One company, four names.
Serko is a technology company that simplifies the complex world of corporate travel management. Its solutions are used by millions of travellers to book and manage work trips, and by thousands of companies to run their travel programmes — one marketplace, reached under four different names. It is listed on the New Zealand and Australian exchanges under the ticker SKO.
UrbanIQ worked across three of those surfaces — the corporate site, the Zeno platform and Serko AI — on the front-end build, the design system holding them together, and the brand and messaging that decides what each one says. The difficulty was never any single product. It was that they have to read as one company without becoming one product.
Chapter One
Entry · The Brief
Four brands,
one company.
✦
Serko reaches the market under names that are not Serko. GetThere serves enterprises, Zeno serves larger companies through a network of travel management partners, Booking.com for Business carries the SME end white-labelled, and serko.ai is the assistant now in US closed beta. A visitor lands knowing one of those names, rarely the parent. The site has to connect the name they know to the company behind it without demoting either.
That pulls three ways at once: a design system that stretches across brands without flattening them into one another, an information architecture serving travellers, travel managers, partners, candidates and shareholders from the same navigation, and product surfaces that keep shipping while one of them is still behind a waitlist. UrbanIQ worked across all three, and on keeping them coherent as the portfolio grew.
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01
Node.Challenge Identity
The parent nobody searches for.
Almost nobody arrives looking for Serko. They arrive looking for Zeno, or GetThere, or the booking tool their travel manager rolled out, or a job. Each of those names carries its own equity, and none of them can be sacrificed to promote the parent — but a listed company still has to be legible as one entity.
The structure could not simply list products. It had to let each brand lead where it is strongest and make the relationship between them obvious on the way through.
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02
Node.Challenge Audience
A traveller and a shareholder.
The same site carries product marketing and market disclosure. A travel manager comparing booking tools and an investor looking for results, reports and announcements are both a click from the homepage, and neither should have to wade through the other. Add candidates reading about life at Serko and partners looking for the reseller story, and one navigation is doing four jobs.
A listed company also cannot be loose with what it publishes. The site has to route people before it persuades them, and keep the regulated half plainly separate from the marketing half.
Engineering notes
A system that holds four brands
Structure, spacing and type come from one set of primitives; colour and voice are the layer each brand is allowed to own. A product is a theme rather than a fork, which is what stops four identities becoming four codebases that drift the moment one of them ships.
Two audiences, one architecture
The investor centre and the product pages share components but not tone, and never share a route. Regulated disclosure keeps its own path through the site so it stays easy to find, easy to cite, and impossible to mistake for marketing.
Writing around a closed beta
serko.ai is in US closed beta behind a waitlist. Copy for a product that is not generally available has to describe what it does without implying anyone can have it yet, and has to survive the day that changes. Saying less, precisely, ages better than saying more.
Chapter Two
Entry · Closing Remarks
A system,
ready for the next name.
✦
The result is a set of surfaces that carry a growing portfolio without re-architecture. A new product arrives as a theme rather than a rebuild, a new section inherits components that already exist, and one brand can move without the other three having to agree to it first.
Serko now reads as one company with four front doors rather than four companies that happen to share a logo. The relationship between the parent and its products explains itself, which for a listed business whose best-known names are not its own was the whole point of building it this way.