CASE STUDY – Twiga Foods
Strengthening Twiga for Pan-African growth.
After a successful rebrand and brand positioning in 2018, we worked with Twiga again in 2021 to develop a strategic brand growth model to transition the business from a platform that provides smallholder farmers with access to domestic markets, to a high-tech Pan-African brand that streamlines various supply chains from producers and manufacturers to retail.
Twiga is one of Kenya’s most promising startups, and is transitioning from a platform that provides smallholder farmers with access to domestic markets, to a Pan-African brand that streamlines supply chains for informal retail and general trade.
Strategic Positioning
Brand Model
We worked closely with Twiga’s leadership team to develop mechanisms that better dial in our purpose, cascade growth levers and unlock value at scale.
No two projects are ever the same at ARK, and in that spirit, we developed a purpose-built brand model to help Twiga grow, leverage the brand functions to the various stages of growth as we transition from a Kenyan to a Pan-African brand, B2B to B2(B2)C, and small-holder farm sourcing to large-scale agriculture, FMCG, dry goods and household product portfolios.
Business, Product and Process System Design
Customer Experience
As part of our strategy-led design process, we map existing customer journeys, and explore potential opportunities to streamline service delivery and make the experience more seamless and valuable for all parties.
We then developed robust customer journeys backed by service blueprints for suppliers, vendors and end consumers, taking into account numerous customer jobs and value drivers.
Employee Experience
As startups grow rapidly, organic and agile ways of working change to enterprise SOPs. We proposed a number of ways to maintain cross-functional agility for continuous innovation, systems to build institutional memory, as well as culture-enhancing initiatives to foster stronger teams.
Brand Architecture
Twiga has a vast array of digital and physical products, all coming live with rapid go-to-market roadmaps. We needed a brand architecture and design system that built clarity for internal product design and development teams, as well as ability to function competitively in the market.
Private Label
We developed a new brand and packaging system for Twiga’s Private Label products, to accomodate new and future product development.
Twiga Fresh
We also created Twiga Fresh, a brand identity for all Twiga’s products sourced and traced back to their new large-scale commercial farms.
Retail Experience
Finally, we developed functional interventions & merchandising systems to ramp up trade visibility as the brand comes closer to consumer touchpoints.
2018 Rebrand
Formative Brand System – Soko Yetu
Ahead of Twiga’s Series B raise in 2018, Twiga approached ARK to build its brand and better communicate what it does to connect farmers and produce vendors across Kenya. We focused efforts to redesign and streamline Twiga’s brand identity, digital strategy and website design in order to create better alignment between their brand objectives and their online presence.
We reworked the brand identity to improve the way it functions and represents the brand. We retained the iconic giraffe making a few minor tweaks to give the logo better balance while ensuring it would render clearly on small screens. We also enhanced the unique connected typographic style making it more legible and iconic, and updated the colours of the identity to improve its contrast and readability.
The unique logotype we created is the key identifier for the brand’s corporate audience.
Design System
This project provided us with the opportunity to bring life to different touch points with colourful iconography, illustrations and, infographics. We extended the brand’s colour system to include a secondary palette for illustrations and iconography. The palette includes unique swatches for their farmer and vendor audiences, making it easier for them to identify which communication material is specific to their needs.
We created a ‘Twiga world’ illustration to depict the how its early version of the Soko Yetu marketplace worked.
Next, we developed a full suite of icons for all product categories listed.
Content Storytelling
To communicate Twiga’s vision and impact we used a variety of storytelling tools. In addition to the infographics and illustrations we created we also used photography and video to take viewers inside the world of farmers and vendors.
Our photography took us to different parts of the country to capture the stories at the farms, as well as the vendors in the cities.
Communication
To create a deep alignment with the reimagined identity we redesigned Twiga’s website – www.twiga.ke. This allowed us to combine all the identity and storytelling elements to connect with Twiga’s audience and deliver a useful and immersive experience.
