Sowbeez
Be the voice of your town.
Influence marketing was built for people with large audiences and brands with budgets to match. Sowbeez opens it to the other end: any household in France with an Instagram account, and any local business worth talking about.
Brand Appart worked with Sowbeez for eighteen months, from brand identity to the mobile app and the website, as a monthly design partnership.
The challenge
Two products in one app
Residents post and get paid. Local businesses order and track. One interface had to serve both without either side feeling like an afterthought.
A category nobody knows yet
There is no existing category for paid micro-influence at neighbourhood scale. People had to understand the model before they could believe they would be paid for a post.
A campaign screen doing too much
Statuses, budgets, actions, history. The campaign view had accumulated everything, and users could no longer tell what to do next.
Brand Strategy
Influence, brought down to street level.
The premise is simple and easy to get wrong. Sowbeez is not a smaller influencer platform, it is a different market: a bakery paying twenty locals rather than one account with a hundred thousand followers.
So the brand had to speak to people who have never called themselves influencers, and to shop owners who have never bought media. Everything was written for those two, not for the industry.
Brand Identity
Punch In Red, and a system that scales down.
The palette runs on five colours, led by Punch In Red with Soft Green in support, paired with Rubis for its modern read. Illustration, iconography and patterns were separated into distinct roles, so the app stays legible instead of decorated.
The logo ships in three builds: compact as the default, wide for horizontal spaces, minimal for small sizes and mobile. All of it documented in a brand book the team applies without us.
Deliverable
Brand, app and website, over eighteen months.
We built the identity, designed the product and kept shipping as it grew: brand book and logo system, the mobile app end to end (onboarding, campaign creation, statuses, statistics, referral, payments), the website with its earnings simulators for residents and for businesses, and motion for both the app and the logo.
The work ran as a monthly design partnership rather than a one-off project, so the product could keep moving between releases.
Result
Everyone gets to be an influencer, in their own way.
Sowbeez turns a modest local following into income, and gives small businesses a media buy they can actually afford.
The campaign screen was rebuilt around one primary action instead of competing buttons, and onboarding now ends with a first guided campaign. Users learn the model by doing it once rather than reading about it.
Testimonial
We faced a real challenge with Sowbeez’s branding. Brand Appart came highly recommended by major players and they exceeded all our expectations.
