The timing of when Josh kicked off was appropriate because there was already definition around the core product."
That's a pretty meaningful lesson for anyone willing to listen. Brand and product should absolutely be designed by people talking to each other constantly. But a brand written before anyone knows what the product does is a brand written about nothing, especially when the brand and the product are so tightly coupled in the business model. You end up with a beautiful identity for an app that turns out to work differently, and then someone has to retrofit one of them.
What made it "together" was everything after the start date. Josh was in the (Zoom) room for the key product discussions.
So here's the rule I'd steal: start the brand when the product can answer "what is this for?" in one sentence, and not before.
Four narratives to get to the right one
Once Josh started, he moved fast (it’s one of the things we love about him). He wrote Koala a manifesto (low key underrated copywriter). Then he brought them four different narratives for who Koala was and asked which, if any, resonated.
None of them were right on their own! Oh no? Not quite.
Justin: "It was: this piece here, this piece here, this piece here. But having that initial swing at the narrative, which we'd never had, was huge."
This is the brand version of what we talked about in week two (two newsletters ago). You don't ask a founder "what's your brand?" and write down the answer. You give them a few strong, deliberately different options and let them react, because people are much better at recognizing themselves than describing themselves.
The brand volume dial
One of my favourite articulations of how brands show up is the concept of brand volume. In Koala’s case, the brand that came out of our work is a "coastal jungle” kinda vibe.
The backstory is that Joey the koala migrated from Australia looking for a more chill, tropical life and landed in Maui. Warm oranges and yellows, blue and green accents, a leaf mark, a deliberate sense of calm.
But you can’t have a koala riding a surfboard on every brand surface. So we think about different assets having different “volumes” on a dial:
- The marketing site sits at a 9 or 10. Full expression.
- Onboarding sits at a 6 or 7. Still prominent, still delightful.
- The core product (feed, community) drops to a 2 or 3. Enough to feel like Koala, not enough to get in the way of the tool.
Joey moves across them as a character, showing up when needed: onboarding, empty states, the AI assistant, discovery. But we also have the ability to scale him back without it feeling any less like Koala.
What shipped
And now, to flex. Four months after kickoff, Koala had:
- A complete brand system, including Joey
- Product design across every core flow: onboarding, home feed, explore, chat, profiles, collabs, and Joey's interactions
- A marketing site designed and built in Webflow, set up so the Koala team can update it without touching code
- A motion package
Most studios will give you half of this in twice as long - and nowhere near this quality. WOOF.
[IMAGE PLACEHOLDER: 5. Brand guidelines shot.png from Drive HG folder]
🎁 Early access for HG OGs
Last week I said I might have an early access invite code for ya. Well, I do!
Koala's public launch is in January, but Hidden Gems subscribers get in early. Sign up at joinkoala.co and use the code RAREDAYS.
🎁 Claim your Koala early access →
Huge thanks to Justin and Jesse at Koala for making the gift happen.
And that's a wrap on this run. Thanks for sticking with four Thursdays of koala content.
Two deep dives down. If there's a project of ours you'd like me to pull apart next, hit reply. I'm taking requests!
