The new Mollie
The story of our rebranding.
Today we proudly release the completely rebranded Mollie. For those of you who don’t know us: we’re a tech-driven, Dutch payment processor and we’re about to expand throughout Europe. In the past couple of months we completely restructured our products and features, built a new website from scratch, gave it all a fresh new design and copy, and completely refactored the whole backend and frontend. In this article, our first one on Medium, we’ll tell you a bit about ourselves, our business and our rebranding, and we’ll show you some parts of our new website.
Mollie
For the past decade, Mollie has been working hard to make accepting payments better. Back in Amsterdam, 2006, Mollie built an API that allowed Dutch merchants to offer payments to their customers, without the hassle of signing a contract with 10 different banks. Back then it was only iDEAL, now the most important payment method in the Netherlands, but since then we've added new payments methods and grew substantially. Eventually, we decided to build comprehensive payment products that make life easier for companies. Being one of the first fintech businesses in the Netherlands, we've also spent the last decade educating both companies and our government about this new business and the future of fintech. With our products, we’ve focused on simplifying onboarding, on providing a localised payment experience for consumers, and on building a clever API for developers to work with.
We entered the Belgian market in 2015, and were met with great enthusiasm. We now provide payments for almost 25% of the Belgian online stores, after only two years in the market. In the Netherlands, that number's even higher, over 50%. Now, we’re looking to expand to Europe. But first we wanted a new look. A new branding that more closely reflects the clever, innovative solutions that we build.
The rebranding
Close to a year ago, we decided we’d invest the time and energy to build our new branding completely in-house, preferring to keep control of the project and maintain the ability to iterate on it, instead of handing the project over to an agency. We've worked hard on it since then.
We had several demands of our new branding. It needed to reflect our updated goals and ambitions, showing the progression we’ve made over the past year, while also being ready for the expansion we’re looking to accomplish. And it had to be scalable to be used online, in print and on merchandise.
The first thing we designed was the logo. It was clear from the very start that the big red pill that used to adorn our building, website, and merchandise had to go. Being, in essence, a financial institution, we were hesitant to continue using red, the colour of caution, of stop signs and brake lights.
The new colour is blue, the colour that emanates accessibility, approachability, and gives off a sense of calmness. The logo features a single M, simple and streamlined, like we strive to make our products. An idea we extended in the logo that features the entire word.
With the website too, we wanted it to really reflect the ease of use and innovative nature of the Mollie products. Both through copy and design we tried to create an experience that entices you to read on, that explains in-depth what we do, and that shows clearly, even when only scanning the page, how we make payment experiences better.
Structurally, we tried to tell the story of how we make payments better as well. On the homepage, we open with a header which concisely explains what we do, following it up immediately with our newly structured products, Payments and Recurring. After that, we show the easiest implementation possible, through our partners, where all you have to do is link your Mollie account to their platform. We follow that easy integration up with developers information, both showing the most important plugins and talking about our API. We close the page with our features, which will allow you to run your business more efficiently.
Technical stack
We rebuilt our marketing website entirely in Node.js using React for fast server-side rendering. Our developers love working with React for its component model, hot module reloading, inline JSX templates, and overall great developer experience. For the content and images, we decided to use Contentful — a headless CMS — allowing our copywriters, designers, and translators to edit and preview content without any code deployments. It also provides us with an editor for easy localisation, translation, media conversion and delivery to many types of devices and browsers, and we were able to design content structures that fit beautifully together with the React component model. Lastly, we’ve containerised the website with Docker for continuous integration and deployment to Google Container Engine. Using these technologies we were able to move fast and iterate confidently, with a broad team of developers, designers, and content creators.
Merchandise
We also made some fresh new merchandise featuring the new branding. You will probably see our colleagues around Amsterdam wearing new sweaters and T-shirts, and you can stop by one of our meetups to grab some gear yourself.
