Why our brand is purple: a journey

When we founded Zero Health, we knew our brand had to stand for something. Green was taken by a competitor, blue communicates trust but also sadness, and our CEO is colorblind in a way that ruled out orange. What remained was purple, and what followed was nine weeks of discovery.

Week one: the audit

We audited the color purple across culture, history, and our competitors' pitch decks. We learned that purple historically signified royalty, which aligned with our positioning of patients as "the royalty of the healthcare journey", a phrase legal has since asked us to stop using.

Weeks four through seven: the tunnel

There is a version of this post where we pretend the process was linear. The truth is that for three weeks the entire brand team lived inside a mood board titled "Quantum Calm", subsisting on seltzer and vibe checks. We emerged with 400 shades of purple, one of which was technically gray, and a shared vocabulary we now use instead of therapy.

The shade we ultimately chose, "Trusting Violet", tested 12% better than the runner-up, "Concerning Eggplant", among users who had just been shown Concerning Eggplant.

Where you will see it

Today, Trusting Violet appears in our logo, our buttons, our portal, and the mesh gradient on our homepage, which rotates on a schedule approved by our wellness team. It signals care, calm, and the confidence of a company that spent nine weeks on this instead of interoperability.

We hope it makes you feel something. In user testing, it mostly made people feel "purple", which we have decided is enough.