Aimo — Turning a Fortune 500's scattered mobility bets into the Nordics' leading mobility group.
Sumitomo Corporation, a Japanese Fortune 500 company, entered Nordic mobility by starting Sweden's first electric car-sharing service, then acquiring Q-Park, the region's largest parking operator. Our job was to make all of it feel like one company. I led the brand work for close to eight years, from the beginning.
The hard part was not design. It was agreement. We were building a brand backwards, out of companies that already existed, across three countries, two very different industries, and a Japanese ownership culture we met with in person. A conservative parking business built on fines and fine print, and a startup built on speed, now had to live under one brand.
So we argued for the human version. Parking, as an industry, is stiff and faintly punitive. It talks at people. We pushed Aimo the other way: simpler language, a warmer tone, braver than the category is used to. The real work was convincing a traditional business that softening was a strength.
Underneath, we built the whole system: a brand hierarchy of parent and sub-brands, a custom typeface drawn for legibility and to cut licensing costs at scale, an illustration style, and a design system the in-house team could run themselves. It went everywhere, from the app to the cars to the signage in the garages.
The shift showed up in the tracking. Between 2020 and 2023, independent research found satisfaction rose from 26 to 40 percent, positive associations roughly doubled, and the words people used moved from 'expensive,' 'fines' and 'complicated' toward 'simple,' 'quality' and 'modern.'
A custom typeface, drawn for legibility on a garage sign at distance and to remove licensing costs across a brand this size. Geometric enough to feel modern, humane enough to feel like Aimo.
The illustration style is where the softening became visible. In an industry that talks in fine print and warning signs, a set of simple, slightly funny line drawings did the opposite: they made parking and charging feel approachable, and they worked as well on a garage wall as in the app.
Aimo Park is the parking business, formerly Q-Park and now one of the largest parking operators in the Nordics, around 370,000 spaces across Sweden, Norway and Finland. This is where the softening had to work hardest. Fines, barriers and fine print became clear signage, plain language, and a system that behaves the same everywhere.
Aimo Share, the EV and car-sharing side, and where Aimo began. Built to feel effortless: unlock with the app, charge without thinking, the brand carried onto the cars themselves.
