Accelerating a health and wellness start-up idea to raise seed funding.

Project: Business Strategy, Value Proposition & Prototyping

Client: Quol

Category: Health & Wellness

Responsibilities:
Concept visioning, Identity development, Strategy architecture,  Business development, Prototyping, Branding and Visual UI design.

The challenge

The two founders of Quol came to us with a brilliant idea and big ambition: to find new ways to help people live a healthier and happier life, but needed help to turn their start-up idea into a business in a short space of time and bootstrapped budget. We pitched our rapid prototyping sprints which enabled us to develop the idea alongside some solid research and business strategy which would result in a proof of concept that we could go armed to investors with.

Balancing health and wellbeing and our modern lives feels difficult when we’re just so busy. But there are ways to live better, and there is good information out there if you know where to find it, or if you understand it. And this is where Quol comes in. Quol, stands for “Quality of Life”, something that we are all striving for no matter who we are or where we live. Unlocking the secret to this and making quality of life more accessible to all is key to the Quol’s founders vision. By opening up access to experts, specialists and creating bite-sized information that could be adopted by everyone on any platform, we sought to bring a new type of service to enrich people’s online experience and help them live happier and healthier lives, both on and offline.

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Our approach

Before we began, we advised the founders to spend a couple of weeks focusing their energy on collecting inspiration, conducting desk research, documenting initial content before we begun our two-week long intensive ideation process. In the first sprint, we collected insights, discussed broader issues and concerns before zooming into the real crux of the problem.

Within the first workshop, we quickly realised that there’s a plethora of health and wellbeing information available online, not all of which is easily understood, correct or that provide tangible insights. Following on from this, we spent time working to understand who the market was and what makes the potential audience tick by conducting a thorough empathy mapping exercise and customer journey framework across the potential touchpoints. We very quickly realised how important, ‘Trust’ would be for users, especially when you consider how many different health brands and channels are out there.

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Once we’d started to understand the potential audience, we started to calculate the potential market and numbers to ensure that this idea could become a revenue-generating and profitable business. Once we’d verified the businesses potential, we started to map out the business strategy and value proposition. Without giving too much away at this stage, this process enabled us to establish, Quol’s niche and its unique selling points within the wider landscape.

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In parallel, we begun working up the high level brand identity based on the brand essence exercise we completed in the sprint before.

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Using the ‘rules’ that underpinned Quol’s DNA, we were quickly able to build out the look and feel from a honed moodboard. This included a primary and secondary colour palette, logomark, typography pairing and image styling.

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Based on the value proposition, Quol’s content needed to stand out, so we chose bright, eye-catching colours and paired them with a modern, blocky, Serif font that is easy to read on any device and can deliver for short form and long form content.

Quol is all about finding the balance in life, so we needed a logo that would showcase how Quol will continuously take care of you so we presented a few variations of how we could make that possible and landed on a circled arrow that represented the circle of wellbeing.

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The results

At the end of these two weeks we had a fully working prototype, branded pitch deck and a nailed down definition of what Quol is, does and provides to its users. The founders are currently out pitching for funding and developing content and we’re looking forward to how we can help this worthwhile platform reach its full potential.

Some key frames from the branded pitch deck. Some information is blurred out for privacy. 
Some key frames from the branded pitch deck. Some information is blurred out for privacy.


“Furthermore came highly recommended–and they lived up to their reputation. We had a limited budget and Hana and her team designed two sprints to get our business up and running. The research and proof of concept sprints spanned two weeks. It was intense, but brilliant and highly productive. We feel we achieved more in a fortnight than we would have done in six months. We thought we knew what our business was all about leading into the sprints, but Furthermore’s thorough interrogation and expertise helped to develop our business concept in directions we hadn’t even considered. We couldn’t recommend Furthermore highly enough. The team is hardworking, highly professional, creative and fun to work with. More importantly, they get results.” — Hugo Ward, Founder of Quol
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