We realised that if we could make a shift away from profit being dependent on whether we actually deliver value, we could fundamentally transform this market and build something that is unrecognisable from old-school insurance.

COVID accelerated the acceptance of what we were offering. For instance, when people were in hard lockdown they were not driving and Naked was the only insurer with an app where you could press one button and downgrade your cover.

We said to each other, “What is the word, what is the concept that best describes this?” There was only one obvious word that fitted the bill, and that was 'naked'. We could not find a better way of internally describing what we were busy with, what we stand for, what our values are. But more importantly, 'naked' also applied externally.

The moment you say that you are in insurance, you almost get people to shut down completely. The quickest way to stop a conversation is to start playing an insurance ad, or put up an insurance billboard. In building the brand, we've had a very interesting journey and we tried a whole bunch of stuff, some of which worked and some of which didn’t.

Our name is our core value of being transparent, being sincere in trying to remove unnecessary things that do damage to the relationship that we're in with our clients. Doing things in a simple, clear, transparent, minimalist way is core to this brand's value.

In that first year, maybe first two years, the two biggest things that resulted in growth was firstly, word-of-mouth and tracked referrals to some extent and secondly, the use of public relations.

A big part of our advertising spend was strategically recognising that the industry that we are in, is a ticket to the game to introduce a big new audience to Naked. For them to take us seriously, we had to announce that we are big enough to have an ad on 94.7 or a billboard driving on the N1. That's all we're trying to signal there.

One of the biggest mistakes that we definitely made early on, and I guess from time to time I still fall in that trap a little bit, was trying to tell the world about all that we've done in a single piece of communication.

It depends who's going to be working on the brand. We had one or two cases in our communications journey where working with external people was a success. But most attempts failed.

We've realised that the core functionality in our business is being a UX business. Every single button that you press has been thought about for days and weeks and months, and every sentence that you read is much shorter than it would be when you're reading it on a traditional old-school insurance company’s PDF or on their website. This is because we've invested the time to really make the journey with us simple.