Optimizely rebrand illustration with man riding hamster

Free to grow: Why Optimizely's polarising rebrand is exactly the point

Optimizely has raised eyebrows with its recent rebrand. Engagement Director Liam Thomas explores the brand’s new visual identity and why it’s working.  

Liam Thomas

31 July 2026

4 minute read

Line up the websites of the big enterprise marketing platforms and try to tell them apart. Blue-purple gradients. Glassy abstractions. Smiling people pointing at dashboards. All speaking the same visual language – the language of a category that had quietly agreed to look like itself.

Optimizely just tore up that agreement. And judging by the reaction, it worked.

New Opti branding

Let’s take a look

Back in June, Optimizely unveiled a new identity built around a single idea: marketers should be 'free to grow'. The work was led by London brand agency Ragged Edge, in collaboration with Berlin-based illustrator Andrey Kasay, whose surreal, hand-drawn style has previously appeared in work for MTV, Nike, Gucci and Red Bull. The result is a world of parrots, flaming coffee cups and, memorably, a man driving a hamster. It's strange, joyful and completely unmistakable.

There's a second irony here, and Optimizely leaned into it deliberately: an AI platform launching a brand made by human hands. AI helped with production tasks like migrating content to the new website, but the creative direction and core assets were kept human throughout.

"Our new brand is built around a simple belief: marketers should be free to grow," said Alex Atzberger, CEO at Optimizely. "AI should make the mundane elements of marketing easier so brands can focus on the things that AI could never replace: human curiosity, creativity, and compassion, which allows them to build something distinctive."

Previous Optimizely branding

Previous Optimizely branding

Bravery was not optional, even with mixed reactions

The phrase that defined the project internally came from Ragged Edge's initial pitch deck: 'Bravery will not be optional'. Dan Reid, Optimizely's Director of Global Brand and Creative, said the line quickly became a guiding principle. "Some rebrands get watered down and homogenised by endless cooks and nervous execs," he wrote when the brand launched. "This is not that rebrand."

Scroll through LinkedIn and the reaction is split, in the best possible way. Plenty of people love it. Plenty find it jarring, or confess it's 'not for them'. What you won't find much of is indifference, and indifference is the only reaction that kills a brand.

Here's where I land: the split is the success. If Optimizely had shipped a rebrand that everyone politely admired, it would have failed on its own terms. It set out to be felt before it's understood, to stand apart from a category of interchangeable gradients, and to give people something to argue about. All three achieved. 

New Optimizely branding

New Optimizely branding

The quieter, bigger shift: what happened to the product names

The illustrations will get the attention, but the more consequential change for anyone evaluating or running the platform is in the naming architecture. For years, Optimizely's portfolio came wrapped in bespoke brand names: Optimizely One as the umbrella, Opal as the standalone AI assistant brand. That layer has been dramatically simplified (the Optimizely One name still lingers in corners of the site, but the emphasis has clearly shifted). The products page now reads like a plain-language taxonomy: Content Management System, Experimentation, Agent Platform, Personalisation, Analytics. The flagship products are now described as agentic CMS and agentic experimentation, and the whole platform aligns under one claim: the AI platform for marketing.

This is a smart inversion, and I'd argue it's the most instructive part of the rebrand for anyone naming products in 2026. The personality now lives entirely in the brand layer. The naming layer went the other way: ruthlessly descriptive. In an era where buyers (and increasingly their AI assistants) research platforms through answer engines, 'agentic CMS' is a phrase machines and humans can both parse instantly. 'Opal' is not. Brand poetry moved up to the masthead; the product catalogue became plain English. Vendors that do it the other way around, sober corporate brands on top and a mythology of invented product names underneath, are making life harder for everyone, including the LLMs now doing their buyers' shortlisting. 

What it signals

This one is a point of view: that differentiation is the last durable advantage when everyone has the same tools, that AI should clear the way for human creativity rather than replace it, and that a B2B platform is allowed to be fun. Whether every CMO loves the level of playfulness is beside the point. They'll remember it, and in a market where the products increasingly converge on the same capabilities, being remembered is the game.

It takes genuine nerve to do this at enterprise scale, with thousands of customers watching. Optimizely took the risk, split the room, and got precisely the outcome it designed for. I think that deserves to be celebrated.

New Optimizely typemark

Alex Atzberger will be in Australia on 13 August for Optimizely's annual Digital Summit in Sydney, the first time the new brand shows up on a local stage. Register now to see Luminary CEO Marty Drill live on stage with The Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) for our Fireside Chat: New Gates to a Historic Ground: One Source of Truth for Every Visitor.

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