Everyone’s tried. No one’s cracked it.

That was the warning that came with the conversation. Jim and Simon weren't being dramatic; they were being accurate and honest.

We'd known them for years, we trusted their judgement, and still, the frustration was clear: every attempt to explain Impeller Ventures left people nodding politely and missing the point entirely. Designers included. Especially designers who dislike not having a brief, and more frighteningly, one that flexes or changes.

So we did the usual thing. We asked the sensible questions.

What do you do? Who's it for? What does success look like?

Every time, the answers shifted. Not because Jim and Simon were evasive, but because Impeller doesn't behave like the things those questions assume. There was no neat offer. No repeatable engagement. No tidy flow from idea to outcome.

Instead, there were stories.

A founder here, a business there. Different contexts and constraints, but always with the same result: things moved.

For weeks, the conversations looped. We disagreed, pushed back, replayed what we thought we'd heard and got corrected more than once. Slowly, something clearer began to surface, not a service, not a process, but a pattern.

Momentum.

Not growth, scale or optimisation. Momentum as in: ideas that stop stalling. Momentum as in: getting pulled forward rather than pushed through a system that wasn't built for them.

That's when the mental model flipped. Most venture builders behave like funnels, wide at the top, expensive in the middle and ruthless at the end. Impeller did the opposite. They created the conditions that pulled ideas through. Fast, cheap, and exposed to reality early enough for the market to decide.

Once we stopped trying to describe Impeller and started reflecting on that pull, everything loosened up. The identity didn't need to be explained. It needed to behave. It needed to move.

What followed wasn't just a solution but a reflection of what they had always done. A shared understanding we could all recognise when we saw it. The work since with Impeller, and later with Wallswork, has carried the same tone: challenging, occasionally uncomfortable, always grounded in conversation.

No grand reveal, just forward motion.

Project deliverables

Identity design, website, communications