The smart home, decided on the fair floor.
Homate
Homate
2023
Home automation
- Brand design
- Logo design
- Website
- Print & signage
- Campaign / Launch
- Copywriting
A company that outran itself.
Seppe and Gauthier came up with Homate during the first lockdown, while still studying at HOGENT. They built a wireless controller that pulled every brand of home automation into one app, won Start Academy 2021 with it, and had a registered company by the summer of 2021.
By the time we met them they were selling to Belgian homeowners and to the installers who fit the kit. Two audiences, two vocabularies, one very young company. They were moving faster than any of their own material could follow.
“There was just a well-made logo. Everything after it was improvised.”
The mark itself was good. Past it, every brochure, every post and every price sheet was made by whoever had an hour free that week. Nothing matched, so nothing accumulated. A homeowner and an installer could look at two pieces of Homate material and reasonably think they were two different companies.
That is expensive in a market where the competition is Niko and Google. Buyers were not weighing the controller on its merits, they were quietly deciding whether these two were a real company yet. The website kept getting rebuilt to catch up, twice inside eighteen months, and it still trailed the business.
Assisting them during their transition into a scale-up.
The gap was never between Homate and its competitors. It was between what Homate already was and what it still looked like. A real company, with real installers and real product, presenting like two students with a good idea. Closing that gap quickly was the job. The idea we closed it with: a smart home is not a gadget you add to a finished house, it is a decision you make while the house is still going up. That put Homate next to the wiring and the heating, where the choice actually gets made, and it made the fair floor the most important room the company had.
People do not buy home automation from a photo. They buy it after touching a switch and watching a lamp respond. So the brand was built to be walked through: an interactive wall where visitors could schakel, verlicht and klimatiseer with their own hands, personas on the screen so a couple could point and say that one is us, and a WIN panel that turned a slow browse into a reason to leave their details. Two stands, Batibouw in Brussels and BIS in Ghent, carried more of the brand than any campaign did.
One green, used without apology, against white and a lot of air. The Poppins family kept the tone friendly rather than technical, because the whole pitch was that this stuff is not complicated. The icon set was drawn custom so a switch, a thermostat and a shutter read as one family instead of borrowed clip art. It had to survive being printed two metres tall on a reboard wall and still work at magazine size. Everything was built as a system with rules rather than a folder of finished artwork, on the assumption that people who were not us would be making Homate material before long. That assumption turned out to be the useful part.
A proper handoff to the in-house marketing team.
Alongside the stands came the pieces that keep a young company looking its age: a magazine, a catalogue for installers, a brochure for homeowners, the website, fleet livery, cards, t-shirts. The WIN campaign around the fairs brought in over two hundred new leads.
Then they outgrew us, which is the right ending. Homate had grown enough to want a marketing person of its own, so they hired one, and we handed over a brand built to be run by someone else. No retainer, no dependency, no slow fade. He is still there, still posting, still working from the foundations of the system years later, which is the only real test of whether a brand was made properly: it keeps working once the people who made it have gone.
Homate grew big enough to be bought out in 2025. The company was taken into Ecopuur and continued selling clean and smart energy solutions.
Grow faster than your brand can follow?
Homate had a good logo and improvised everything after it, right through the busiest year of its life. Tell us what you are outgrowing, and we will build the part that keeps up.
