The Challenge

KW-Wealth sets itself apart from competitors through it’s customer focused approach – building meaningful relationships to understand their customers as individuals. Independent financial advisors and wealth managers.

KW Wealth provide clients with advice on a wide range of issues including investments, pensions and life insurance. KW-Wealth currently looks after around £1.8bn of client funds.

Their old brand, tone and marketing collateral did not fully reflect this.

The Solution

The solution took shape through initial creative sessions with the client and began with a new name to mark a break with the past. The client then requested a full visual brand proposal to provide an evolution of the existing style while reinforcing their core ethos and difference to competitors.

The design of the site evolved using the newly redesigned identity to delivery of a visually stunning website. It is the beginning of a modular design system which has evolved for future projects, overcoming some of the general user experience challenges which had hampered the old site – whilst still maintaining the clients familiarity with the old.

The Competitors

Mood Boards and Initial Designs

Art Direction

The KW identity is solid and confident, with a feeling of a trustworthy source of content the harks back to the old logo, generating a feeling of familiarity. Best design practices brought the design up to date as well as setting the ground for future projects.

Illustration was chosen as the key driver and has been used to great affect in the printed matters as well as all digital media as it depicts the offices in the city and the surroundings. As KW prides self on being very personal with its clients the illustrations of the people especially key.

UX and UI

Wire-framing based on client discussion and research was developed and heavily tested and refined.

Tight page design and grids were used to maintain integrity throughout the different brands.

By having a fully responsive prototype, design questions could be answered much faster as well as avoiding working on static designs for multiple view-ports.

Design Principles

KW is also a plural brand and the new approach gives a freedom to its sections, utilising the layered photoshop files – the freedom to create multiple and unique imagery for each section is maintained.

Delivery

An in-house team of three developed the sites using the prototype and documentation to build.

As we had taken over from an old site URL we made sure that we correctly reassigned the URL from old to new. As any new URL is difficult to rank organically we instigated a PPC campaign to make sure no leads were lost.

From our subsequent SEO research and analysis it was seen that most of the traffic goes come to the news area, knowing this it was an important door for the KW brand the design was subsequently re-focused on delivering the latest news onto the homepage.

The Twitter an Linked in profiles have also been re-branded and notes on tone of voice issued.

Results

The new website was an big step for KW Wealth to enable them to set themselves up with a new digital identity as a quality standard.

Helping them to improve their digital position in the finance sector was a massive challenge and I am thankful for leading the team who worked on this amazing task.

User Feedback

I am really proud of our new look. I hope you’ll like it when you visit KW-Wealth.com from July 2nd. When I look back at where we started on the re-brand project, I am surprised at how much of the old brand identity is still there. And I am amazed at how good it looks in its fresh new treatment.

We knew that we wanted to keep our tone of voice – it’s strong, jargon-free, unpretentious and confident. And we liked the sense of space in our brand, giving us a very uncluttered look. But everything else we planned to change. Re-decorating is always worth it in the end!

David Inglesfield: Head of Wealth at KW Wealth