I'm Luke Bishop – a Creative Director and Writer with 15 years' experience across both in-house and agency environments – I have a passion for concept development, creative strategy, copywriting, brand building and team management.
Dojo: Rebranding Europe's fastest-growing fintech
April 2025
Right from launch day in August 2020, Dojo grew at a white-knuckle rate – 150,000 UK customers in three short years, no less.
This was clearly very encouraging from a market share point of view, as initial belief in the product was ratified by the most important metric of them all – especially for a scale-up business.
But as adoption grew at an exponential rate, it became clear that the cracks would soon begin to appear in the initial brand identity foundations if we didn’t take action soon.
Exploring the current day
Exploratory ‘suring-up’ work began with the product UI – looking at ways to sprinkle some magic within the key touch points of the card machine app and increase cohesion with marketing creative.
But as the exploration ramped up, it became increasingly obvious that a more holistic brand refresh was needed to support business growth – as well as the numerous new customer comms platforms and processes being introduced to support merchants and convert prospects.
Working with senior marketing leadership, I went back to my brand agency roots and began lining up potential suitors to help Dojo create the brand identity foundations that would help further UK onboarding and entry into major European markets.
After a competitive tender process, we decided that global brand agency Design Studio was the right shop to help us move things forward. And move things forward, they did.
Changing position
On top of the brand identity work, there was also a pretty intricate positioning puzzle to solve, as the Dojo offer became more layered and comprehensive.
As well as payment services, business funding and back-end business support, the acquisition of restaurant booking app WalkUp meant that Dojo was now playing in the B2C world, too.
We needed a central brand idea, a creative platform, to tie the whole offer together and make things compelling and meaningful to business owners and consumers alike. The challenge was set.
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And after weeks of collaboration, deliberation and debate, we finally got ‘to the good stuff’.
With multiple work streams in progress, I helped lead, manage, critique and contribute to our brand agency’s output, alongside senior Dojo leadership and founders – working to tight timelines while also taking other business functions on the rebrand journey – educating and highlighting its importance to the future success of the organisation.
Evolving the current identity
At the start of the rebrand journey, we started with a clean slate. No idea too crazy, no execution too ambitious.
In the search for ‘right’, it was important that we didn’t let the here-and-now cloud our judgment on what the future might look (and sound) like.
But as the journey continued, it became clear that there was more equity in the initial Dojo identity than we realised – our striking brand teal being one key example. So, as time went on, we knew that (to borrow a Partridge-ism), Project Rebrand would be more evolution than revolution.
The original brand voice – designed by myself and the Dojo copy team during the first Covid lockdown – kept its original roots of Fresh, Focused and Authentic, but changed descriptors to bring the pillars more into line with the new central brand idea.
Iconography, typography, art direction, illustration styles and secondary and tertiary colour palettes were also evolved to help audiences ‘get to the good stuff’.
With the individual elements well and truly elevated, the jewel in the crown became the development of the ‘Bento Box’ design system – which allowed for impactful, simple and meaningful communications and data visualisation across both marketing and product applications.
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This pre-defined structure helped us to keep things more consistent than ever, and strip away ambiguity from the beginning of any creative output.
The logo conundrum
With the brand identity foundations slowly starting to bed in, one question remained: Do we change the logo?
Previous Head of Design Luke Hardy’s brilliant and striking Bauhuas-inspired word mark was much-loved both internally and with customers, so we knew any changes would be done with a heavy heart.
But as the dust slowly started to settle on the evolution of our new design system, it became clear that a reimagining was necessary to make things cohesive within our new brand ecosystem.
So it was out with the delicate lower-case form of the original logo, and in with a full-caps, rounded-edge word mark that worked more naturally with our more defined and simplistic design system. It was bold. It was different. But it worked.
Learnings: tell the story – every step of the way
Having worked on many rebrands agency-side and then as Creative Principal at Dojo, the contrast of responsibilities and challenges is stark.
There's no doubt that the work is the hero of any rebrand story (and rightly so), but as a leader of a creative team in an ambitious scale-up business, it became clear very quickly that the most challenging part of the process would be taking people on the journey of why it mattered.
Why should other business-critical workstreams be deprioritised to make way for something that looks like a luxury to the uninitiated? Well, I learnt a valuable lesson there.
Don't wait till things are fully formed to show and tell. Take people on every step of the journey and contextualise the positive impact it will have on what they care about. Strip out the ambiguity. Plan hard. Get people excited.
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With the initial detrimental impact rebrands can have on balance sheets and ROI difficult to quantify in the short term, telling the story of 'why' is the only way to get buy-in at any level within the business.
So become the champion of it – a raconteur of brand-based positivity.
Do it well and your work will soon do the talking for you.​
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