One firm. Two brands. One design system dressing both.
Savison Life built a compliance-gated pharmaceutical marketplace, ran it under its own name for two months, then split the two apart on purpose: the marketplace got a consumer-grade brand, and the firm became the consulting practice behind it.
Built as one thing, divided into two on purpose.
For two months the firm and its first product shared a name. The June specification is titled for the company, not the product — at that point they were the same thing. In August they stopped being the same thing, and the split was executed in four reversible phases without moving a single file.
My role was founder: the firm, the specification, the identity, the migration plan and the consulting practice that now carries the company's own domain.
- Role
- Founder
- Period covered
- Apr – Aug 2026
- Shape
- One partnership firm, two live brands
- Status
- Consulting live; marketplace operating under its own brand
the ratio that made a whole second identity one CSS block
hostnames on one deployment
consulting practice areas
courses in the training catalogue
files moved during the brand split
The marketplace and the firm were telling two stories through one front door.
One name, two jobs
- A buyer looking for a factory
- A brand owner looking for regulatory help
- Both arriving at the same homepage
- Neither reading a page written for them
A marketplace speaks to transactions. A practice speaks to expertise. One domain could do either, and was doing both badly.
Two front doors, one entity
- The marketplace got a consumer-grade brand of its own
- The firm's domain became the consulting practice
- The operator console stayed in company colours
- Every legacy URL kept working
The console stayed in the firm's colours deliberately: it is the operating company's internal tool, and branding it as the product would be wrong for the staff who use it.
From a single HTML concept file to two brands in four months.
- 28 Apr
The concept file
A verified pharmaceutical marketplace, mocked up in one self-contained HTML page. Licence verification and price transparency are already the core promise.
- June
The specification names the company
A 731-line master document that teaches the industry before it specifies the product — because an implementer who doesn't know what the regulatory terms mean will make errors.
- 10–27 Jun
The marketplace is built
Catalogue, customisation wizard, deal rooms, payments, dashboards and the operator console.
- 24 Jun
Volume 01 — the identity
Dark-first ground, a lime signal, League Spartan at −0.06em, sharp corners, and a light paper theme reserved for actual paper: invoices, certificates, print.
- Jun – Jul
Collateral from the same tokens
An eight-page pitch deck and a two-page brochure, built as HTML with a render script in the exact token set. The identity treated as a system even for PDFs.
- 12 Aug
The migration plan
Split one platform into two brands with the least possible work. Four phases, each reversible on its own.
- 19 Aug
The split ships
The marketplace moves to its own domain with zero file moves. The consulting site goes live on the firm's domain. A redirect loop takes the site down the same evening and is fixed the same evening.
- 20 Aug
Named visiting cards
Per-brand designations, phone numbers and mailboxes for the same person, with a vCard endpoint so “save contact” works from the card's landing page.
The identity as a system, not a palette.
The system was built so cleanly that handing its clothes to a second brand took one CSS block and zero component edits. That was not luck; it was the point.
Ground and signal
Midnight
The ground. Dark is the default theme, not an option.
Neptune
Raised panels and cards.
Isotonic
The signal. A lime used as fill, never as body text.
Pacific
Links and quiet accents on dark.
Paper
Cheviot
The light theme is not a preference. It is the paper theme, used only where paper is the metaphor: invoices, certificates, print.
Type and form
League Spartan
Display, at −0.06em. The lowercase wordmark keeps its full stop.
DM Sans · DM Mono
Everything else; mono for labels and data at 0.16em.
Sharp by default
Radius zero. 12px rounding is reserved for marketing feature cards; pills only for status.
The token file documents its own corrections. A label grey was re-pitched because labels appear on cards, not only on the dark ground. A signal-tint variable was added after lime had been hardcoded across thirty-five call sites, which put a lime wash over a brand whose signal is yellow.
A second brand in one CSS block.
Before committing to the split I measured the system rather than guessing at it. The measurement is what made the decision easy.
role-token usages
surface, text, signal — names that describe a job, not a colour
brand-named usages
the entire surface area that had to change
files converted to CSS variables
the earlier work that made this ratio possible
component edits to retheme
middleware resolves the brand once and forwards it on a header
This is the argument for role tokens in one number. Had those 1,788 usages been colour names, a second brand would have been a rewrite rather than a block of CSS — and the business decision to split would probably have been judged too expensive to make.
Content and advisory as a discovery layer.
The firm's own domain now opens on the regulatory and operational groundwork, done properly. The strategy is in one sentence from the project's own record: give a prospective brand owner a reason to engage before they even have a manufacturer in mind.
Five practice areas
Regulatory compliance, manufacturing optimisation, quality assurance, product development, business strategy — each scoped to the problem in front of you rather than to a package.
A training catalogue
Five courses aimed at factory teams and brand owners, each with its audience and outcome stated, published on the shared engine rather than a duplicate build.
Two paid consultations
Reassigned to the consulting site in the split, because that is what they are. The marketplace's packaging wizard deep-links across.
One real mailbox
Lead capture writes to a table and consulting mail runs on a real address, because a contact address that bounces is worse than none.
Kept on the record, because the record is the point.
- The firm's apex resolved to a registrar parking page — twice, because an attached hosting plan silently overwrites DNS. Now a written procedure: detach the website first, then edit DNS.
- A redirect loop took the site down on the evening of the cutover. Fixed the same day, and visible in the history rather than tidied away.
- A hidden hosting-subdomain bug broke a CNAME through four fix attempts in June.
- The first mark was hand-drawn, and was corrected within days once the real brand file was flagged.
- The milestone-branch workflow was abandoned in practice. The project's own documentation says so instead of pretending otherwise.
- A pre-launch hardening checklist tracked in the firm's own records
- Registered-office and identifier lines deliberately absent from footers rather than fabricated
- Terms and privacy pages still pending, and the footer honestly does not link to them
- The operations hire, named in the record as the most common way platforms like this break trust
A company is not its first product. Savison Life built the marketplace, gave it away to itself, and became the practice behind it.
The one-line version of this project
verify · gate · settle
Savison Life · a partnership firm · India · 2026