Pickle exists to make personal finance radically easier for everyday people. The app brings together all your financial activity into one calm, unified view. It offers personalised guidance to help you save money, stay organised and regain control of your financial life.
Pickle was created by Salad Money, a UK-based loan provider focused on ethical lending for people in public service roles. Their mission is to provide fair, transparent financial products built on real affordability insights rather than credit scores. Pickle was built to support this vision of financial prosperity for everyone.
To bring this vision to reality, we redesigned Pickle's brand identity and mobile application to position Pickle as an all-in-one financial wellbeing companion. The system encompasses type and color systems, and seamless graphs that make understanding complex financial information effortless.
We collaborated closely on the project with Dan Evans, Head of Marketing at Salad Money, and Rob Samarji, Head of Engineering at Salad Money, along with other members of the company’s internal engineering, communications, marketing and advertising teams. We worked with Salad Money to oversee all aspects of the implementation of the new product, including an advertising campaign and website design for the launch.
Strategic Expression
We first established a strategic foundation for Pickle’s identity that would support its evolution into a clear, modern and accessible financial wellbeing product. The core principles of clarity, warmth and confidence, guided the development of a system designed to simplify financial information and build trust with users navigating complex personal money decisions.
Every element from colour and typography, to iconography and the brand voice was considered as part of a unified whole, ensuring that the brand extends consistently across product, marketing, environmental, and merchandise applications.
The font Rubik was chosen for its sharper definition and stronger presence at small sizes, particularly within the dense environments of mobile UI. The colour palette was engineered for clarity and contrast, balancing a signature primary hue with a family of supporting neutrals that create structure, hierarchy and warmth across interfaces and printed materials. A comprehensive set of brand guidelines documents the full system; voice principles, typographic rules, colour specifications, spacing frameworks and behaviours.
Interface & Interaction
The Pickle app was conceived as a single environment in which complex financial information becomes instantly comprehensible. Its design emerged from a structured process of discovery: competitive analysis identified patterns and gaps across the fintech landscape, while user research illuminated behaviours, frustrations and mental models that informed every decision. These insights guided the creation of a new information architecture, establishing a coherent, navigable structure.
Wireframes and prototypes were iteratively developed and refined in collaboration with the Pickle team. We created a system of components designed for clarity and speed of comprehension. A standout feature that we developed for the Pickle app are the graphs created to visualise spending, trends, and other financial data with precision.
The interface was built with flexibility in mind. We implemented dark mode optimised for readability, hierarchy, and comfort in low-light environments. Every interaction in the app was considered in relation to the whole, resulting in a product that feels consistent, purposeful and human at every touchpoint.
Go-to-Market
Launching Pickle into a competitive fintech landscape required marketing collateral that could clearly communicate the app’s unique capabilities while building trust and desire. We designed a website to highlight Pickle’s most distinctive feature so that prospective users could quickly understand the value of switching from competitors. The interface is structured to guide visitors through the product’s core benefits, using visual hierarchy, concise messaging, and responsive layouts across desktop, tablet, and mobile.
We worked on an advertising campaign that extended the product experience into motion and social formats. App screens served as the primary visual anchor, while copy, colour and messaging were varied systematically to test engagement and performance. This iterative approach established a flexible framework for generating multiple creative executions at scale, allowing rapid experimentation and optimisation across channels.
Together, the website and advertising campaign functioned as a cohesive acquisition system, helping Pickle acquire its first thousand users within days of launching.
