flinder has been on a journey.
And, like any fast-growth company, things have evolved quite a bit since we started out. As we’ve grown, our brand and identity have needed to evolve too.
Aligning our outward presence to better reflect who we are
We approached our rebrand the same way we approach everything – with obsessive attention to detail. We invested a significant amount of time and effort to make sure it’s consistent with who we are at our core and it represents, as best as possible, what we’re about.
It was a discovery of who we really are and what we wanted to be known for. We asked ourselves a lot of questions. Questions like, ‘If we were a car, what would we be?’ ‘If we were a character, who would we be?’ ‘What’s our voice?’ And ultimately ‘What message and emotion do we want to leave our audience with?’
flinder CEO, Alastair Barlow commented “Our brand refresh has taken over 12 months with an immense number of hours, pains and passions. From distilling down over 150 fonts to find the very best one that represents us, to analysing the ethos behind our colours, shades and iconography - every little detail mattered.”
We wanted our visual identity to be cohesive with the concept of transformation. We wanted our brand to represent our tightened values and our commitment to incorporating our mission and vision into our branding as we move ahead.
That’s why a butterfly is a fundamental part of our visual identity. It’s also why we’re called flinder. Co-founders, Alastair and Luke, previously lived in the Netherlands, and 'flinder' (vlinder) translates as butterfly in Dutch. It's also one of the first words uttered by Alastair's daughter, so it has a unique, personal meaning.
From our experience at the Big Four, we know how important it is to invest in a brand. Our investment in flinder builds a solid foundation to support our continued growth and we know that professionalising our approach will deliver a consistent brand experience to our clients as we scale. It's essential to our infrastructure as we take our business from nearly 50 to 150 and beyond.
How we’ve designed the flinder visual identity reflects our affinity with logic, our love of data and numbers and how they can tell a story.
The theory of the golden ratio
The golden ratio is one of the best-known mathematical concepts because of its frequent appearance in geometry and nature.
Philosophers, architects and designers have long used the ratio throughout history as a basis to create memorable, visually impactful designs and structures. They leveraged the ratio to establish cohesion and balance between their structural elements.
Still used today, the golden ratio works because designers believe in its aesthetically pleasing power of balance for the viewer.
Designing our mark, we needed balance and structure and so based it on these principles. It’s the logic and science behind not just our mark but our entire visual identity.
The golden ratio and the flinder mark
The golden ratio formed the building blocks and foundation of our butterfly icon, using the golden ratio circles to form our trademark butterfly components. Simple and elegant on the surface, yet complex at its core. A perfect balance.
Our new colour palette
We've also been very deliberate in our choice of colours, and while there isn't a mathematical equation we can apply, each colour has a distinct meaning to align with and demonstrate our values. This part was definitely more of an art than a science!
Our DNA is still the same
In the past five years since our inception, we’ve:
- Grown our team to nearly 50 people.
- Supported our clients raise more than £400m in equity funding.
- Pioneered a new subset of accounting – smart finance functions®.
- Built our own proprietary technology to surface business-wide insights.
While quite a bit has changed about flinder, there’s plenty that hasn’t.
This is the stuff that’s part of our DNA. It formed our vision on day one and is as important to us five years later as it was back then.
- Our elastic finance team – giving our clients a better option to hiring in-house; bringing leading practice and being able to scale the finance function as they scale.
- A laser focus on insight – whenever possible we tell you why something has happened, not just what has happened. Relating it back to the business and strategy.
- An obsession with real-time data - we give our clients what they need when they need it. It needs to be timely to take action.
- Cutting through the BS - we tell it straight and as simple as possible. It's about telling the story as easy as possible to create action.
The end result
We're passionate that our brand is more than just a logo. But our entire visual identity is a large part of communicating our message. Spending the time to uncover who we are to better communicate this to the outside world has given us strong foundations for the next 10 years. It's given us the opportunity to reflect on the need to show our stronger technology and data-led principles. And it's added greater clarity around the smart finance function® category.
While it may be the end result, it's actually just the start of the journey. We've developed visual design, tone of voice and how we write guidelines for our team. We're fully focused on delivering a consistent brand experience across all our clients and audiences.
We're super proud and passionate about our new brand, and we're much better placed in sharing our message and emotion to the outside world. The transformational and logic side of our visual identity defines who we are.
We are flinder.
