Building a Pan African Brand
When Founders Factory Africa launched in 2018, it entered a continent defined by scale, diversity, and extraordinary momentum.
But to attract the founders, investors, and partners needed to build 100+ new ventures, FFA required more than visibility, it needed a brand that could unlock trust, signal ambition, and feel native to 54 markets where design maturity varies dramatically.
Our goal was simple: create a brand that inspires optimism and makes possibility feel tangible.
Founders Factory Africa. Energy!
Founders Factory Africa (FFA) was a venture development company building and investing in early-stage technology startups across the African continent. Backed by Standard Bank and Netcare, FFA sits at the intersection of Fintech, Healthtech, technology adoption, and continental-scale problem solving.
The work is high-velocity, high-context, and deeply human, perfect conditions for design to do its best work.
Role. The click song
I joined FFA in May 2019 as Head of Design, tasked with building and scaling the design function from the ground up.
Our remit spanned Product Design, Brand, and Business Design, but the deeper mandate was capability-building: enabling founders to adopt design as a core operating system, not a cosmetic layer. Design was not there to decorate growth, it was there to enable it.
✨ Design positioned as a strategic capability, never a production engine.
Building a Brand. Expensive shit
Brand building in Africa demands a different kind of rigor. It’s not about aesthetics, it’s about earning trust in markets where credibility is a currency.
A brand is not a logo or a website. It is the aggregate of:
Strategy → purpose, vision, clarity
Positioning → what you bring that no one else can
Expression → how your story lives across touchpoints
Content → the narratives that move people
A brand is only as strong as its weakest interaction.It must be designed with intentionality, consistency, and the humility or boldness to serve real users in real contexts.
A brand’s strength is defined by its weakest link. As trust can take years to build and seconds to break, our approach was deliberate, intentional, and meticulously designed.
Don’t challenge me. The Makers
The Founders Factory brand built in the UK wasn’t designed for the African context. What we needed was something locally resonant yet globally coherent.This meant constant collaboration with our global counterparts, balancing two truths:
→ Global cohesion matters.
→ Local authenticity decides adoption.
We designed with both in mind.
Our challenge: build a world-class, Africa-led brand while simultaneously delivering for a growing portfolio of early-stage ventures. Time, scope, and resources rarely aligned, the usual startup trifecta.
The journey. Le Le Le
We explored potential agency partners across Africa, but ultimately & consciously chose to build internally, supported by exceptional collaborators who became part of the FFA family.
Our research foundation combined qualitative interviews, market analysis, trend mapping, and founder insights.
From this emerged our North Star:
African entrepreneurs were not resourced to build and scale early-stage businesses. FFA convenes the people, tools, and conditions they need to succeed, so founders can power a thriving startup economy.
This guided every decision.
My role was to create alignment, clarity, and momentum across a highly complex initiative:
→ Facilitate multi-stakeholder conversations
→ Define our brand strategy
→ Lead the creative process
→ Relaunch the website as our primary public touchpoint
Heritage-driven Systems: Designing forward, not backward
Textures, patterns, architectural forms, colour, materiality, movement, all informed how Africa tells its stories visually. We channelled these signals into a modular, heritage-driven system:
→ Custom shapes drawn from the FF mark and African environments
→ A colour ecosystem reflecting energy, optimism, and cultural vibrancy
→ A flexible system built for remixing across dozens of markets
This allowed the brand to scale without flattening diversity, a core requirement for 54 markets.
To create something genuinely African, we looked to the continent’s visual and cultural heritage, but not as a museum. Instead, we treated heritage as a future-facing design language.
Solution. Lengoma
To build authenticity, we turned to the streets: real textures, real materials, real walls, real colours. COVID limited our ability to travel, but creative resourcefulness became a strength.
The system included:
→ A simple, clean, decluttered logo
→ A library of shapes derived from the Founders Factory geometry
→ Textural backgrounds representing diverse environments
→ A high-energy colour palette grounded in possibility
We built a design system flexible enough for rapid content creation, yet disciplined enough to maintain coherence across every team.
✨ A system for scale, not rigidity.
With Strategy and cultural foundation in place, we moved into Brand Expression. Working with our team and collaborator Vumile Mavumengwana, we explored four conceptual territories, from conservative to radical, ultimately choosing a hybrid solution that was bold, optimistic, and unmistakably African.
Website: the first manifestation
We crafted a content-rich, strategically architected platform to:
→ explain the model
→ showcase the portfolio
→ articulate value to founders and investors
→ create trust through clarity
We considered tracking KPIs for awareness, engagement, and conversion, ensuring the brand operated with product-level accountability.
The website became the first full expression of the new brand.
Knowing we are on the right path? Account Balance
Success wasn’t measured in aesthetics; it was tracked through:
→ brand awareness
→ engagement
→ inbound founder applications
→ investor interest
→ ecosystem perception
A Brand is much more than than the user interactions with the distinct touch points. Is how your users perceive you as per your behaviours, your actions, the vision you are pursuing.
A brand is a living organism, not a finished artefact.
As Heraclitus reminds us: change is the only constant.
We launched in May 2020 after a year of intense, collaborative work.
What’s next? Vuli Ndlela
The next chapter is about amplification, experimentation, and continuous evolution.The brand is built to grow with the continent, flexible enough to adapt, strong enough to scale, and human enough to resonate.
If you’re curious about African Design, heritage-driven brand systems, or building across 54 diverse markets, I’d be happy to continue the conversation.