A steel distributor receives dozens of inquiries a day, each in a different shape: a forwarded email, a scanned PDF, a spreadsheet with dozens of line items in grades, standards and dimensions. Sales reps retype them, check stock and price from experience, often for two to three hours a day. The fastest supplier usually takes the order, and what a customer will actually pay lives in a few people's heads.
Vanadio automates that work, from reading the inquiry to writing the order back to the ERP. The difficulty was the buyer. Distributors, service centres and traders run their revenue on systems they have used for decades, and they have heard software promise to modernise them before.
That ruled out the two obvious looks. An AI-startup brand would be treated as an experiment. A brand borrowed from steel-industry software would make Vanadio look like the tools it is meant to replace.
We positioned Vanadio as the operating layer for industrial materials companies: the system that sits between the inquiry, the price, the stock, the purchase and the order, and runs that work rather than assisting with it.
Four principles came out of the strategy. Infrastructure over novelty, because a distributor only hands revenue-critical work to something that behaves like infrastructure. Domain-native without the clichés: no sparks, no molten metal, no heritage-industrial imagery. Autonomous over assistive, because the product does the work and improves with every quote. Restrained over loud: no “magic”, no swagger.
The voice follows the same rule — precise rather than promotional, plain rather than abstract. Claims are carried by operating proof instead of adjectives: extraction accuracy, hours saved per sales rep, where the data is hosted and who can see it.
The metal trade runs on spreadsheets. Stock lists, price lists and inquiries all arrive as rows and columns, and the cell is the one shape everyone in the industry reads without thinking. The identity is drawn from it. A modular grid sits under every layout. The illustrations show tables with missing values being filled and cells connecting across layers, which is what Vanadio does to an incomplete inquiry. The symbol follows the same logic: several views of one deal resolve into a single V.
Colour has a job. Furnace Ember, a hot orange, marks where the AI is working — a cell being filled, a suggested next step, a hover state — against Vanadio Black and white. Hedvig Letters Serif sets the headlines with an editorial calm suited to a conservative buyer. Instrument Sans handles the interface, labels and dense tables.
The only reference to metal is the name. Vanadium is the element added to steel in small amounts to make it stronger.
Most of the site shows the product working instead of describing it. An animated walkthrough follows one inquiry from a crowded inbox to a priced quote, to a view of where the company wins and loses business, to an order written back to the ERP. It uses real grades, standards and dimensions, so a sales director can check it against an ordinary working day.
Proof comes from production rather than pilots: customer logos, industry association memberships and results attributed to companies by size and segment. Data security has its own section, because a distributor deciding whether to connect its inbox asks where the data lives before it asks what the software does. The site runs in English and German.
We extended the identity into the Vanadio platform: UI foundations with colour tokens tested for contrast, status colours for dense tables, and a type scale for rows, chips and labels, so the product and the marketing read as one company. The icon set uses connected cells to show relationships between data, workflows and decisions.
Pitch decks for investors and for sales carry the argument of the site, and the sales kit follows it through to the rollout plan and the order form, so a buyer meets the same system from the first slide to the signature.
Reported results from live deployments include a 10% higher win rate per sales rep at an international metal trader with more than €10bn in revenue, €1m in new sales at a producer, and three hours a day saved per sales rep at a German steel service centre.
