Last month, we unveiled a project close to our hearts that we’ve been carefully crafting for almost a year now. Accel Atoms is a pre-seed program for exceptional founders launched by the Indian arm of esteemed American VC firm Accel. After a much-extended saga to conceive an authentic idiom and identity, we’re chuffed to share Atoms’ new branding program.

Accel approached us with a specific problem to solve by design: their sub-brand Atoms suffered negative perception among its target audience of early-stage founders. Our strategy team began its extensive primary research: 90+ hours of interviews conducted with 70 stakeholders including founders, partners, internal team, industry experts, and competition. While Atoms serves as the bridge to Accel, founders were unclear of its proposition and found its program design inadequate. Other identified problems which the design program had to solve include the poor quality of cohort applications and brand persona being seen as transactional.

Parallel to the interviewing, we derived pointed insights from the fundraising landscape through secondary research: VC domain trends, service and investment trends, Indian VC ecosystem’s perception, and emerging ideologies. The team then conducted a thorough audit of the brand, internally (culture and aspirations) and externally (touchpoints and gaps). Within VC, we carried out a separate landscape study of accelerators and incubators, before auditing the sub-brand and its then-existing website. This brief holds the studio’s record for lengthiest research and strategy phase yet. We’re ready for startups and VCs now 😀.

We prescribed revised positioning, paired with a totally fresh visual and verbal landscape for the sub-brand. After two drawn-out rounds of exploration, we were delighted to find a solution with deep roots: the 0-1 journey of early-stage founders, dovetailing from the notion popularized by Peter Thiel. The interviews revealed to us that no two founders’ pre-seed journeys were alike; each faced their own set of challenges which they overcame in highly contextual ways. We positioned Accel Atoms as the catalyst for 0-1 journeys and proposed every 0-1 journey is unique as the core communication from a visual lens. An extensive visual study in the incubator/accelerator space informed us of what visual cues and devices to stay away from. Several hours of craft and distillation later, we have managed to shape a striking tonal footprint for the brand. We user-tested two visual directions with our target audience; founders related with 0-1 in an instant. The brand’s tone of voice allowed it immense character, flashes of wit that bring a smile in the mind. We iterated relentlessly, solving for sustainability, novelty, and future readiness, with hypercontextual communication. Have a look in our Atoms branding case study here.

In retrospect, we wonder if there exists a code for alchemy. Sequential as this piece makes it seem, versus the wild goose chase that it was. We love what we do, this pursuit, the hunt for stellar and authentic solves, time and again.

Maybe this is what transformation takes.
Bravery, trust, and a grand voyage.
We thank Accel Atoms for daring to be authentic