Bitkey Inc. was founded in August 2018 with initial Brand and Logo design work done by the architectural agency DE-SIGN. By the end of 2020, with a staggering 50+ products in the pipeline and failed attempts by a third-party branding agency to create a coherent base for the company to grow upon, the newly founded corporate branding team was charged with directing the branding efforts of Bitkey.

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The biggest challenge we faced in building the Bitkey brand was that various brand identity elements were scattered throughout the company. When I joined in May 2019, the leadership had already determined the company's mission and values without clearly defined origins or relations. Additionally, the rapid growth of Bitkey gave the sales department the power to create arbitrary product, technology, and service names, resulting in pseudo-brands.

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Designing the brand for Bitkey was less about radical transformation but rather about discipline in filling the gaps in the brand narrative. Our approach was to take what was already there, such as the brand mission- "Connect everything through the power of technology" and work our way back, asking basic questions to determine the brand purpose, promise, and vision.

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After defining the brand statements, we advanced to the company's abstract core value system. Through the 'CONNECT Principles', a set of simple and actionable on-brand behaviors, we gave employees a tool to understand if their activities align with Bitkey's values.
Finally, we simplified the branding architecture through a hierarchical structure and created three overarching brands that help sort everything, from product names to services and technologies.

Our primary achievement was not creating a brand that made sense at the time, but rather building a solid foundation that scales with the company. Considering that Bitkey was the fastest-growing startup in Japan in 2020 and 2021, this was a crucial aspect of our branding strategy.

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