BoldTrail Branding

Rebranding the platform half a million agents run their day on.

By 2024, Inside Real Estate had quietly become one of the largest real estate tech companies in North America — but the market didn't know us by that name. They knew kvCORE. They knew BoomTown, the lead engine we'd acquired in 2023. They knew Brokermint, btPRO, AmpStats. A decade of acquisition had built a near-complete operating system for brokerages, and a fragmented public identity to go with it.

The rebrand had to do four things at once: introduce a new portfolio name to half a million working users, unify two recently merged companies under one identity, restructure how the product suite was organized, and ship without disrupting agents mid-transaction in a tough housing market.

We partnered with Sustena Group to lay the strategic foundation — the BoldTrail name, the Real Estate's Growth Engine positioning, and initial palette direction. With that groundwork in place, our in-house team took it from strategy to execution, building everything customers would actually experience at launch.

  • Design Director

  • Brand Identity and Design System / Web Design / Product Marketing

    • Brand Portfolio Architecture, including Marketplace product offerings.

    • Brand Identity for BoldTrail, BoldTrail BackOffice, BoldTrail Recruit, and BoldTrail Marketplace.

    • Web Design for core marketing site, replacing kvcore.com

    • Flexible Design System for website, Adobe Creative Cloud, Sketch/Figma.

    • Brand PR campaign

  • Erinn Farley | VP, Creative Director

    Marla Tipton | Design Director

    Keith Hille | Senior Designer (Contractor)

    Joanna Bjur | Sr. Manager of Content & Comms

    Lee Bressan | Comms & Content Strategy

    Matthew Graves | Senior Video Editor

    Jacob Vig | Full Stack Developer

    Michael Nyffeler | Photography

BoldTrail logo by Sustena
BoldTrail logo refined by In-House Team

Perfecting the mark for every scale it would actually live at.

The strategic wordmark was strong at display size — but real-world deployment is unforgiving. Scaling down to a favicon, app icon, navbar, or responsive breakpoint exposed a kerning inconsistency that made the eye catch unevenness.

“The mark had to work at every size we’d actually deploy it at — not just the comp.”

I redrew the kerning optically, modified the letters so the mark read with consistent rhythm across every scale. The refined wordmark became the canonical version that shipped across product, marketing, and every downstream sub-brand.

A visual language for how the product shows up.

Before BoldTrail, product imagery across Inside Real Estate was inconsistent — screenshots treated differently across every surface, no shared logic for how UI was framed, cropped, or staged.

I developed the product image styling system from scratch: composition rules, device framing treatments, background usage, shadow logic, and the handling of UI states in marketing contexts. The approach became part of the official Design System, establishing a repeatable standard for how the product visually represents itself anywhere it appears.

HomeSearchAI product image styling

The Design System

From the refined wordmark, I built out the brand visual library: color system and application rules, typographic framework, iconography suite, component logic, and motion principles. The library governs how the brand behaves across product UI, marketing surfaces, and sales enablement — and it lives in Sketch/Figma/Adobe CC as the source of truth for every BoldTrail touchpoint.

The library wasn't a deliverable for its own sake. It's the infrastructure that lets downstream work stay accountable to the parent system without requiring the brand team to be in every review. Without it, every new surface is a one-off interpretation of the master brand. With it, the brand compounds. We also built a comprehensive brand site at brand.insiderealestate.com to make all assets easily accessible to internal and external partners — the living style guide that keeps the system honest over time.

The Website

I designed boldtrail.com end to end. The site was structured around what the platform actually had to communicate: a portfolio of capabilities sold to multiple buyer types — solo agent, team, brokerage, enterprise — without losing the through-line that makes it one ecosystem.

The launch also addressed an underlying architecture issue: before the rebrand, company and product content shared a single domain, fragmenting brand equity and diluting organic search at the exact moment prospects were making purchase decisions. Separating boldtrail.com from insiderealestate.com gave each a clear purpose and a cleaner signal to search.

The results followed — a 21.7% lift in organic traffic and a 66% lift in conversion rate.

Reflection

The strategic foundation gave us the name and the conviction. Translating that into something a brand can actually run on — the system work, the production work, the framework that scales — is where the in-house team earns its keep. That part doesn't always make it into the case studies. On this one, it was most of the job.