Work / Case study 01 of 03 · Climate tech · Energy
Northloom
Making ten thousand home batteries look like one power station.
Client line · “The power station is already on your street.”
Overview
Northloom links the batteries, heat pumps and EV chargers in people's homes into a single power station that the grid can call on at peak. In three years it had grown to 11,400 homes and closed a Series B. The brand hadn't kept up. It still looked like the pilot it started as: a stock wind turbine, a green leaf and a lot of explaining.
[01] The challenge
Northloom has two audiences who need opposite things. Homeowners are being asked to trust a company with a device in their garage, and they want to see what joining actually does. Grid operators and investors need to see infrastructure: a company that can deliver megawatts on command, every time.
The old brand worked for neither group. In the app, sign-ups stalled at the install step. In procurement meetings the team kept getting filed as 'a consumer gadget'. And the first national campaign was booked for May.
[02] The insight
Nobody can see a virtual power plant. It has no chimney, no turbine and no site. What makes it powerful is thousands of small contributions acting together, and that's exactly the part nobody can see. Make the network visible and both audiences get it: the homeowner sees their own thread, the operator sees the whole fabric.
[03] The idea
Every home is a thread. We built the identity as a weave where each strand is a real site in the network. When the grid calls for power, the strands tighten and turn amber, so the brand shows the company working in real time.
The same generative system draws the monogram, the app's home screen, the charts in the investor deck and the billboards. The brand grows as the network grows. A quiet serif wordmark sits next to it and does the talking, because the weave already has the energy.
What we made
Brand strategy · Identity system · Generative graphics · App UI · Motion direction · Launch campaign
- 01
Woven monogram & wordmark
A 7×7 weave with the N picked out in over-stitches. On screen it responds to network load; in print it locks to a fixed state.
- 02
Live weave engine
A Canvas generator fed by Northloom's dispatch API. It runs the site hero, the app backgrounds and event screens at 60fps and weighs 38KB.
- 03
Homeowner app
New home and onboarding screens. Your thread sits inside the fabric, with earnings and CO₂ avoided shown as plain numbers, not dashboards.
- 04
Grid-services data system
Charts, maps and a capacity vocabulary for procurement decks, with megawatts first and homes second.
- 05
Launch campaign
'The power station is already on your street' ran on OOH, radio idents and door-drops, localised by postcode with live site counts.
Outcomes
+64%
onboarding-to-install completion in the redesigned app
3.1×
monthly sign-ups in the 90 days after launch
38 MW
flexible capacity under contract, up from 21 MW
19.8k
homes in the network by September, from 11,400
We spent three years explaining what a virtual power plant is. off/form turned it into something you can just look at. Procurement meetings open with the weave on screen now, and nobody asks whether we're a gadget company.
Credits
- Client
- Northloom
- Strategy, identity, motion
- off/form
- Weave engine
- off/form creative technology
- App engineering
- Northloom product team
- Sonic identity
- Fenwick Sound (fictional)
- Media planning
- Callow & Reid (fictional)
Tags
- Energy
- Generative identity
- Data visualisation
- Mobile
- OOH
Your problem next
Bring us the brief that doesn't fit the template. We'll come back with the one idea that explains it.
Start a project