Driven by a relentless bar for quality and integrity, the Plume brand identity was an emotionally perilous journey in demanding the most from ourselves.
We refined and destructed ideas continuously while meandering through collaboration with and without agencies over the course of 8 years.
Plume WiFi began as a strictly consumer product, but by 2018 we were already building new products to aid Communications Service Providers (CSPs/ISPs) and to craft new messaging pertaining to these enterprise customers. Eventually the brand at large needed to reflect these disparate audiences, and convey the sophistication and exciting possibilities our platform represents for now and the future.
It's 2016, and no one has ever heard of "mesh" WiFi or other distributed solutions. The consumer only knows about WiFi routers with bigger antennas, and "extenders" that always suck.
Though completely new to the residential consumer, our technology had already proven itself. There are several technological capabilities that made Plume WiFi "adaptive" to your home to ensure flawless, blazing fast, signal in every corner of the house.
It's not enough to be groundbreaking technology that solves a ubiquitous frustration in modern homes. We must be a product with identity that unlocks entirely new hope and inspiration.
We need to educate the consumer while also inspiring them; to show what they didn't know they were missing.
We built a story around this leap forward that was more than narrative or graphics — it was the full experience of a product in your hand, tantalizing to unbox, amazed at its elegance, plug it in and watch it work without any effort, and get an entirely magical display of its intelligence through an inspiring, dream-like interface far beyond anything necessary or expected.
We obsessed over the texture of the ethernet cable. We deliberated endlessly over interaction details. We crafted a user interface that literally breathed to show it was alive and aware — optimizing your home continuously.
We built the entire brand to be an experience. I was honored to be part of a team brave enough to refuse mediocre. We were intolerant to the mundane.
Help consumers comprehend a net-new technology that has layers of complexity contributing to it's effectiveness, and yet each of these layers are further mysterious to the consumer.
For example: bands and channels in WiFi protocols that cause interference with your neighbor's WiFi and even interfere with themselves in typical WiFi extenders!
We were very selective on which problems actually needed to be explained. Often as possible we found ways to convey trust and technological prowess to assure "it simply works".
But at a minimum, we employed diagrams (often animated) and cinematic videos to illustrate the technology in a friendly way. The styles importantly needed to feel minimal and approachable.
"Adaptive WiFi" is and was core to the WiFi backbone of today's Plume service and platform.
Pods don't do the thinking, they simply change channels and perform as the cloud intelligently instructs. This allows the cloud to make calculated decisions around device type and activity, among all other devices competing for bandwidth, in order to judge the best channel configuration continuously.
Beyond the most simplified graphics I could muster (as below), we also included these kind of learnings in the app as certain events took place.
To create packaging that was true to our convictions as a new wave of the internet at home, and that presented our product as both approachable and sophisticated. Plume should be understated, with a sense of awe.
The original packaging focused on textures that felt clean and simple, and it presented the pods inside sockets reminiscent of jewelry. The hexagons fit flawlessly and pulled out as said jewelry drawer.
As a distributed WiFi solution that placed WiFi directly into areas of the home, customers always begged to understand "how many pods do I need?".
This was a similar problem to explaining the value of our technology. Less is more. Customers were all too willing to complicate the solution, and every home has entirely different layouts, obstructions, and even different building materials for unlimited variables.
Refusing to address this question with some specific measurement, we found the best analogy to calm concerns: "think of it like a lightbulb".
Put the pods where you want WiFi just as you do with lighting in your home. 1 in each room is plenty. Plume will manage the rest.
We were in fact out of the hardware game. Simply buying inventory as needed from partners like Sagemcom.
Plume is needs to be presented as a service the user is getting continuous benefit from: the WiFi constantly managing quality, and quickly there are new services like parental controls, but users had a hard time understanding a subscription for their "WiFi".
This problem was wrestled with in many many ways over the years. Most importantly home owners would need to understand that "it's not WiFi". It's really more like a smart home service (for starters), and continues growing more capable all the time.
This is a seed that grew into what ultimately became our biggest rebrand in the legacy of 8 years, which took place later in this journey.
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How to keep variety and diversity without becoming generic.
A spectrum of character was built with an always-available kind of volume knob for style that could be dialed up as needed based on surrounding content.
Even for the most common Plumian, there is a spark.
View a cascade of the Plumian Spectrum for brand inspiration and mood.
How can we use the insights and learnings from our network of millions of smart homes to create additional value for CSPs, media outlets, and even end-users?
How can we also present this data to be concise, punchy, and compelling enough to drive anticipation of our monthly insights?
I personally created each data-visual below, and managed this deliverable for 4-5 years inside Plume with a new graphic ever month — on time, never late.
A small team of myself a lead data scientist and the marketing leader for CSP communications, would gather to investigate what insights are available in our platform that are compelling and valuable to our CSP audiences around the world.
We relentlessly held to a bar of interest and quality that was quite painful to achieve at times, but we saw it through each month. This effort became a springboard strategically used to build a robust set of dashboards far beyond a simple newsletter.
Learn more about the journey from Series B to Unicorn and the continued building of a world-class brand.
Anyone who designs for emails knows: email clients suck. They are super limiting, can't do anything fancy, and have stifled a lot of innovation in the industry.
We had countless needs for email communications and they were coming from multiple audience types, multiple use cases — some product, some marketing, some legal/admin, and billing — and all of these requirements converged directly on my team.
We needed a solution that would be modular, scalable, easy to implement — but as always, in Plume fashion, they needed to be undeniably compelling and beyond simply looking pretty. At Plume, we created experiences above everything else.
With partnership from a few stakeholders internally, we launched on a effort to create a unified email system for all communications.
Our email system built with the new Plume brand was created to be open, flexible, and consistent.
Figma designs were completely modular and swappable — using on an atomic design system.
Responsiveness between desktop and mobile was not just capable, it was actually a feature in the experience of these emails.
A single email had a unique experience depending on whether it was viewed day or night, on mobile or desktop, and would reveal unique layouts and even data depending on these variables.
This has been only a smattering of visual artifacts from my journey designing, and leading design, at Plume in Palo Alto, CA. Please say hello to learn more and see how these lessons can be employed at your organization.
