CASE STUDY
Building One of the Most Recognized Brands in B2B
How we built the system that made HubSpot's identity work globally across products, events, acquisitions, and 7,000+ employees.
When most people think of HubSpot, they think of orange. They think of the Sprocket. They think of a brand that feels warm, energetic, and unmistakably itself across the website, the INBOUND floor, the personalities in their LinkedIn feeds, and the software they use every day.
That consistency doesn't happen by accident. It's a system. And we built it.
For years, Jenn Proud served as Global Head of Design at HubSpot, and Dmitry Shamis served as Global Head of Brand and Creative leading the teams building one of the most recognized brands in B2B. What we shipped during that time wasn't just design work. It was infrastructure: the strategy, the systems, and the tech stack that let a company of thousands create on-brand content without a designer in the room.
This is that story.
Industry: B2B SaaS / CRM
Size: ~7,000 employees
HQ: Cambridge, MA
Revenue: $2B+ ARR
Timeline: Multi-year
Scope:
Global Brand Refresh
Product & Sub-brand System
Marketing Design System
Web Redesign
Event Brand (INBOUND)
Acquisition Integration Strategy
The problem with growing up
In our time at HubSpot revenue grew 12x and increased by $2B in ARR. That growth was exciting but it was hard to keep up because like most fast scaling companies, the brand couldn't keep pace.
The issues began to surface everywhere. The visual identity had barely evolved since the startup days, even as the company was competing for enterprise deals against Salesforce. The product had grown from a marketing automation suite to six fully featured Hubs—each with their own distinct value propositions but with no visual system to help customers understand what they were buying or how it all fit together.
Marketing, sales, events, product, people, and service teams were all producing content independently, with no common system to keep them aligned. The result was a brand that looked like a dozen different companies instead of one.
The goal wasn’t to rebrand HubSpot. It was to build a system that made the brand work as hard as the business did.
Building the foundation: the global brand refresh
The first order of business was clarity.
We developed a brand refresh that felt familiar (we weren't touching the Sprocket or getting rid of the orange) and solved the underlying structural problems. It started with a comprehensive visual playbook that codified everything from color and typography to photography direction and layout principles. Most importantly, we made it usable by every team across the company.
But a playbook sitting in a PDF solves nothing. The rollout was built to be operational from day one:
A Digital Asset Management system gave every HubSpotter access to every brand asset. Every icon, illustration, photograph, logo, font file. All organized and searchable, without waiting on a design team.
A Canva instance with dedicated brand kits for each sub-brand and over 1,000 pre-designed, on-brand templates gave marketers, sales, and customer success the ability to create content independently without going off-brand.
A CMS stocked with on-brand modules meant that web pages, landing pages, and campaign assets could be built by any marketer, at any time, without a developer or designer as a dependency.
The brand system wasn't a set of rules. It was a set of tools. And top of building them out, we also taught everyone how and why to use them.
“The system did what good systems always do: it removed friction.”
Making the products make sense: product & sub-brand system
HubSpot's product offering is genuinely complex. Six Hubs: Marketing, Sales, Service, CMS, Operations, Commerce, each with distinct features, tiers, and audiences. For years, there was no way to differentiate them or tell the story of how they worked together.
The design team had a working theory: marketers don't have the visual assets they need to communicate the value of what they're selling. After a series of strategic workshops across the business, that hypothesis was validated and expanded. Turns out it wasn't just a marketing problem. It was a company-wide problem.
The solution was building a unified product visual identity system: a framework that preserved the coherence of the HubSpot brand while giving each Hub its own distinct visual personality with unique color palettes, distinct design language, and a clear hierarchy that made multi-Hub combinations legible to buyers.
The result was a better buying experience. Customers could finally understand how the pieces fit together, and more easily navigate a complex product suite without requiring a sales rep to walk them through every feature.
Enabling the team: the marketing design system
Consistency at HubSpot's scale doesn't come from guidelines. It comes from systems that make the right thing the easy thing.
The Web Module Library was a 42-module design system built in Figma and Storybook, built to WCAG-AA accessibility standards, and fully aligned with the product team's Canvas design system. Every module, from hero headers to testimonial blocks to pricing tables, was pre-built, documented, and available to any marketer to deploy independently on HubSpot's CMS. This led to over 30k web pages across all of HubSpot’s domains and languages that didn’t require any dev or design resources to build.
The system did what good systems always do: it removed friction. Marketers stopped waiting on design and dev cycles to ship campaigns. New projects got built that would have never been prioritized before. Marketers that didn’t have resources had the means to do their jobs. And experiments that would’ve never been prioritized got built and in some cases becoming foundation to HubSpot’s ability to attract, engage, and convert customers at scale.
30k+
web pages
across all of HubSpot’s domains and languages that didn’t require any dev or design resources to build.
Redesigning HubSpot.com
Your website is where every prospect decides if they trust you. HubSpot's had stopped doing that job well. From section to section, team to team, language to language, the site became inconsistent.
The global redesign addressed different visual styles, confusing information architecture, and a product story that was hard to follow across an increasingly complex suite. The work touched every major surface: the homepage, global navigation, product pages, and pricing.
The website was built on the new design system which meant it was both on-brand from launch and maintainable without a team of specialists. The redesign delivered measurable improvements in user engagement and positioned HubSpot clearly in the CRM category it had created.
The blog didn't escape either. Following HubSpot's acquisition of The Hustle in 2021, the blog was redesigned to integrate news-style content, podcasts, and video alongside existing product and industry focused articles. The result: a 30% increase in traffic, 25% growth in newsletter subscribers, and average increase in time on page up by 2 minutes.
Free tools rounded out the picture. The Email Signature Generator became the most visited page on HubSpot.com, achieving a 400% increase in conversion rate. Make My Persona was named Product of the Day on Product Hunt and saw a 200% conversion rate increase. Tools that served the inbound philosophy — attracting potential customers through genuinely useful experiences — and proved their value in pipeline.
Proof of system: INBOUND
A brand system is only as strong as what it can support. INBOUND was the stress test.
HubSpot had one of the biggest stages in B2B marketing with speakers like Barack and Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and Seth Godin. But INBOUND was operating on an island with its own brand completely independent of HubSpot. As the event grew in cultural significance, that gap became a problem as attendees didn’t always realize they were attending a HubSpot event.
INBOUND needed a sub-brand. And building that sub-brand correctly meant the core HubSpot brand system had to be strong enough to support it. It need to be defined enough to highlight the relationship, and flexible enough to let INBOUND have its own personality, energy, and visual identity.
We developed a full sub-brand system for INBOUND that lived comfortably under the HubSpot umbrella while giving INBOUND a life of its own. Each year had its own cohesive creative direction that ran through the signage at the BCEC, badges, digital and OOH advertising around Boston, sponsor activations, speaker decks, lawn activations, and every visual touchpoint in between. Nothing was an afterthought.
This led to finding efficiencies that freed up budget and creative energy alike. The result was an event that cost less, looked better, and performed better year over year in both attendee NPS and global social presence.
INBOUND was an industry staple. And the fact that it could exist as its own thing while still being unmistakably HubSpot, was only possible because the underlying brand system was built to support exactly that.
Acquiring without breaking: The Hustle integration
When HubSpot acquired The Hustle and Trends.co, the instinct might have been to bring them into the HubSpot visual system immediately. We pushed back on that.
The Hustle had a distinct voice, a distinct brand, and an audience of millions who had chosen it specifically because it wasn't a corporate marketing publication. Rebranding it overnight would have alienated the very thing HubSpot had paid to acquire.
Instead, we designed a phased integration to protect what made the acquisition valuable while building the connective tissue that made it useful to the business.
Phase 1 (1-6 months)
Add the Sprocket (and nothing more) to The Hustle and Trends logos to signal the relationship without changing the experience.
Phase 2 (6-12 months)
Build a unique, hybrid sub-brand for The Hustle that moved it closer to HubSpot visually while preserving the look, feel, and personality its audience loved.
Phase 3 (12-18 months)
Finish the transition and expand the media ecosystem with new HubSpot programs and sub-brands like the HubSpot Podcast Network, a relaunched YouTube presence, an expanded newsletter program.
What this was, really
Most agencies will tell you they built a brand. We built a system.
The work at HubSpot wasn't a campaign or a rebrand. It was years of connected decisions. Each decision designed to make the next one easier, each one building toward a brand that could operate at global scale without falling apart at the seams.
A 1,000-template Canva Brand Kit. A 42-module CMS design system. A product visual identity across six Hubs. A sub-brand system for one of the biggest events in B2B marketing. An acquisition integration that protected what was valuable while building what was new. A global website redesign. A brand playbook that became the operating system for how HubSpot shows up everywhere. And all of it built to evolve and grow as the company did.
That's what a brand system does. It makes the brand work for the people who have to use it every day not just the people who designed it.
HubSpot is the CRM platform for scaling companies, serving 299,000+ customers in over 135 countries. hubspot.com
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