Karma Solar

Practices

Services

Industry

Corporate

Brief

Karma had the vision to connect the world’s one billion people without power to sustainable energy systems, providing them access to healthcare, education, and food security, and thus, creating the world’s largest off-grid energy company.

Brand Lounge was tasked with creating a compelling visual identity that establishes a forward-looking and modern brand that also is approachable and engaging.

Differentiation

Brand Lounge understood the importance of developing a brand that promotes the company’s supreme goal of understanding what fellow humans are enduring, and its willingness to do something about it. Brand Lounge worked on a strategy to position Karma Solar as a disruptive player in the industry, reaching investors and partners at the initial phase, but with enough mileage to connect with end-users at a later stage.

We wanted to create a brand that positions the organization within the industry, but that also addresses “energy poverty”. This required a new set of innovation-thinking, not only in the lab but also in the way Karma reaches its customers and delivers its products. We wanted to create a visual identity that projects innovation and speaks about the brand’s ultimate goal of touching the lives of those in need. After assessing it, we agreed to retain the equitable elements from their existing identity, primarily the shape of the sun and the color palette. These elements helped redefine a logo, and identity system that communicated clean solar energy, and the simplicity of installing and using the products’ solutions.

The migration from the existing visual identity to the new one helps uplift Karma Solar to an entirely new level. It equips it with much more visibility towards its mission and objectives and promotes it as a modern brand dealing with modern industry, but also as an empathetic brand that aims to do good for the world.

Solar power brands in general tend to sit more on the conservative side of the spectrum, mostly because the bulk of their dealing is in a B2B environment. With Karma Solar, the objective was to reach the entire spectrum of the industry, mostly because the end beneficiary could be a small farmer in need of electricity for an irrigation pump.

Brand Lounge worked on a strategy to position Karma Solar as a disruptive player in the industry. Typography plays an important role in achieving this goal. The challenge was in finding the right typography that can play the two roles of business and human.

The chosen typeface needed to be approachable and communication-friendly. It needed a “humanistic” element to it, yet a high-tech feel. It had to be a combination between the technology of Karma Solar and the company’s human / empathetic approach.

The type was chosen for some of its unique letters such as the “M” and “W” which are fluid and look like “wires”. It resembled power cables and how we’re allowing the flow of energy into people’s livelihoods.

Karma Solar’s website constituted the primary tool of the business, even before the brand. It needed to tell Karam Solar’s history, story, vision, innovation, and most of all products.

At Brand Lounge, we needed to think outside the box, and explore ways of creating a website with multiple facets, while remaining faithful to one story, one brand, and one message.

The Karma Solar website was designed with the B2G audience in mind. It adopts a minimalistic look and feel, highlighting the backstory of the brand and mostly highlighting its solutions. We opted to incorporate animations on the solutions pages that allow the viewer to understand what comes with each product box.

Karma Solar operates in primarily B2B and B2G environments until the product reaches end-users. The main challenge in finding a naming nomenclature that ticked all the checkboxes was to communicate the solution, the products, and the brand’s purpose.

Karma Solar needed to vehicle this emotional connection about its solutions mostly because of its underlying philanthropic mission. We needed to do it gracefully and aesthetically that consistently aligned with the brand’s tone of voice.

Everything Karma stands for as a brand, boils down to the packaging of the product solutions, and of course the products themselves. Here, the challenge was to create a perfect symbiosis between both by designing a package that solemnly announces the solution, creates anticipation, and displays the content and how it works, and last but not least promote what the Karma Solar brand stands for.

The new fresh and modern brand of Karma Solar tells the company’s story in a more compelling and engaging way. The use of a minimalist approach to developing the brand proved to be an excellent accelerator for the company’s vision to reach its audiences.