Next Jump Rebrand

Perks at Work is a members-only shopping platform that employers give to their people. An employee signs in through their company and finds discounts and offers from retailers and brands. For the employer it is a benefit. For the retailer it is a channel into a workforce. For Next Jump, the company behind it, it is the business.

It operates at a scale few shopping platforms reach. Next Jump reported more than $2 billion in annual sales in 2016. Today the platform reaches more than 30 million employees across more than 50 countries, and it is used by small businesses and by 70% of the Fortune 1000.

A platform at that scale is not redesigned the way a website is redesigned.

In August 2015, Dreamspace built an in-house team for the project and moved it into Next Jump’s New York office. We worked from there, embedded in their daily routine, next to the people who ran the platform every day.

Understanding the company from the inside came first. The brand, the platform and the rollout plan all followed from how Next Jump actually worked, not from how a brief described it. Over time the engagement grew from branding into a full overhaul of the brand and the Corporate Perks platform.

The platform was taking orders every day, and the company’s 700 employees around the world were working against it. There was no pause button, and no version of this project that began with one.

The redesign had to happen in the open, one release at a time, on a platform customers were using that minute.

Before any page changed, the whole system went on a wall. The sitemap ran forty feet and held thousands of pages, each one to be redesigned in a short time and released in phases.

A wall that size shows what a screen hides: how many pages there are, how they connect, and how much has to move together.

A redesign this size only holds together if the rules are written down. We wrote the Perks at Work brand usage guidelines: the mark, the color palette, the treatment of full-screen title cards, and the way the brand steps back when a partner’s brand leads.

Timothy Ambler and Sean Yuksel were co-Executive Creative Directors. Timothy led the brand and the rebrand of Next Jump’s identity. Sean led the UX and UI design of the entire e-commerce platform. The Dreamspace team executed the rebranding collateral and distributed the materials across multiple mediums, across the whole brand ecosystem.

Orange is the primary color, with a set of neutrals and accents for everything else. When a partner’s color leads, the Perks at Work wordmark goes neutral gray, so the two never compete.

Thousands of pages cannot be designed one at a time. We defined rules for how headlines, single items and categories behave, then applied them across every kind of page.

The goal was a shopping experience that reads the same whether an employee lands on the home page, a category or a single retailer.

Every phase went live on a platform that was already selling. That changed how the work had to be designed. A page could not depend on a later page being finished.

The new brand identity and guidelines went out ahead of everything else, so each later screen inherited the same colors, type and partner rules.

The full redesign followed: the thousands of pages on the wall, released phase by phase while the store kept taking orders.

With the brand and the platform in place, we put the base of a second business into Perks at Work, the Leadership Academy. We planted it and left it there.

A new screen had to sit next to an old one without the customer feeling the seam.

To make thousands of pages feel like one product, every page drew from a single visual system, built for the platform and applied across the whole ecosystem.

Perks at Work is not only a place to buy things for less. Becoming a leader at your company and working out your future there is a perk too.

Learning to lead belongs next to the deals.

At the time, Next Jump’s Leadership Academy was free. We built the idea of the Academy into the Perks at Work platform, so that growth sat inside the same place employees already went for savings and rewards.

That was the base of a second business for Next Jump, planted in the platform and left there. What Next Jump built on it afterward is theirs to tell.

The identity extended into a Health + Wellness sub-brand and the merchandise around it, and into notebooks, shirts and posters carrying Next Jump’s “Do Great Things” line. We also produced the brand films that told the story.