It can’t be easy designing the identity for a brand or company that’s hard to define, or which isn’t easily explained by that ‘new product, familiar ideas’ trope – the sorts of things described as ‘Like Tinder, but for cats!’ or ‘CityMapper for life decisions’, or ‘Uber for people who want to try dogging but can’t drive’ (if any investor types are reading, yes, I would like to talk – get in touch).

Koto must’ve been faced with a challenging prospect then when it took on branding fintech product Fluz (not sure if that’s Fluz like ‘fuzz’ or Fluz like fluke’, but hopefully that doesn’t matter too much). According to the design agency, Fluz combines a loyalty program, banking app, and social network. Founded in 2018 in New York, Fluz brought in Koto in around 2021 to help craft a new brand identity that was a lot more sparky and resolutely youth-focused.

In part, it seems Fluz’s goal is to help demystify typical loyalty programmes, which are “designed to be confusing,” according to Koto, and which “save their best perks for their biggest spenders”. This means that shoppers miss out on an estimated $121 billion in unclaimed rewards every year.

Fluz, however, looks to social network-ify the whole cashback scene, meaning that users get cashback every time they spend – and crucially, they also get cashback whenever someone in their network spends. Admittedly, I’ve no idea how all that works – and I’m sure there’s a tonne of data protection regulations in place – but something seems a little odd about placing the metrics of the all-seeing eye of social media into the finance sphere. I don’t really understand pyramid schemes – sorry, multi level marketing opportunities – but the ‘mates’ aspect feels slightly redolent of that murky area of commerce. (It’s likely however that I’ve totally misunderstood, as I’m a person who lives in my overdraft and have had the same bank account since I was a teenager, lured in by the promise of a free CD.)

“Our strategic challenge was to communicate [Fluz’s] power in simple terms,” says Koto. “The entire experience is geared towards giving ordinary people more, so we developed a clear North Star: help everyone maximise their money. And, because shared purchasing power is Fluz’s secret sauce, we defined it as a ‘collaborative earning app.’ [With Fluz], when one person gets more, everyone gets more. Our work captures this winning feeling.”

And that, it certainly does. Koto’s work is undeniably superb visually, totally railing against any perceptions of fintech as being dry or complex or suited and booted and exclusive. It’s all, quite simply, very very fun.

For all the trendy y2K gradients, non-gender-specificity, tongue-in-cheekily trashy shiny gems and hearts ‘aesthetic’, though, the branding doesn’t do a lot to help us navigate exactly what Fluz is and does. However, what it does do is exemplify the brand idea Koto formulated perfectly: ‘Life on Max’.

Maximalism is great – almost especially so because of the way it’s so sniffed at by minimalism devotees who need to learn to live a little – and boy oh boy is this maximal. There’s a tonne of bling; there’s starkly close shots of chest hair à la Har Mar Superstar, for anyone who remembers that peculiar moment in pop history; there’s a massive cheeseburger so shiny and drippy and colour-saturated it feels like you’ve walked smack bang into the window of a diner, getting the sort of knock to the head that’s so sudden and painful as to feel almost hallucinatory. A lot of the time, it all feels a lot like that Katy Perry video where she’s in a sort of land of sweets.

The agency says that the ‘Life on Max’ idea is all about “everyday life, dialled way up”, that it’s a “state of mind” which in turn inspired a “brand personality, the Magical Maverick” – which we’re guessing must be the cavapoo-like friendly hybrid of a couple of the trad Jungian-inspired brand personalities that still seem to be a foundational aspect of many branding projects (‘Magician’ and ‘Explorer’/’Hero’ perhaps?) Fittingly, the brand experience itself has been deliberately ‘gamified’, according to Koto.

The Fluz wordmark itself is fun, and certainly underscores the whole maximal ethos: it’s an all-lowercase (obv) blocky, quirky, unabashedly stomping display font that’s squat and looks like it’s good for a laugh but also means business. Elsewhere, Koto opted to use the font Greed Condensed by Prague-based foundry Displaay. It works fine, though looks a little bit ‘done’ (there’s no shortage of similar brand fonts around at the moment, or so it seems at least).

And yes, haha, surely there’s a wry humour here with the whole ‘greed’ thing, but for me at least, it really misses the mark: sure, I’m not the Gen Z target audience, but ‘greed’ just makes me think of Gordon Gekko and that 1980s hubristic cocaine-fuelled grim yuppiedom that spawned everything from Patrick Bateman (yes, a fictional character, but with a depressingly genuine following of amped up young finance bros) to the 2008 crash to weird crypto scam Telegram groups to (shudder) NFTs. It just feels off to so deliberately conflate greed with this otherwise very jolly, slightly surreal, thoroughly digital-native candy coloured saccharine new illustrated finance world. Still, it’s better than the old-guard financial brand look of eggshell white, and bevelled edges.