“Where they’re understood”: Georgia Platt on branding personal financial planning
Posted 2 hours ago in brand identity, design chat, web design
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Woven in: our brand and website design for financial planning firm Henwood Court
Posted 3 weeks ago in animation, design chat, web design
We love a new adventure we already have the know-how to tackle. That’s how it has felt working with the team at Chartered financial planning firm Henwood Court over the last seven or eight months, as we’ve reimagined their branding and created an entirely new website.
In fact, the Henwood Court experience began in a completely new way for us: with our client finding us via a search result on ChatGPT, heartening proof that, contrary to the doom-mongers, AI can point people towards specialist expertise rather than just replace it.
The finished project is one I am intensely proud of. We spent a huge amount of time thinking deeply about this piece of design, how it aligns with the values of our client and considered every tiny detail along the way to its launch.
The Henwood Court story and their brief for the future
I’d describe Henwood Court as a financial planner with a particular passion for understanding and helping their clients. Having worked alongside them and observed them closely for most of the last year, I’ve been struck by how much they both want to understand the people they work for, to ensure the advice they give is right.
This isn’t unfamiliar territory for us either. After our work with Your VC last year, Henwood Court marks another step beyond the institutional and B2B financial services work we’re best known for, into a growing interest of ours in brand and website design for personal financial planning.
In particular, Henwood Court speaks to business owners who have just sold their firm after many years of hard graft. It’s such an interesting client base and one we’d never been briefed on before. Alongside that sits a couple of perhaps more expected groups: people considering their retirement and financial future, people ensuring their family are looked after long term and retirees themselves. Together they round out the primary audiences for this new website.
For somebody weighing up a series of big financial decisions, a website of this kind needs to be both reassuring and genuinely useful, with grit behind the gloss. It needs to help them understand what happens next. For us, this was ‘the brief behind the brief.’
Henwood Court has been a successful family business for over twenty years, a point which wasn’t lost on me in terms of their success at understanding what people really need and how to hew the right advice to their clients’ aspirations. It is in this intelligent groundedness that their ethos and expertise is presented, then backed up with video client testimonials. At every turn, our design needed to meaningfully support that.
Our custom brand and website design for financial planning firm Henwood Court
The brand refresh with patina
From a business identity standpoint, Henwood Court had a relatively new logo they’d adopted a few years ago, which was now familiar to their team and clients. It’s perfect for them, with a distinctive handwritten style and the brand’s signature purple. It made sense to build around that mark and create a new house style that would support and enhance it. We spent the early part of the project building out a set of assets, what we call ‘a visual brand’, seeing a compelling opportunity to find a new depth of thoughtful design for the firm.
It was in the first part of the project that we defined four key themes, personal freedom, clarity, warmth and partnership, as a structure for everything we worked on for Henwood Court. At the heart of these ideas was a desire to convey reassurance delivered through a tradition of service. We drew a series of patterns drawn from the crafting of natural materials: traditional wooden parquet, weaving and tailoring. From the first moment we saw these ideas applied, they felt right. This blend of visuals combined to sew the structure of the pages together, delivering texture and meaning without ever intruding on the content.
Everything we designed, then built, for the website put Henwood’s core client base first. Even our technical build for the core pages of the site focused on forward motion and simple interactivity designed to delight and reveal. It enables people to read and understand Henwood Court’s thinking and ways of helping them at their own pace, rather than presenting it all at once. To achieve this process we worked directly with Sarah Townsend, Henwood Court’s copywriter, as she crafted the storytelling, a genuinely collaborative process from start to finish.
“I’d say go for it, but be prepared for a real journey of discovery. Richard and his team took the time to understand every part of our business, asking the right questions and exploring ideas we’d never considered. My advice would be to invest the time, trust the process, and let the journey unfold. The end result is absolutely worth it.”
Georgia Platt
Marketing Executive, Henwood Court
Family business, family project
It’s worth mentioning our working relationship with Georgia Platt, who ran this project from the first conversation through to launch. Georgia leads marketing at Henwood Court and is also founder Nick’s daughter, which meant every decision about how the brand should look and sound next was being made by someone who knew exactly how it needed to feel. That deep instinct about what was right is no small thing in a project like this.
Continuity and a profound depth of knowledge within a family business resulted in really sound project oversight which I believe is demonstrated in the quality of the end result.
Our custom brand and website design for financial planning firm Henwood Court
In her own words
When I asked Georgia what she’d tell another firm weighing up a project like this, her answer said more about the whole brief than I could.
“I’d say go for it, but be prepared for a real journey of discovery. Richard and his team took the time to understand every part of our business, asking the right questions and exploring ideas we’d never considered. My advice would be to invest the time, trust the process, and let the journey unfold. The end result is absolutely worth it.”
The site is live now, with the benefit of the time and trouble we took over every aspect of the project evidenced throughout. Every one of those decisions, the patterns, the colour, even the way the words are presented, works in harmony together. The Henwood Court project’s success is the result of our design team putting the end user first and a project manager with a deep knowledge of how these decisions would resonate.
What began as a search result on ChatGPT turned into the kind of warm, useful design project we’d hoped it would be. That’s proof that thoughtful, considered design belongs in personal financial planning as much as in any industry we’ve built a brand.
Are you looking for brand and web design for a financial planning firm?
If it’s the right time for your firm to consider a brand refresh and new website, we’d welcome a discussion of how to think anew about your business from a visual perspective to ensure the growth you’re advising your clients on can be part of your story too.
Give us a call on +44 20 7351 4083 or email us direct.
