Eight years of brand evolution on staffbase.com

This isn’t a story about a rebrand. It’s a story about stewardship.

From the moment I joined Staffbase in March 2018 as the company’s first dedicated web developer until my last day in June 2026, staffbase.com was my responsibility — not just technically, but visually. Over eight years of funding rounds, acquisitions, leadership changes, and a complete technology migration, the website had to stay coherent, on-brand, and professional through every phase. Nobody else was holding that consistency. I was.

2018 — The blank page

When I arrived, staffbase.com was a basic WordPress site with no real design system. Some modules existed, but they were built to solve immediate needs — not to scale, not to be reused consistently, not to grow into something others could build on. There were no documented standards and no conventions for how pages should be built.

I started from that. Within the first year, I rebuilt the demo request flow with specific goals for each page, created new modules with significantly more flexibility and capability than what was there, and ran a full audit of the GTM setup before anyone asked me to. The visual decisions I made in that first year, quietly, became the foundation everything after was built on.

2019 — First voice

By 2019, the site had a voice. Module patterns were emerging, landing pages were consistent, and the webinar and events infrastructure was in place. Most visibly, the VOICES conference website appeared — a fully branded, standalone Eleventy build that showed what a Staffbase web property could look and feel like at its best.

The year was about depth: not just building pages, but building a system that could be extended without breaking, and standards that could be understood by anyone who joined the team next.

2020 — The team grows

My first hire joined in January 2020. I had his onboarding ready before his first morning: Confluence documentation, a module styleguide, Jira access, everything structured to get him building on day one rather than reading emails.

The website began to reflect what a small, focused team could do when not stretched thin — more consistent, more considered, a more confident visual language. The VOICES site ran its second edition and began to scale across regions.

2021 — Acquisition complexity

2021 was the year complexity arrived. Bananatag was acquired and its web presence — domain, content, brand — needed integrating into the Staffbase web estate. A second developer and UX designer joined, based in Vancouver. I flew there to onboard him in person.

Suddenly the web team wasn’t managing one brand but several: staffbase.com, bananatag.com in transition, the VOICES network, the careers site, and the growing HubSpot landing page infrastructure. Maintaining visual consistency across that surface area required decisions about what could flex and what couldn’t.

2022 — Unification

In early 2022, Staffbase launched a unified brand identity — the culmination of three acquisitions (Bananatag, dirico, Valo, Teambay) and a deliberate effort to look like one company. For the web team, this meant applying a new visual system — new typography (Epilogue for headings, Inter for body), a new colour palette, new spacing and component specifications — across every online touchpoint, simultaneously.

I was the technical execution lead. After months of simultaneous rollouts — staffbase.com, the blog, the VOICES network, the careers site, HubSpot templates, and acquisition domain migrations — Staffbase looked, for the first time, like a single company across every digital touchpoint.

The 2022 rebrand is the most visible chapter of this story. But it only worked because the eight years of platform thinking that preceded it gave it somewhere clean to land.

2023 — Iteration at scale

With the unified identity established, 2023 was the year the brand found its confidence. The homepage received its first major rework since the rebrand. New content formats arrived — podcast, new product pages, campaign work — each one demanding module patterns that hadn’t existed before and leaving them behind for everything that came next. Acquisition integrations completed. A/B tests ran and sharpened what was already there.

Every week that year, something shipped. Not from a formal design system — from judgment built over years of living in the brand.

2024 — The brand matures

2024 brought the subtler, more confident refinements of a brand that had found its register. The navigation shifted from Staffbase blue to midnight blue across the product website and blog — a change that sounds minor but touched hundreds of pages and required careful regression testing. A second major homepage rework shipped. The Japanese website launched, applying the full brand identity to an APAC expansion from day one.

This was also the year the Web UI Guidelines formalised what had been building for years: shared visual standards across product, web, and brand design. For the first time, the website and the product started looking like they genuinely belonged to each other.

2025 — The platform shifts

September 16, 2025 was the highest-stakes day. Staffbase made its company-defining pivot to Employee AI — announced by the founders, with embargoed press breaking the same week. The web team delivered the public face of it: a new homepage announcement, a new Employee AI product page, and brand and heading changes rolled out across the entire site. All against a hard, immovable media date.

Later in 2025, the WordPress-to-Storyblok migration completed — the entire product website and blog unified onto a new headless CMS platform. The brand arrived on a fundamentally different infrastructure. Then the Spanish market launched in December, extending the brand to a new language and territory.

2026 — The last iteration

The final year was a sprint to leave things well. The French market launched. The homepage was reworked against a hard external deadline — the kind that can’t move. A website chatbot arrived and needed a visual identity. The navigation was rebuilt from scratch by SensioLabs, becoming the clearest expression yet of how far the design language had come.

When I handed over in June 2026, the site was in the best technical and visual shape it had ever been in. The architecture was clean, the component system was documented, and the brand was being maintained by a team that understood it.

What this actually was

A brand applied once to a site is a project. A brand maintained consistently across eight years of hypergrowth, acquisitions, team changes, and two technology migrations is something different: it’s craft, exercised continuously over time.

The 2022 rebrand was the most visible chapter. But it happened cleanly because the years before it built something coherent to rebrand, and the years after it proved that consistency isn’t a launch — it’s a commitment.