“It means something before it looks like anything”: MISA’s Lucy McAndrew on branding a group of businesses

Branding a group of businesses is essentially the work of making a portfolio read as one entity. We talked to MISA Group’s Lucy McAndrew about working together to create the parent company’s website, built outward from local craft.

Africa-focused energy investment firm MISA Group is built on three decades trading across the continent and was unified in 2026 under a single brand.

The new MISA Group branding grew outward from a logo system created by the Ghanaian designer Kwaku Opoku, with a design rooted in Adinkra symbology and kente fabric patterns. We were briefed to take that work and build a full system around it, bringing the patterns to life with animation, developing a broader colour language and applying both to a new website.

Lucy McAndrew is an investment analyst at MISA Group, working closely with CEO Guy Hacking on the opportunities the group appraises across Africa. That vantage point, close to both the investment thinking and the firm’s founding values, made her the right person to talk to about branding a group of businesses that had to carry both. We asked Lucy to tell the story of the MISA brand and website from her perspective.

This interview is part of our series talking to the people behind the projects we work on.

MISA’s view is that Africa is rich in resources and talent but short of the patient capital and infrastructure to use them. Working closely with Group CEO Guy Hacking, how do you see that vision playing out in the opportunities you appraise on the ground?

There’s just a vast amount of opportunity and very often the thing missing is the financing needed to realise it. A lot of that comes down to mispriced risk. Investors have a tendency to assume that Africa is uniformly risky, when the risk profile looks completely different depending on where you are and what kind of opportunity it is. Our take is that the market has simply mispriced it, and we can say that because the group has been operating in these markets for decades. The familiarity most investors don’t have is where we start.

You see it right across what we look at: hugely talented people, deep knowledge of their markets, and more potential than almost anywhere else in the world. Modaso, our infrastructure business, is a good example: really capable people, a real pipeline, doing some genuinely groundbreaking projects in countries crying out for power, and the thing only works if we’re willing to build patiently around them and believe in them. Bioscape is another: there is a growing global demand for agricultural residues and Nigeria has a lot of them. What’s usually missing is the financing and the connective tissue, the freight, the offtake, the working capital, to make it work in practice. Carbon in Africa is the same for the same underlying reason: huge potential, exciting projects, needing the right structure around them. That’s what patient capital is for.

So watching it up close with Guy, the discipline is mostly temperament. Stay close to the ground, back operators who actually know the terrain, and be willing to hold through the years where the value is quietly getting built. That’s really what patient capital comes down to.

When MISA set out to unify under one brand and build the new website, what spirit did the new brand need to evoke, and what did the site most need to get right?

When we thought about the brand, we kept coming back to the heritage of the business: the legacy, the fact that it’s family-owned and very much values- and people-driven. We wanted to hold onto that integrity and entrepreneurialism and build on what Michael, Guy and Tara’s father, had built, whilst laying the groundwork for the next phase of growth and philanthropic work.

We spent a lot of time thinking about how to marry that experience, the history, the operational expertise sitting in the business and with the people on the ground, with the ambition, looking at the holding companies we aspire to: the old European ones, what Dangote has done in Nigeria and across Africa more broadly. We wanted it to feel structurally clean, professional and serious, and very much African: vibrant, unique, progressive, and it had to speak to that legacy.

Tone was the thing we guarded hardest. We invest in Africa because we believe in it, and the copy and brand had to sound like that without labouring the point.

For the site itself, clarity mattered most. People have to be able to go onto the site and understand who we are, what we do and what we believe in, and how, and we had to let the people doing the work on the ground shine through. I love the hero line on the home page in particular: “When the world turns to Africa, we will already be there”. The tense is deliberate. The world turning is the part that’s still to come. Us being there isn’t.

The brand grew outward from Kwaku Opoku’s logo and its kente-inspired foundations into a full system of patterns, animation and colour. How did that way of working, building on local knowledge, align with MISA’s philosophy, from investments to charitable foundations?

What I love about Kwaku’s design, and the work you at Richard Chapman Studio have done to build on that visual identity, is that it means something before it looks like anything. The arch reads as an “m”, two parts coming together, the holder and the portfolio, making a safe space where things can happen, and it comes out of Adinkra symbology; the kente influence really lives in the pattern work that grew up around it. Even the colours carry the same logic. The navy is inherited straight from Mocoh, the trading side, and the amber brings the warmth: Africa, legacy, energy’s connection to the earth. So the whole system is built outward from things that already meant something, rather than a template flown in and localised afterwards.

And that’s basically how the group tries to work everywhere. The investments back people who are already deep in their markets. The foundations are locally led, on the same values. The weaving idea turned out to be a gift for a holding company: individual strands, each with their own meaning, stronger together. None of that had to be invented for the brand. It was already how things worked, and the ethos we want to continue to operate with.

What does the new brand and the website let MISA say that it couldn’t before, and where did the creative output go further than you expected?

Mostly it lets us talk about the group as one thing. Before, you’d explain Mocoh, then the portfolio, then the foundations, and the sum never quite got said. Now there’s one name, one story, one vision, and you can feel the difference in how people respond, counterparties, founders we’re meeting for the first time. It’s also given the portfolio companies something to orient around, and lets everyone in the market know: we’re here to stay, and we’re only growing and increasing our impact.

The surprise for me was how far the creative travelled. I expected a logo, a palette and a website. What we got is closer to a language: the patterns, the motion, a whole library of symbols that each mean something, and it’s ended up everywhere: our presentation templates, our documents, even internal tools we’re building. I didn’t expect the work to keep spreading after launch, but it has. Richard and the team managed to find a visual language to build our identity around, and for that we’re hugely grateful.

Our conclusion

The success of this project begins with the visionary thinkers at MISA Group who are building upon Africa’s energy solutions to create a sustainable future. We began the project, in a sense, with similar foundations, briefed to build everything we did from the authenticity of Kwaku Opoku’s identity.

That well of creativity informed everything that followed, meaning that as the design process began we leant into a different sort of skillset, that of working with an outstanding set of tools to build something that would speak to MISA’s investors.

Essentially this project was to give MISA Group’s website a sense of authority and scale, providing a platform for the group of businesses and charitable foundations in such a way that felt both consistent and confident at scale. What the group has now is a cohesive brand language and that the work has since spread into presentations and internal documents suggests it holds. Our thanks to Lucy for her words and to Kwaku for the foundation our work stands on.

Are you looking for design expertise branding a group of businesses?

We’ve completed work of this kind working with umbrella companies, firms with a diversified structure and firms with many funds which use sub-branding to delineate them. Great examples of our work in this field are:

Veld Capital

Baker Steel

KOA

…and of course MISA Group themselves.

If your group company’s name, visual identity, or digital presence no longer reflects where your business is going, we’d love to talk. Get in touch: 020 7351 4083 or email us directly.