cargo.one was ready for the world's top freight forwarders. Their brand needed to catch up.

Freight forwarding is a traditional, high-trust industry. To win enterprise clients — the kind with names like DB Schenker, Kuehne+Nagel, and Dachser — you can't look like a scrappy startup. You need to look like the category leader.

cargo.one had the product to be that leader. The brand wasn't there yet. The homepage had just been refreshed, but everything downstream of it — social templates, ads, event materials, partner pages — still felt like an early-stage company. As the go-to-market strategy shifted from broad acquisition to targeted enterprise outreach, the gap between how cargo.one looked and how they needed to be perceived became impossible to ignore.

The brand needed to stop looking like a startup and start looking like the market leader they were becoming.

Rather than a single rebrand moment, we treated the brand as a living system — gradually and systematically elevating every layer over two years.

The starting point was a predominantly blue palette that worked, but didn't say anything. We introduced depth: purple and orange accents, gradients, new brand elements and textures that gave the identity range and personality. Layouts became cleaner and more considered. Social templates — previously generic and interchangeable — were rebuilt from scratch to feel unmistakably cargo.one.

As the brand grew, so did its formats. When cargo.one launched a podcast, the visual system had to stretch to cover it. I designed the full identity for the podcast — graphics, cover art, episode assets — so the brand held together in every context, from trade show booth to LinkedIn feed to podcast platform.

The web work was focused on making the website more scalable. cargo.one had 50+ airline partner pages scattered across the site — inconsistent URL structures, inconsistent layouts, and no way for the content team to update them without a designer. Every new airline partner meant a bespoke page built from scratch.

We fixed the root problem. I migrated all partner pages into a CMS — standardising the structure, updating the template, and designing a suite of new assets alongside it. The result: 50+ pages done properly — and a process that no longer creates a bottleneck. The content team could now update and add pages themselves, with no design dependency. We also built a CMS for the customer story pages — so publishing new stories no longer required a designer in the loop.

Beyond the CMS: redesigned social media templates applied across all channels, an updated newsletter look, monthly video updates for LinkedIn, and a series of AI onboarding videos for clients — which clients started asking for more of the moment the first ones went out.

As cargo.one shifted from broad market visibility to targeted enterprise acquisition, events became central to their go-to-market strategy. Industry conferences were no longer about awareness — they were about being the most credible brand in the room.

I designed the full visual identity for their event presence: booth systems, signage, branded swag, event programmes, and on-screen presentations. Each event got its own sub-branding — a visual system that felt connected to the core identity while reflecting the theme and context of that specific moment. The goal was always the same: make cargo.one impossible to overlook and impossible to dismiss.

Over two years, the brand systematically moved from functional to premium — right as cargo.one was landing the deals that defined their next chapter.

They closed partnerships with some of the world's most significant carriers and freight forwarders during this period: Delta Cargo, United Cargo, Cargolux, Cathay Pacific on the airline side; DB Schenker (global rollout), Dachser, Hellmann, and Kuehne+Nagel on the forwarder side. The brand showed up in every pitch, every event, every touchpoint those clients encountered.

The company also raised its Series C round, backed by Bessemer Venture Partners and Index Ventures. Design alone doesn't close rounds. But it has to look right every single time — and it did.

500+

Design assets delivered across brand, web, social, and print

2 yrs

Ongoing partnership — the longest in the studio's history

Series C

Raise supported through brand and strategic design work

This work came together through close collaboration with cargo.one's internal design manager and a brilliant marketing team. Every project here is shaped by their thinking, feedback, and trust as much as my own.