Monzo's bright coral cards are noticeable from a mile away – but the eye-catching colour was more of a happy accident than a marketing masterstroke. To begin with, the company’s cards were going to look like the plethora of more muted cards in your wallet.
“We mostly wanted it so when we went to a restaurant or something, people would ask about the card,” says head of design Hugo Cornejo. “Then when we realised people really liked it, we kept it.” The coral colour was chosen before the Monzo name; back then, the startup was still known as Mondo.
Stand-out payment cards aren’t new: high- or no-limit cards from Visa and MasterCard are already denoted with matte black, and high-street banks let the rest of us personalise cards with our own photos. The neon coral of Monzo’s early cards wasn’t just a pretty colour, but an eye-catching marketing tool that not only helped word spread about the financial startup, and let users signal to others in the know that they were tech-savvy early adopters.
The British banking startup carefully designed its app to allow everything from self-banning gambling spending to IFTTT integration, not just to be different, but to be better, says Cornejo. And that includes having attractive, fashionable cards. Like a smartphone, you carry them everywhere, so looks matter. “I might bullshit you a bit, but I think they’re better because they’re pretty.”
Like the Mondo brand, the coral cards weren’t intended to stick around. The bright neon was first used for early adopters, for the beta version of the cards, which were pre-paid credit cards before Monzo was allowed by regulators to offer current accounts. The idea, Cornejo says, was to choose a bright colour to mark the cards as prototypes, akin to when car makers show off their future models at a show – they don’t make them in white or grey, but bold colours. “They always use crazy colours to tell you this is in the works,” he says.
That was the idea with the first round of Monzo cards, which were only intended to be printed in a batch of a few thousand as a beta, before switching to a more standard design. Two years on, the colour remains. It was a gamble, not only because switching up card designs isn’t easy. “The production of cards is very tricky. It has tons of constraints in the production, approval from third parties, from manufacturers. It takes a crazy long time to produce samples,” Cornejo says.
Hunting for ideas for the first round of cards, one caught his eye: a gift card from high-street retailer Debenhams, not generally seen as a design hub. “I was meeting our card manufacturer – this was really early days – and saw a card for Debenhams, it was a neon gift card. It wasn’t hot coral, but it was pink,” he says. The catalogue had a slim choice of seven neon colours, and a quick poll of friends and colleagues revealed coral was the favourite.
Though chosen with only minimal research, the card was getting attention even when it was being made. “It was funny because three months later, the people that were manufacturing them told us that it caused a bit of commotion in the printing facility. You could see them throughout the factory because they’re so bright,” he says. “Neon colours convert that light into visible light and reflect it back. That’s why they look so shiny and so bright. So in this manufacturing facility, which is quite dark, you could see the cards all being printed, like a laser.”
While Cornejo admits Monzo got lucky with the now iconic colour of the beta cards, he says it’s partly down to taking time with design in the early stages – even for prototype products only early adopters will ever see. “In order for any product that’s customer facing, design must happen,” he says. “You might do it with care, you might do it as an afterthought. In our case, we know of the importance of it because of the hot coral card – people really like it, but it doesn’t happen by accident. It was a lucky strike, but there’s some reasoning and design behind it.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
