Kippa
Built the brand, website and merchant platform for Kippa, the all-in-one business app for Nigeria’s small businesses.
We designed Kippa’s identity, its marketing website and KippaPay for Merchants, a web dashboard for payments, bookkeeping and business tools, on one design subscription.
Kippa helps small businesses in Nigeria get paid, keep their books and register their business, all in one app. As it grew from a mobile bookkeeping tool into a full business platform, Kippa needed to look, sound and work like one company, not a collection of features.
We were brought in on a design subscription to bring it all together: a sharper identity, a marketing website that explains the whole platform, and KippaPay for Merchants, a web dashboard that lets owners run payments, bookkeeping and customers from a computer.
This case study walks through how we got there.
Client
Kippa
Services
Brand identity · Website design · Product design (web app)
Timeline
2023
Sector
Fintech
The challenge
The hardest problem wasn’t any single screen. It was coherence.
Kippa had grown fast. Payments, bookkeeping, inventory, invoicing and business registration had each arrived as their own feature, and the brand, the website and the product had started to tell different stories. Merchants needed to see one simple platform, and to trust it with their money.
One platform, many products
Payments, bookkeeping, POS and business registration had to read as one product, not five.
Trust for first-time users
Many merchants were moving money digitally for the first time. Every touchpoint had to feel safe and familiar.
From phone to desktop
Kippa began on mobile. Bigger businesses needed a web dashboard that could keep up with a busy shop.
Designed for real shops
Owners manage stock, staff and customers between sales. Every flow had to be quick to learn and hard to get wrong.
Discovery
Before designing anything, we studied how the best money products explain themselves to business owners.
We gathered references from Karbon, Weavr, Lygon, Openflow, Pennylane, Mono and Flutterwave, and looked at how each one turns complex financial features into a simple promise. The pattern was clear: lead with the outcome for the owner, show the product early, and keep the language plain.
That became the brief for everything that followed: start, manage and grow your business, all in one place.
Identity system
A bold K that works as hard on a POS terminal as it does on a billboard.
We built the identity around the K mark: a solid square that reads clearly at app-icon size and stamps confidently onto hardware, signage and print. Deep Blue grounds the brand in trust, Kippa Blue carries every action, and Manrope keeps the voice friendly and modern.
The system extends to Kippa Unified, a lockup for the combined platform, and to a toolkit of colours, type and usage rules the team could run with.
Finding the direction
Four homepage directions before we committed to one.
Before designing thirteen pages, we had to agree on one visual language. We explored four homepage directions side by side, each with a different balance of product, people and proof, then refined the strongest into the approved homepage that set the pattern for every page after it.
The website
A website that sells the whole platform in seconds.
The website had one job: help a busy shop owner understand what Kippa does and sign up. We designed thirteen pages, from the homepage and product pages to resources, community, press, careers and help. Decisions we made, and why:
Show the product, early.
The hero pairs the promise with the real dashboard and mobile app, so owners see exactly what they are signing up for.
Three clear doors.
Payments, bookkeeping and business registration each get a tab on the homepage and a product page of their own.
Plain language.
Short, benefit-led copy written for owners, not finance teams: collect payments, send invoices, register your business.
Proof where it counts.
Media coverage, customer stories and a founder video, placed to build trust before the sign-up.
Information architecture
Before drawing screens, we mapped the whole product.
KippaPay for Merchants covers payments, point of sale, bookkeeping, business tools, customers and account settings. We mapped every area and every page first, so the structure drove the design rather than the other way round.
The sidebar that came out of it is the backbone of the product: six areas, each one click away, with a business switcher always in reach for owners who run more than one shop.
Mapping every flow
Then we designed every flow, in every state.
KYC and first-time setup, sending and withdrawing money, airtime and bills, recording money in and out, creating and editing invoices, tracking debts and stock, requesting POS terminals and resolving disputes.
Nothing was left for later. Every flow has its empty, error, success and confirmation states drawn, because those are the moments that decide whether a merchant trusts the product.
600+ frames. One web app. Every state accounted for.
Design system
One system underneath it all.
A shared set of tokens and components, from navigation and inputs to tables, status badges and modals, kept hundreds of screens consistent and quick to build.
Status badges, for example, give every transaction a clear state at a glance: successful, processing, failed, reversed or settled.
Final product
A merchant dashboard built around three jobs.
Get paid
Transfers, POS terminals, airtime, bills and a live transaction history, with disputes handled in the same place.
Keep the books
Cashbook, invoices, debts and inventory, so owners always know what came in, what went out and what is left on the shelf.
Grow the business
Customer lists, broadcasts and business registration, so a small shop can act like a bigger one.
The result
3
Disciplines on one subscription: brand, web and product
13
Website pages designed and approved
600+
Merchant app screens, flows and states
