Smartree
Brandient’s very first project — the first name, the first identity, and the idea of a tree that turns client needs into "oxygen for business."
In 2002, the company behind Romania’s first online human-resources portal reached the crossroads every young business meets when it outgrows its founding product. Launched in 2000 as ResurseUmane.ro — literally, the name of the category — it had pioneered online recruitment in Romania and was expanding fast into payroll outsourcing, personnel administration and HR software. The descriptive name that had announced a new market now confined the company to it: it said what the category was, not what the company would become, and it could be neither owned nor defended. With new ownership taking over in September 2002 and a relaunch imminent, the decision on the table was strategic, not cosmetic — keep trading as a category, or build a brand able to carry a services company far beyond the portal.
Brandient’s answer — the consultancy’s first engagement — was to move the brand from description to idea. The name Smartree fused smart and tree, preserving the one asset the young company already owned, the tree of its original logo, while signaling intelligence and growth. More important, the name carried the strategy. The tree became the brand’s working metaphor — an organism that photosynthesizes a client’s administrative burden into "oxygen for business" — and that line reframed the whole offer: payroll, personnel administration and recruitment, recast not as back-office chores grudgingly outsourced but as the air a business runs on. The client conversation moved with it, from the cost of processing to the continuity of the business itself. The identity rebuilt the tree as a crisp mosaic of green, gray and black squares — a systematic mark for a company selling process and data, designed to read as method, not ornament.
The same idea disciplined the portfolio. Rather than let a fast-growing suite of HR products and partner programs accumulate inconsistent names, the architecture used one repeatable device — the tree embedded into program names — so that everything the company offered read, at a glance, as part of a single system. For a business selling compliance and reliability, coherence was not cosmetics: it told buyers that an expanding list of services came from one accountable partner.
The business vindicated the choice. The portal that had given the company its first name was sold within two years; the brand built to outgrow it carried the company to the leadership of Romania’s payroll and personnel-administration outsourcing market — a position it holds to this day. Smartree has since outlived its founding product, attracted private-equity backing from Enterprise Investors in 2010, passed through successive owners and anchored a group reorganization in 2021 — nearly a quarter-century of continuous trade under the identity created at relaunch. For Brandient, project number one proved the conviction the consultancy was founded on: that a name and an idea, chosen with intent, are business assets built to outlast the circumstances of their making. The work was recognized with a REBRAND 100 Merit (2005), a EULDA 2006 and an Identity Best of the Best 2nd Place for Services (Moscow, 2006).
Client:
Smartree
Industry:
Technology and Telecom
Project type:
Rebranding
Date:
2002
Services:
Brand Audit, Brand Positioning, Brand Name, Narratives and Voice, Logo and Visual Identity Program, Corporate ID Program, Digital Design, Communication Design
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