By Gen Feeds Editorial
Mother Design opened its rebrand of the psychic services platform Purple Garden with a séance, a chakra reading and an automatic drawing workshop led by a practitioner from the platform itself[1][2]. The studio's own case study treats that unmeasurable opening as method rather than anecdote. For teams that follow how creative work gets made, the decision worth studying is procedural. The studio protected a block of process time that could not show progress, stripped the KPI out of the exercise, and brought AI in only afterwards, as a way to widen variation inside a hand-led process.
Purple Garden connects people with spiritual practitioners on a phone or a laptop[1]. The studio's case study places the platform inside a $2.3 billion spiritual services category, which it describes as stuck in "visual clichés" and a default of "Book fast. Get answers. Act now."[1]. Against that backdrop, the studio set out to create an identity that taps into "the connection, uplift and even transcendence a good reading can give you"[1]. The result is live. The homepage now opens with "Tend to what is growing within you"[3].
The séance was a structured workshop
The session itself was structured work. Under Mother Design's Wild Card initiative, which pushes the team to experiment with unfamiliar disciplines, a holistic practitioner from Purple Garden guided a chakra reading and an automatic drawing and writing workshop[2]. The designers worked with paper and charcoal to bypass conscious thought, and the forms, textures and feelings that emerged became a creative foundation for the identity[2]. Creative director Jo Tulej traced the lineage to Hilma af Klint and The Five, the group of women who drew and wrote freely in trance states, and noted that the word séance comes from the words sitting or session[2]. The séance was a first step. A few days later the team returned, sat with the drawings and writing, and discussed what they were seeing[2]. Tulej described the whole exercise as "A brand audit with a twist, you might say!"[2].
Removing the KPI from the exercise
The studio connects the result to the conditions the ritual created. "It was slow, unclear and required a lot of trust and to a certain extent, vulnerability, from our team," Tulej said. "By protecting this time, and removing a traditional 'KPI' from the output, I believe it gave our client a much richer, robust output, sensitive to the category and its audience."[2]
The protected time bought a positioning the category had not claimed. The brand idea, "A Living Practice", speaks to what the studio calls "believers of the bigger picture", and the case study frames the platform as offering immediate guidance and the depth of an ongoing practice[1]. The voice system carries its own duality. Called Active Contemplation, it can either guide a visitor forward or slow down for reflection, an explicit answer to the urgency default the studio flagged in the category[1][2].
The artifacts that came out of it
The ritual left visible deposits. The wordmark is an "ornate living depiction of growth and cultivation", built with sprouting ligatures and branching curves[1]. A crystal-like glyph inspired by flora, crystals and charged energy acts as brand shorthand in small spaces[1][2]. A living type treatment draws on cymatic patterns and atomic systems, which the studio says embody continual growth and a sense of revelation[1]. Photography centers on charged objects that stand in for services like dream analysis and psychic readings, lit with solarised glows and flame-like ripples[2]. The palette keeps the category's purple but goes warmer and earthier, and the case study counts seven purple hues against the bluish tones typical of the field[1]. Literatura Present and ABC Social do the practical work of keeping screens legible[2].
AI arrived after the direction was set
AI entered late and on a short leash. The case study reserves a section titled "Crafted by hand. Charged by screen." for the point where the team moved "back and forth between traditional design tools and AI, allowing assets to shift and evolve as we went"[1]. The stated aim was "a sense of delightful unpredictability"[1]. The case study names no tool. The sequence is the transferable part. The séance fixed a felt, human direction first. Iteration across AI and traditional tools then expanded the range of outcomes while the assets evolved. As a workflow, the case reads simply. Variance became useful once a direction existed. Before that point it would have been noise.
Numbers to read as vendor statements
Several figures deserve their label as vendor statements. The $2.3 billion category size is the studio's estimate, not an audited market figure[1]. Practitioner profiles carry marketing claims of their own, among them a clairvoyant described with "over 40,000 readings"[3]. The palette count also splits inside the vendor's own materials. The case study counts seven purple hues[1], while the launch announcement describes "six warmer purple shades"[5]. Ownership statements also differ depending on where you look. Tulej counts Keen and Purple Garden as the two psychic platforms Mother Design rebranded this year[2], and the Keen case study quotes Ariana Hellebuyck as chief marketing officer at Ingenio[4]. The Purple Garden footer, meanwhile, reads "© 2026 Barges Technologies, Inc."[3]. The cited materials leave the relationship between the two company names open. The process story itself rests on the studio's account. The live homepage is the part an outsider can verify, and its copy matches the studio's verbal identity[3][5].
What other teams can borrow
The same method pointed two ways this year. "This year we've been so lucky to rebrand not one but two psychic services platforms (Keen and Purple Garden)," Tulej said, crediting the divergence to getting "under the skin of the audiences and aims of the business"[2]. Keen's case study headlines its aim as taking psychic services "from a niche audience to a mass-wellness audience"[4]. Purple Garden went the opposite way, toward an audience of seasoned seekers[1][2]. The séance supplied conditions rather than answers, a slow and unmeasured start in which intangible ideas could survive a commercial brief. That part travels without the occult. Give the earliest phase of a project room to run without deadlines or metrics, fix a direction by hand, and only then let AI expand the range of outcomes. The studio built the voice to engage customers "without falling into the category tropes of urgency and pressure, ie. Book fast. Get answers. Act now."[2], and the homepage now greets visitors with the counterproposal, "Tend to what is growing within you"[3].