MATCHA

OVERVIEW

Matcha is the home-sharing platform for professionals. Created out a love for travel, Matcha exists to help modern professionals take advantage of their flexible jobs - and cover their rent while they’re away. By putting trust at the heart of the tenant-host relationship, Matcha lets professionals get more out of travel.

SCOPE

Brand Strategy

Verbal Identity

Visual Identity

Web Design

YEAR

2023

OPPORTUNITY

An elevated travel brand

Within a few months of launching, Matcha started getting gaining traction with employees at leading organizations like BCG, Microsoft and AirBnB (yes, even them).

This prompted a bigger discussion around the brand Matcha was building - something the founding team hadn’t yet put thought into. Their main goal was to build trust with clients and credibility with corporate partners. They turned to Brandside for support in crafting an elevated (yet playful) end-to-end brand.

CREATIVE IDEA

The New Business Class

From the get-go, we knew Matcha needed to stand for something different. It wasn’t just an alternative to staying at a hotel, or a mass-market home-sharing platform.

Matcha represents a growing movement of young professionals who are hungry to make the most out of every experience. They seek out travel, new experiences, and never settle. And, Matcha’s founding team, with various backgrounds and relentless drive, perfectly embodied this next generation of professionals. This formed the basis of the brand’s creative concept: The New Business Class.

“Working with Brandside was a game-changer for us. The team captured the essence of our brand, translating what we knew deep down into a crystal-clear narrative and visual system. Everything they did was rooted in research, and the moment they walked us through the creative concept, we knew they ‘got’ it.”

– Noah, Co-Founder @ Matcha

VERBAL IDENTITY

Work-life indulgence

The ‘New Business Class’ creative concept was translated into messaging themes, value propositions and copywriting guidelines. This provided the team with boiler plate material to develop on-brand copy and sales messaging.

A voice character, Maverick Max, captured the essence of Matcha. She solidified how Matcha acts as talks - confident, strategic, slightly irreverent - providing helpful direction on how to craft effective, user-ready copy.

VISUAL IDENTITY

Art Deco
member’s club

After exploring a few directions with the team, we landed on an aesthetic inspired by private member’s clubs - spaces frequented by the new business class. To add some dimension, we tied in a light styling of 1920’s art deco. This brought out a retro travel decadence reminiscent of a Christie or Ambler novel.

The result was was a pastel-yet-rich colour palette inspired by global travel, with font choices and custom lettering tying it all together.

VISUAL IDENTITY

A companion for the road

From our first conversation, it was clear that Matcha’s team wanted a custom, highly recognizable character. ‘Cuppa’, a cup of matcha, was introduced to bring in some of the brand’s playfulness and irreverence identified in the research phase. And, against a backdrop of elevated photography, colours and layouts - the character brings a dichotomous energy that feels unmistakably ‘Matcha’.

For usability, Cuppa was designed with 4 core poses and 12 expressions. We wanted to create flexibility with the graphical element itself, while providing clear direction for how and when it could be used. This was so the brand maintained an elevated, editorial feel.

DIGITAL EXPERIENCE

Matcha’s verbal and visual identities came together in a set of cohesive high-fidelity website mockups. As a growing tech startup, it was critical to design an experience that enabled users to flow seamlessly between storytelling and product.

We struck a balance through engaging copywriting, varied layouts and custom icons for an end result that felt both functionally familiar and visually distinctive.

Matcha’s digital storefront

“Brandside Studio’s step-by-step guidance made an otherwise overwhelming process enjoyable, and they went beyond aesthetics to develop messaging that spoke directly to our target audiences. The final work has left us both proud and excited to share Matcha with the world.”