Project
Sage Global Rebrand
Client
Sage
Service
Brand Transformation / Creative Direction
The situation
Sage had outgrown its brand. The identity no longer reflected where the company was going — and the organization knew it, even if nobody could articulate why. I led the transformation working with global agency Wolff-Olins, building a complete new system around a single defining idea: the Sage Flow. Post-rebrand, annual revenue increased by $200M and the company raised $100M in capital.
The situation
Sage is a global software company serving millions of small and medium businesses across more than 20 countries. By the time I joined as Global Brand Creative Director, the brand had quietly drifted. The visual identity was generic, the story was flat, and the company had grown far beyond what the brand was capable of expressing. Everyone could feel it. Nobody had named it.
The Friction
This wasn't a design problem. It was a clarity problem. Sage had a brand that described what it did — accounting software, payroll, HR — but not what it believed, or why any of it mattered to the people running their businesses on it. There was no emotional center. No gesture that said: this company is on your side. Before anything visual could change, we had to find what was actually true about Sage. Not what the strategy deck said. What the company genuinely was, at its best.
The Approach
I led the brand transformation working with global agency Wolff-Olins, alongside internal teams spanning marketing, design, product, and communications across multiple continents. We started with discovery — going deep into the organization, its customers, and what the company stood for at its core. The answer became the Sage Flow: a signature visual gesture embodying perpetual forward progress, with the business at the heart of everything it does. From that single idea, we built the complete system — identity, motion, iconography, UI/UX direction, events, campaign frameworks, and a full suite of brand tools that 13,000 employees could actually use. The identity was designed to move. Sage had been a static brand for too long — animation and motion were built into the system from the start. Custom illustrations, iconography, and dashes-and-dots graphic elements gave the brand warmth and flexibility across every surface.
The Outcome
The rebrand launched globally and held. Not just visually — organizationally. Internal buy-in across marketing, product, and sales was strong because the work had involved those teams from the beginning. The brand gave the sales team a clearer story. It gave the product team a visual language they were proud of. It gave leadership something they could present to investors with confidence. Post-rebrand annual revenue increased by $200M. The company raised $100M in capital.
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