A climate-tech holding company asked for a new name and identity for the moment they stopped being a "heat-pump installer" and started being something larger.
The company had outgrown its first name. What had begun as a small installer of residential heat pumps was, four years on, three businesses under one roof — installation, manufacturing, and a small lending arm to help homeowners pay for any of it.
The founders arrived at our first call with a brief that asked, politely, for a "more professional logo." They left agreeing that what they actually needed was a single word the whole group could stand under, and a story honest enough to make the lending arm sound like the same company as the installers in the van.
"We don't sell heat pumps. We sell the part of the house that finally feels like the future."
Our first round had the obvious answers — earnest greens, leafy metaphors, the kind of identity that politely apologises for asking the homeowner to spend money. We made them well and then set them down.
The second thought went the other way. Heat pumps are sun-shaped on a diagram. Lending is the same sun, on a longer timescale. The new name — Helio — covered all three businesses without translation, and the mark became a single solar disk: half-orange, half-night. Hope, and the hours it takes.
One mark, one wordmark, and a sub-system of three: Helio Home (installation), Helio Works (manufacturing), Helio Capital (lending). Each sub-brand is the same sun rotated. Three different times of day.
The type system is built on two voices: a long, plain-spoken sans for the homeowner-facing side, and a tighter monospaced voice for the lending and manufacturing documents — the kind of language that earns trust by being less excited than the situation calls for.
The website was the second-largest piece of work after the name. Most climate sites are either selling fear or selling figures. Ours sells a calmer thing: the day after the install, the week after the loan, the room that finally feels right.
It also does the boring work well — financing calculators, three different homeowner journeys, a press room, an investor section the lawyers signed off on without re-writing.
The new system launched in the autumn of 2025 across three markets — India, Germany, and a small pilot in the UK. The homeowner side of the business booked its strongest quarter in the four following weeks; the lending arm, which had been quietly invisible, took on its first institutional partner.
It's a project we'd happily do again, mostly because the founders made the second-best decision we've ever seen a client make: they let us throw away the first round of work in the first month.