Earn It
Brand Strategy & Identity - Sapling Level Engagement
The Project
The UK has one of the lowest employee engagement rates in the world, just 10% of workers feel genuinely engaged at work. Mental and physical health are on a downward spiral. Health insurance costs for businesses are rising. The cost of living is squeezing the people companies most need to retain.
These aren't separate problems. They're the same problem. And Earn It was built to solve it.
Earn It is a wellbeing payment app that rewards employees for taking care of their mind, body, and soul, turning healthy daily habits into real cash credits, redeemable with a growing marketplace of trusted brands. For businesses, it's a way to improve employee wellbeing, engagement, and ultimately the performance, profitability, and value of the company. For employees, it's a way to feel better and be better off.
The bigger vision: to positively impact one billion lives.
That's not a marketing line. It's the belief the whole brand is built around.
The Challenge
When Earn It came to Palmer&Co, the belief was real. The ambition was genuine. But neither was visible.
The brand was generic, indistinguishable from dozens of other HR tech and employee benefits platforms. The business was product-focused, leading with features rather than the transformational change it was actually trying to create. The story that could move people, the one about the broken state of workplace health, the cost to businesses, the human cost to employees, and what becomes possible when you fix it, was buried under functional messaging that nobody would remember.
The beliefs were there. They just hadn't been crafted into something people could get behind.
This is one of the most common challenges Palmer&Co encounters: a founder who knows exactly why what they're building matters, but whose brand is communicating something much smaller than the reality.
The Approach
Root Work - Finding What Was Already True
We began with audience research, understanding the decision makers inside businesses who would buy Earn It, the employees who would use it, and the landscape of competing solutions they were already navigating.
What we found confirmed what the founders already knew instinctively: the opportunity wasn't to sell another employee benefits platform. It was to lead a conversation about what healthy, engaged, productive workplaces could look like, and to position Earn It as the company making that possible at scale.
DNA - Surfacing the Big Idea
We took Earn It through the complete brand strategy process, the same Ikigai-based framework we use in Circle and Sapling. Through that work, the conviction that had always been there became visible, nameable, and buildable.
The strategic shift was significant: from product-first to belief-first. From "here's what our app does" to "here's what's broken in the world, here's what we believe should be possible, and here's how Earn It gets you there."
The one billion lives ambition stopped being an aspiration and became the foundation, the purpose that gave every other brand decision its direction.
Expression - Building a Brand People Can Get Behind
With the strategy established, we rebuilt the brand from the ground up, creating an identity distinctive enough to stand out in a crowded market, warm enough to feel human rather than corporate, and built to carry a genuinely big idea.
Character design and animation brought the brand to life in a way that communicated Earn It's personality immediately, playful, optimistic, and grounded in the real lives of the people it was built to serve.
Work delivered on this project:
Brand strategy & framework
Brand identity design
Character design
Animation
Website design
Pitch deck
Marketing materials
Marketing plan
Content strategy
The Result
"When we came to Palmer&Co we knew what we were building, but we were struggling to communicate why it mattered. Ruth and Richard helped us find the story that had been there all along, the one about what's broken in the world of work, and what becomes possible when you fix it.
The brand strategy process gave us the clarity to articulate our vision in a way that resonated with everyone we spoke to, investors, potential clients, and the employees we're ultimately trying to help. The identity, website, animations and pitch deck they created gave us something we're genuinely proud of.
For the first time, the outside of the business matched the ambition on the inside. Ruth is simply the best marketer I've ever worked with, and I've worked with a lot."
Damian Milkins, Founder & CEO, Earn It
What This Illustrates
Earn It is a demonstration of what happens when the belief gap gets closed.
The founders always knew what they were building and why it mattered. The brand just hadn't caught up with the conviction behind it. Once the strategy surfaced the big idea, and the identity gave it the visual and verbal language to travel, everything changed. The pitch became more compelling. The story became more shareable. The brand became something people could actually get behind.
That's what belief-first brand building does. It doesn't invent a story. It finds the one that was already there, and makes it impossible to ignore.
Services delivered on this project: Strategy & Consulting • Design • Marketing • Animation • Character Design
Building something with the potential to change things at scale?
