Author: Vero Maldonado, 
Gretchen Mrazik,
Yu Rong
April 15, 2023

Behind the Design: The Making of WestCap.com

As WestCap’s in-house creative team, we help the firm’s portfolio companies use creativity as a lever for business growth. This includes nailing the first impression prospective clients have with a brand — which is often their website.

But what does it look like when the “client” we’re working with is WestCap itself? We recently gave our own site a complete overhaul and wanted to share how we brought the new version to life.

Over the last few years, WestCap has been finetuning its strategy. The firm has always believed that investors and operators should work hand-in-hand to grow the companies in our portfolio. We coined this hands-on approach  “Operating Equity.”

The new model has been well-received, but we realized it wasn’t reflected on a very critical touchpoint — WestCap’s website. At CōLab, we saw an opportunity to give the WestCap website a visual refresh, while also finding ways to showcase our Operating Equity model front and center.

An opportunity for brand alignment and introspection

We kicked off this project just as we would with any other client—by looking inward and diving deep into the inner workings of WestCap. When we’re working with a portfolio company on their website, we start with a discovery process involving data collection, research, and stakeholder interviews. This process usually raises many existential questions. How do we want to present ourselves to customers? What are the most important things we want them to remember about us? Answering these questions requires a fair amount of internal alignment and prioritization.

We started by taking the opportunity to talk to WestCap teams we don’t often engage with. It was important to cover all our bases—talking to both partners and the individual contributors who are on the frontlines working with investors and portfolio companies daily. We heard from our investor relations team on their pitch to prospective investment partners (LPs) and to our deal captains on the types of companies they look for. Everyone had their own distinct perspective on the WestCap story, but themes started to emerge. These conversations strengthened our conviction in focusing on Operating Equity, which was resonating with our audiences.

A digital experience as distinctive as our model

Once we had wrapped our heads around the key messages, it was time to put our ideas down on paper. We started creating several wireframes that laid out our firm’s mission and its approach to Operating Equity. Through this process, we landed on a thought-provoking idea. What if we structured the website less like your traditional growth equity firm and more like a tech company? The Operating Equity philosophy was akin to a product suite—a series of capabilities and strategies that all laddered up to a larger vision. This approach also freed us to design a site that set us apart from other firms. Our model is different and our website should reflect that.

The end result was a page that leveraged storytelling and motion to introduce Operating Equity just as a tech company would introduce a new product. We showcased our operating team as if they were features, different tools within a powerful Swiss Army knife. One design element we’re especially happy with is the glow that highlights the site’s visual components as users scroll. At first, it has a blue hue—our brand color—but as you go down the page, more colors come into view. The glow is meant to represent the dynamism at the core of Operating Equity: a diverse set of skillsets, perspectives, and teams coming together to create a larger whole.

We know that many people think of private equity as mathematical and calculated. That glow highlights the human side of that work, serving as a metaphor for the empowerment and human energy that is at the core of every project at WestCap.

For us, it was important to show, not just tell. That’s why we included in-depth case studies on the home page that highlight the impact of Operating Equity. We started by breaking down piece by piece how our model works in practice and then showed it in action. Each case study highlights  various ways we‘ve partnered with some of our portfolio companies to hone in on their own strategy, product vision, and brand.

More than a website: Our brand's embodiment

First impressions matter. Though most people typically spend just a few seconds on a company’s website, those few seconds can determine how people perceive your brand. That’s why along the journey of this redesign, we made sure to return to the original motivations behind this project: A website as distinct as our operating model. We’re proud to showcase the care we put into the work we do to serve WestCap’s portfolio companies. We believe the new site reflects all of that and more.

Meet the contributors

Vero Maldonado is a Creative Director at CōLab focused on all types of content — UX, brand, editorial, you name it. She’s part wordsmither and part therapist, helping companies find the right way to describe themselves and how that carries across every channel. Vero started off her career at Path, a small social network and cult favorite for tech designers, before joining Airbnb in 2014 as the company’s first content strategist. She helped define and grow the content strategy discipline, while also crafting the messaging for Airbnb for Work, Airbnb Experiences, and Airbnb.org. Before joining CōLab, she did a short stint at Slack where she led a messaging overhaul for Slack Connect.

Yu Rong is the Product Design Lead at CōLab where she creates digital experiences for websites and apps with strategic thinking and solid design skills. Over the course of over 8 years, she's worked in China and the United States at all sizes of design agencies — from Leo Burnett and AKQA to Partners and Spade, and Astro Studios; and tech in-house such as Apple and Facebook. A few notable clients that she worked with included Apple, IBM, and WarbyParker.

Gretchen Mrazik joined CōLab in the spring of 2021. Prior to being the Executive Producer at CōLab, she produced the marketing and launch of the SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, CA. This national campaign included broadcast video production as well as in-stadium display-- the first of its kind continuous 4K HD videoboard. Gretchen has held several senior producer roles in her 15 years working within creative design agencies and corporate strategy teams. She understands a wide range of multimedia having managed projects in advertising, marketing, product design, branding, and environments.