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White label: $320M acquisition story
During COVID, Gabi's main growth channel dried up. Radio ads stopped working, because far fewer people were driving. The product was strong, but the traffic was not. The idea that came out of this was to offer Gabi as a white-label solution: other companies could give the same product to their own customers, under their own brand. I designed the system that made this possible.
TL;DR
One product that could wear any brand.
Gabi needed to become other companies' product without a custom build for each one, so I reduced a brand to three variables (logo, colour, corner radius) and built a token system that re-themed the whole app from them. A fully branded prototype went from a multi-week design project to a few minutes, and it was used across Gabi's partner and enterprise conversations, including with Experian, which acquired Gabi for $320M in November 2021.
Problem
The question was not how to make it look like a partner. It was the smallest set of changes that makes it feel theirs, without rebuilding the app for every one.
I started by breaking down which parts of the UI actually carry brand identity, and which were simply styled by convention. That exposed the core trade-off: change too little and partners would not believe the product was theirs; change too much and every new partner would become a custom build, adding design, engineering, and maintenance cost.
I considered two directions: a bespoke reskin for each partner, with higher fidelity but poor scalability, or a small system of brand tokens that could re-theme the product on demand. I chose the token approach, betting that a few carefully selected variables could create enough ownership while letting sales prototype new partner experiences in minutes, without new design work.
Process
I looked for the fewest variables that could carry a whole brand.
Find what carries the brand.
Break down the UI to see what truly signals identity, and what is just decoration.
Pick the path that scales.
A custom design per partner does not. A small set of brand tokens does.
Reduce it to three.
Logo, main colour, corner radius, proven across five representative screens.
Solution
A token system that re-themes the whole app, so any partner’s branded prototype takes minutes, not a design project.
I reduced the system to a few variables that carried most of the brand identity: logo, primary colour, and corner radius. To test whether that small set could hold across the product, I applied it to five screens covering the core journey, from sign-up to final quote review.
Then I built a clickable prototype in each partner’s own branding and put it in front of existing partners. The response was clear: they saw it as their product, not Gabi with a different look. That validated the token approach and gave sales the confidence to use it more widely.
Impact
Weeks → minutes — the time to produce a fully branded partner prototype.
Experian was one of the partners I built a branded prototype for. In November 2021, Experian acquired Gabi for $320M.
I want to be precise here, because it matters. An acquisition of that size has many causes, and I will not claim that a prototype closed the deal. What I can say is that the white-label system I designed was what let Gabi show Experian, clearly and on demand, how an embedded, branded Gabi could look. That prototype was in the room during the conversations that led there. At that point the solution was still early. After the acquisition, Experian's team continued the work to integrate Gabi into their platform.
