Upstream
Indsutry
Sustainability
Scope
Brand & UX
Market
B2B
Challenge
The carbon management market is dominated by technically complex platforms that require lengthy onboarding, deliver slow pricing quotes, and assume users already have deep ESG expertise. Upstream needed a brand and experience that felt different. Clear, instant, and accessible for manufacturing clients who may not have dedicated sustainability teams, while still carrying the credibility required to win enterprise clients. The challenge was to balance approachability with authority in a space that had never prioritised either.
Solution
Our work covered brand identity and UX design, ensuring a consistent experience from first impression to in-platform interaction.
For the brand, we modernised the recognisable carbon bubble visual into a scalable identity system, building a professional color palette and typography designed to balance technical credibility with accessibility. The identity worked seamlessly across digital and offline applications, from platform dashboards to marketing assets.
For the product experience, we carried out a full UX research and design process to ensure the platform was not only functional but easy to adopt in real enterprise settings. This included stakeholder interviews to clarify business requirements, proto-personas to map user types and their core needs, competitive analysis to identify pain points in existing ESG tools, and user journey mapping to align the platform architecture with real-world tasks. Interactive prototypes enabled early validation of key flows, and usability testing using the System Usability Scale benchmarked effectiveness and identified friction before launch.
The result was a complete design system in Figma that gave the development team everything they needed to build consistently and at speed.
Outcome
The collaboration delivered a brand and product experience that positioned Upstream as a credible leader in the ESG space. The platform launched on schedule with a streamlined user journey that significantly shortened the time from emissions calculation to offset procurement. Instant quotes across multiple carbon markets eliminated the multi-week wait times common in the industry. The scalable design system ensured the platform could grow without visual or UX inconsistency, resonating with both operational teams and Fortune 500 decision-makers.
As Daniel Sadik, Senior Vice President at Carbon Solutions Group, put it: "We have been very impressed by the talent and speed at which the team is able to operate and deliver a high quality product. We would highly recommend Aurra for any design build project going forward."
