The challenge

Ember makes home batteries that store solar power during the day and release it in the evening. It is a genuinely useful product in a category very few people get excited about. Most competitors lean on the same visual shorthand: electric blue, lightning bolts and dashboards full of numbers. They look technical, cold and a little intimidating.

The founders came to us a few months before their first retail launch. They had a working product, a growing waiting list and no real brand to speak of. The brief was short and honest: make energy storage feel warm, human and worth talking about at a dinner party.

Our approach

We spent the first two weeks with the people who would actually live with an Ember battery. We visited early customers, joined installation days and listened to how people described the evening their lights stayed on during a power cut. Nobody talked about kilowatt hours. They talked about feeling calm and looked after.

Strategy

That insight became the brand idea: energy you can feel. Ember is not a gadget on the wall, it is the quiet glow that keeps a home running. We wrote a short brand platform around that idea, with a tone of voice that is plain, warm and never alarmist. Every message has to answer one question first. How does this make home feel?

Identity

The identity is built around a soft radial glow that sits behind the wordmark, the packaging and every product shot. It shifts with the time of day, brighter in the morning and softer at night. We swapped the category blue for a palette of warm oranges and deep charcoal, and paired a geometric sans serif with a friendly monospace for data and specifications. The result is confident without shouting.

Motion

Motion carries a lot of the story. We defined three simple rules. Light rises, it never flashes. Transitions breathe in and out. Numbers count up slowly, like a battery filling. Those rules shaped the launch films, the app onboarding and the social templates, so every touchpoint moves with the same calm rhythm.

What we delivered

• Brand strategy and messaging platform

• Logo, glow system and colour palette

• Typography and data visualisation style

• Motion principles and a library of animated templates

• Launch film and product photography direction

• Framer website with an editable CMS

The result

Ember launched with a brand that looks nothing like the rest of its category, and that difference does a lot of quiet work. Installers say customers recognise the van before they read the name, and new owners share photos of the glowing unit in their hallway without being asked.

Just as important, the team can now make on-brand work on their own. The guidelines and motion templates live in one shared library, so a new campaign takes days instead of weeks. The glow has become something the whole company rallies around.