His second day on the job as Inozyme Pharma’s director of investor relations, Stefan Riley’s CEO came up to him and said, “Stefan, I hate our website.”
“That sounded like a call to action,” Riley said. So he set out to commission a soup to nuts rebrand for the rare disease biopharmaceutical company, starting with that website.
Working with Agency39A, a design and digital transformation agency, Riley wanted to make the brand not only beautiful and different but accessible to the biopharma’s four main targets—patients, HCPs, investors and prospective employees.
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He cites his own experience of trying to look up “abnormal mineralization”—the class of diseases the company works with—and finding nothing.
“I thought to myself, if I as a potential employee am not finding really clear, accessible information, then it's not accessible to our patients, it’s not accessible to the doctors who are potentially looking for answers, it’s not accessible to their families. It's also not accessible to other folks who are looking for opportunities within the biotech industry,” he said. “If it's not clear at first glance for an investor when they have 400 opportunities to vet, then you know, they can lose interest very quickly.”
The redesign features the actual product, INZ-701, an enzyme replacement therapy, and the result is like nothing else in the industry—it’s beautiful, abstract and … lilac.
“Our goal was to find a way to look completely differentiated from everyone else. This is a rare opportunity, this is untapped biology and we didn't want to get people to land on the website and say, ‘oh we see blue, we see the standard colors used in the industry,’” he said. “We wanted it to be an immediately recognizable brand.”
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The complete overhaul of the branding includes everything from photography of the office space and team headshots to social media banners and all the swag, down to Zoom backgrounds. The only thing that remains is the Inozyme logo.
To get the word out, Inozyme sent email blasts and social media pushes; every member of the team has updated their profiles with the new branding on their networks, especially LinkedIn. While this has all been organic now that most of the branding is done, paid advertising in on its way as the goal is to get more patients into clinical trials.
While the rebrand was relatively quick, starting in July right after the company had gone public, with the website launching in November, nothing is ever really done, says Riley. “Brand is a living, breathing thing.”
According to a securities filing, in June of last year, Inozyme bagged $45 million to move INZ-701—a treatment for ENPP1 deficiency, a rare genetic disorder that can cause children to develop rickets—into the clinic. An additional $40 million will push the candidate into a phase 1/2 study in ABCC6 deficiency, another genetic disorder causing mineralization in the blood and soft tissues that can lead to blindness, heart complications and skin calcification. Inozyme raised $128.8M in a public offering in July 2020.