Angelina Severino, Lebara’s Global Design & UX Lead, speaks with our founder Roman Stikkelorum about making the internal case for change. And what happens when a brand finally catches up with its product.
Lebara had everything a mobile operator needs to win: a reliable network, competitive pricing, and loyalty most competitors could only envy. The one thing it didn't have was a brand identity that reflected any of it. The last rebrand dated back to 2018, and by the time Angelina Severino joined as Global Design and UX Lead, that mismatch between product and perception had turned into a real business problem.
Solving it meant a new brand identity, but that had to be won internally first, before any creative work could start. Here, she walks through how she built that case across five markets, why the system behind the brand mattered more than the logo itself and what comes next now that the identity work is done.
You arrived at Lebara to find a strong product and a brand that wasn’t keeping pace with it. How clear was that gap when you first got there? And what did it actually cost the business?
When I arrived, I found a company that was super progressive, super fast, modern, and agile, but whose brand told a completely different story. The last rebrand was around 2018. Lebara had a genuinely strong product. Great network, honest pricing, real flexibility. But something was not adding up. The message of Lebara being one of the best providers on the market was not coming across in the right way.
If our products are good, why aren’t people coming to us?
We ran brand perception research and the results were stark. Users were choosing competitors over Lebara not because of price or coverage, but because of how the brand looked and felt. The quote that stuck with me was this: “I don’t trust that this brand will deliver the modern service I am looking for. So I’ll go elsewhere.” There was no concept behind the identity. No exclusivity. No craft.
There is a version of this story at almost every company we work with. The product or digital design team has already shipped the future, and the brand is still describing the past. Closing that gap is the job.
“People believe what they see. A brand that looks dated makes even the strongest product feel behind. If you don’t see a modern brand, you don’t believe the company is modern.”
When Verve presented “Join a smarter perspective on mobile” for the first time, how did it land?
It was love from the first pitch. The strategic problem it solved was one we had been wrestling with for a long time. Everyone in the market was already claiming to be smart. There’s even a competitor literally called Smarty. What made this concept work was that it was not just a line of copy. It was a worldview that the visual language could follow and reinforce.
When the concept is strong and followed by the visual language, everything gets connected. We knew that we could finally align all the brand touchpoints, because the identity would translate into everything we needed.
The brand has to work across five European markets, the Middle East, Africa, and now the US. What did you build to make that possible?
When we were presenting the identity to different markets, some pushed back. The dynamic typography, the bold aesthetic, the loud expressive energy. It wasn’t landing everywhere. The concept was great, but they needed a more flexible system.
One brand. Three volumes.
The volume button was the answer. Three levels of expression built into the same system. Volume one is calm and simple: clean typography, the logo, strong imagery. The language is strong enough without being dynamic at all times. Volume two introduces perspective into the typography, plays with more colour. Volume three goes fully expressive: biggest typography, most dynamic imagery, bold colour combinations. Go crazy.
It also had a practical dimension: not every market team has the design capability to produce highly expressive work. The volume system meant every market could show up in the brand regardless of their resources.
Most global brands solve consistency by removing everything that could go wrong, and what is left is safe and invisible vanilla.A system that only works when your best designer touches it isn't a system.
Before any customer sees a new brand, the people inside the company have to believe in it. What did it actually take?
Getting people to let go of something familiar and trust something new takes time and repetition. My approach was to keep people constantly in the loop, to always let them know what’s happening, what’s new, what we are working on.
The turning point was a brand roadshow that David Clyde, Lebara’s Brand Lead, and I ran internally. We showed the full arc of the work: the concept itself, and how it translates to web, animations, and new product launches. People were reaching out saying wow, it’s amazing what you have done. Capybara, Lebara’s internal mascot, became one of the symbols of the internal shift. Everybody wants to use Capybara in their materials. People were just happy and cheering.
Most rebrands fail in a meeting room in month four, when someone senior who was never involved sees it for the first time. The work is not only designing the brand. It is designing the process, designing buy-in and the arguments that survive that room.
“Communicate way more than you even think is comfortable. Repeat it over and over again. Come up with all the examples of how it works. Once people are involved, understand the system, and see it solve key issues, they turn into brand supporters.”
A brand only lives if the people inside it believe in it. So we build the work with them, in the open, across multiple sessions where every voice has somewhere to land. By the time the new brand is revealed, it already belongs to them. That is the difference between a rebrand that gets announced and one that gets adopted.
A lot of rebrands stop at the visual identity and call it done. You’re treating UX as the next chapter. Looking ahead, where is this brand in three to five years?
Branding is UX. That is my motto, and it drives the next phase of the work. The brand values of simplicity, speed, and modernity cannot live only in how Lebara looks. They have to be felt in how Lebara works. If the brand says smart perspective, that means smooth, frictionless, fast.
The foundations are now in place and the ambition is clear. Travel eSIM is live and heading to the US. That’s a first for Lebara. We’re exploring Lebara Sans in Arabic, which would open the brand further into the Middle East and North Africa.
And I want to be honest about the complexity of connecting design directly to business outcomes. It is extremely difficult to prove it was exactly the design that changed brand perception, because it is always a combination of things. What we have done is run qualitative research showing users the old and new brand side by side, with positive results. Quantitative research follows.
Angelina is being more honest here than most clients would be. But the premise deserves pushing back on. Nobody asks the sales team to isolate their contribution from the product, and nobody asks the product team to isolate theirs from pricing. Design is the only function expected to prove it acted alone.
If our products are good and the brand now reflects that, there’s no reason people should not be coming to us.
A brand used to be something people looked at separately. Now it is something people move through, engage with and increasingly something machines read on their behalf. When a customer asks an AI assistant which provider to choose, that assistant is judging your brand without ever seeing your typography.
This is the kind of work Verve does best: helping ambitious brands close the gap between what they build and what people believe about them.
If your brand isn't keeping pace with your product, let's talk.
