The Vortex IQ brand, in one place.
Run and Grow outcome positioning, messaging hierarchy, visual rules, UI components and the full tone-of-voice guide. Everything a partner, designer, writer or app builder needs to create a consistent Vortex IQ experience.
Start with the promise.
Every design and every sentence exists to make one claim believable. If a decision does not serve this line, it is the wrong decision.
Stop revenue leaks. Accelerate growth.
Vortex IQ finds verified opportunities, prepares the work and takes every change through visible approval, safe application, verification and rollback.
It proposes. Your team approves. Nothing goes live without your say-so.
A brand line, used everywhere: the site, the app, the docs, sales material and social. Say it word for word. Do not paraphrase it or add to it. Where space is tight, the first two sentences can stand alone: It proposes. Your team approves.
Who we are, in one line
Vortex IQ is the AI workforce for ecommerce. Specialist crews find the problem in your own data, prepare the exact change, your team approves it, and it is applied with an undo point, as a pull request or as clear steps, then checked.
Use this when someone asks what Vortex IQ is. It names the category once, then describes the job.
Stop revenue leaks
For teams protecting the revenue their store should already be keeping.
Performance degradation, broken journeys, payment or integration failures, risky changes and migration work.
Accelerate growth
For teams turning missed demand, weak conversion and inefficient spend into revenue.
Search and AI visibility gaps, store experience friction and paid-media performance opportunities.
Start with the result the buyer wants. Product, crew and infrastructure names come after the choice, never before it.
Show what is happening, why it matters and the exact proposed change before asking for approval.
Apply safely, re-read and verify the result, retain evidence and preserve a rollback point where the workflow supports it.
One loop, five steps
One mark, two finishes.
Use the full-colour mark on light surfaces and the white mark on dark or brand-deep backgrounds. Keep clear space around it, and never recolour or distort it.
on all four sidesMinimum size
Below these sizes the IQ stops resolving. If the space is tighter than this, use the icon on its own instead of shrinking the full mark.
Usage rules
- Use the full-colour logo on white and light surfaces.
- Switch to the white logo on dark or brand-deep backgrounds.
- Keep clear space around the mark equal to the height of the V.
- Scale proportionally and use the provided SVG wherever possible.
- Hold a minimum width of 110px on screen and 25mm in print.
- Place it on enough contrast that it stays clearly legible.
- Recolour, add gradients, or apply effects to the mark.
- Stretch, squash, rotate, or distort the proportions.
- Place the logo on a busy image or a low-contrast background.
- Add a drop shadow, outline, or box around the mark.
- Recreate, re-typeset, or alter the wordmark in any way.
- Write VortexIQ, Vortex-IQ, or VORTEX IQ. It is Vortex IQ, two words.
Purple leads. Everything else supports.
These are the exact tokens the product and the website run on. Click any value to copy it. Status colours carry meaning, so they never appear as decoration.
Brand
Purple leads everything. Deep purple grounds dark sections and the footer. Blue is a rare secondary accent, never a substitute for purple.
Surfaces
White is the canvas. Soft grey separates alternating sections. The purple tint carries callouts, chips, and anything that should read as brand-owned.
Text
Near-black for headings, 60% black for body, 40% for metadata. Pure black is never used.
Status
Status colours carry meaning, so they never appear as decoration. Green is healthy or recovered, red is revenue at risk, amber is watching.
Gradients
Geist, end to end.
Geist sets every headline and paragraph. Geist Mono handles eyebrows, labels, metadata, and code: the small, precise type that gives the brand its technical edge. Stylistic sets ss01, ss03 and ss04 are on site-wide.
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz 0123456789
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz 0123456789
The scale
The rest of the system.
Radius, layout rhythm, elevation, and motion. Four small sets that do most of the work of making a new page look like it belongs.
Radius
| --radius | 10px | Cards, panels, inputs |
| --radius-pill | 200px | Every button and chip |
| (product visuals) | 14px to 18px | Floating console cards |
Layout
| --max | 1180px | Container width |
| --bento-gap | 30px | Grid gap, every bento |
| .section | 7.5rem 0 | Vertical section rhythm |
| nav height | 4.5rem | Fixed header |
Elevation
| --shadow-sm | 0 1px 2px / 0 1px 3px | Chips, small tiles |
| --shadow-md | 0 6px 20px / 0 2px 6px | Raised cards |
| --shadow-lg | 0 20px 50px / 0 6px 16px | Hover state, floating visuals |
| --shadow-brand | 0 14px 40px rgba(85,41,214,.22) | Primary button hover |
Motion
| --ease | cubic-bezier(.16,1,.3,1) | Every transition |
| hover lift | translateY(-1px to -3px) | Buttons and cards |
| reveal | 600ms, 22px rise | Scroll-in sections |
| reduced motion | animations off | Always honoured |
The parts we build pages from.
Everything below is live CSS from the shipped design system, not a screenshot. Buttons are always pills. Cards are always 10px. Nothing here needs inventing twice.
Buttons
Chips, badges, and status
Cards and stats
Nerve Centre
Watches selected connected commerce signals.
Vortex Mind
The memory graph that compounds, per store.
Ask Viq™
Conversational agent, cited back to the graph.
Building blocks
- Stateful orchestration
- Managed context windows
- No LLM ops to run
KPI rows, chat, and FAQ
How fast is the first audit?
1 to 3 days. Connect your stack, the instant store audit runs, then the Nerve Centre keeps watching live.
Which platforms do you support?
BigCommerce, Shopify, Adobe Commerce and WooCommerce, plus over 200 connectors in the Vortex IQ connector catalogue.
Will I lose control of my store?
Every proposed change shows evidence and scope before approval. Staging and rollback are used where the workflow supports them.
Signature product visuals
Two outcomes. One controlled way of working.
Run and Grow are the only first-level buyer choices. Experience, capability, crew and infrastructure names explain delivery after the outcome is understood.
Stop revenue leaks
For teams protecting the revenue their store should already be keeping.
Performance degradation, broken journeys, payment or integration failures, risky changes and migration work.
Accelerate growth
For teams turning missed demand, weak conversion and inefficient spend into revenue.
Search and AI visibility gaps, store experience friction and paid-media performance opportunities.
The experience model
Crew names
Function first, codename second. Write the job the reader recognises, then the codename in brackets: Store Health (Pulse), not Pulse on its own. The Store Experience codename is Prism. Never write Muse.
| Function, first | Codename, second |
|---|---|
| Store Health | Pulse |
| SEO and AI Visibility | Beacon |
| Ads Performance | Compass |
| Store Experience | Prism |
| Store Development | CodeCraft |
| Migration and Recovery | Bridge |
Technical foundations
Nerve Centre
The detection layer. It watches the connected signals a merchant selects.
Pair with continuous detection. It detects, but does not diagnose or act.
Vortex Mind
The diagnostic layer. It investigates a finding and returns the root cause.
Pair with explains why or root cause. It diagnoses, but does not deploy.
Ask Viq
The conversational interface, answering from the connected commerce context.
Use Ask Viq on the first prominent mention. It explains and provides access, but does not own staging or agent execution.
Vortex Agents
The execution layer for bounded AI agent tasks across the connected stack.
Pair with AI agents or act safely. State connector, permission, plan and approval boundaries.
Vortex Apps
Staging, backup, deployment and rollback for supported commerce-platform workflows.
Pair with safe or predictable. Do not imply staging and rollback apply to every connector.
Vortex Memory
The retained context layer for signals, fixes and decisions, per store.
Pair with learns or gets sharper over time. It provides context, not independent execution.
Five qualities, testable line by line.
Voice is what stays constant everywhere we write. Run any sentence against these five. If it fails one, it is not finished.
These five come from the approved tone of voice and replace the four pillars of v3.0. Confident and Warm now live in Pillar 01, Concrete in Pillar 03 and Anti-chaos in Pillar 04.
An operator, not a vendor
Write like an operator who has run live stores, not a vendor. Plain English, short sentences, specific nouns. Speak from that experience, but never lecture, never condescend, never imply the reader is failing. Contractions, second person and plain words: a senior peer pulling up a chair, not a vendor pitching from a stage.
One job at a time
Lead with the job, never with the category or a list of modules. One finding, one change, one next step. Lead with verbs.
Evidence before claims
Numbers, names, mechanisms. Every number has a denominator the reader can check. Technical verification and commercial outcome go in separate sentences: first what was changed and checked, then what it did for revenue, once that is measured. If a sentence could appear on any SaaS landing page, rewrite it until it could only appear on ours.
Calm about risk
Running a store should not feel like fighting fires, and our copy should never add to the alarm. Say what is approved, what is reversible and what is checked. Never promise uplift before it is measured, and never describe a proposed change as a result. Flat, factual prose reads as safe. Drama reads as risk.
Respect the people around the merchant
The merchant works with an agency and developers, and answers to a boss. Write so those people look good. We work alongside them and never replace them. No headcount maths, no digs at agencies, no suggestion that developers are optional.
Voice stays. Tone shifts.
Same brand, dialled differently for the surface. A hero rallies. A docs page explains. An error message apologises softly and names the next step.
| Surface | Dial up | Dial down | Anchor |
|---|---|---|---|
| Marketing hero | One job at a time | Detail, concision beats numbers here | Stop revenue leaks. Accelerate growth. |
| Product pages | Evidence before claims, name mechanisms and proof | Architecture until the outcome is clear | Choose the outcome. Then show the mechanism and proof. |
| Help docs | Evidence before claims, plus Operator | Rallying, explain instead | Start with Stop revenue leaks or Accelerate growth, then route to the task. |
| In-app labels | One job at a time, short and specific | Chatter, nothing inside buttons but the action | Run Audit, not Get started with your audit journey. |
| Empty states and errors | Calm about risk | Drama, apologise softly when something is wrong | We couldn't reach Shopify just now. Reconnecting in 30s. |
| Social | All five, the format demands voice density | Nothing, but keep it short | One mechanism named per post. One proof point per post. |
Writing for each audience.
The voice stays the same for everyone. The first door and the words change. Start with one finding and one door, in the reader's own words.
BigCommerce and Adobe Commerce merchants
A head of digital or ecommerce lead with a small team and an outside developer or agency, who has to change the live store safely and sell the fix to an owner, CEO or board. Also Adobe Commerce and Magento owner-operators who want a virtual agency.
A working copy of your live store, with fixes already made and tested in it, undoable in one click. Nothing goes live without your say-so. Or "your numbers are wrong, here is the truth": one true, specific finding on their own store.
Shopify merchants
A founder or small ecommerce team on Shopify who wants more customers from Google and AI answers, and more content, without hiring an SEO team.
More customers from Google and AI answers, with the content and fixes done for you in your brand voice. You approve everything before it goes live.
Agencies
A delivery lead, PM or technical lead at a commerce agency running managed services across many client stores.
Be proactive across every client site with the team you have. Findings become tickets, crews prepare the work, and your engineers approve every pull request before anything ships.
Nine triggers, mapped to the funnel.
Where the reader stands changes what they need to hear. Use this as a checklist before anything ships.
The reader has never heard of us. They scan in half a second. One job: make them feel named, seen, and at ease.
Frame the specific category
Name the exact bucket the reader sits in. A specific role plus a specific pain, never a general audience.
Identity matching, not identity attacking
Mirror who they already think they are. Never open with you're doing it wrong. That wakes the defensive brain and they are gone.
Fluency
Short sentences. Familiar words. Predictable rhythm. Read every top-of-funnel paragraph out loud, and wherever you stumble, rewrite. Non-negotiable on the homepage hero.
The reader is interested and is now testing plausibility. We are not asking for the sale, we are earning the right to.
Name the unique mechanism
Name the outcome first, then the mechanism that makes it believable. Architecture is evidence for the promise, not the opening pitch.
Typically atypical
Strong claims need calibrating language so the brain does not reject them. Add time frames. Add ratios. Prefer more than half to an exact multiple that sounds invented.
Boring by design
Kill objections in monotone. Flat, factual prose signals this is not a big deal. Drama signals the opposite. Two or three lines per objection, no exclamation marks.
The reader believes. Now they need to feel safe saying yes.
Choice framing
Three options, ours in the middle. The brain pattern-matches on three. Make the other two real, not strawmen, so the choice reads as honest.
Transparent trade-offs
Name what is not included. Result, but limitation. Stating the limit builds trust faster than any feature list.
Big proof, small bite
One boulder, not a wall. A grid of twelve logos triggers suspicion. One strong, named, consented proof point beats a wall of numbers, and lets both the fast and the slow brain sign off.
Objections, killed in monotone
Approved proof points
Pick the one that fits the audience. Show one, never all four. Never name a customer, or attach a number to one, without their written consent.
- Krispy Kreme's e-commerce ops team uses Vortex IQ to monitor across BigCommerce, Stripe and GA4 from a single Nerve Centre.
- Wells Stringham, Head of Experience at Apply Digital: saved us at least a week of dev time.
- Olaf Akkerman, GM Retail UK at Microsoft: Vortex IQ stands out by showing merchants what's broken, why it happened, and how to fix it automatically.
- Reduced quote turnaround by 96% on a single Adobe Commerce B2B engagement.
The words we use, and the ones we never do.
Half of brand consistency is vocabulary discipline. Run any draft through this table before it ships.
| Use | Not |
|---|---|
| Stop revenue leaks (Run outcome) | Run as a standalone buyer promise |
| Accelerate growth (Grow outcome) | Grow without the result it creates |
| Ask, Fix, Run, Watch, Workbench | six buyer-facing product choices |
| Show. Approve. Apply and verify. Roll back. | one-click fixes, automatic changes |
| It proposes. Your team approves. Nothing goes live without your say-so. | any paraphrase of the approval line |
| AI workforce for ecommerce | AI OS, operating system, operating layer, tool, app, software |
| Store Health (Pulse), function first, codename second | a codename on its own, Muse |
| a fix, a change, an approval (in the app) | Kanban, crew workbench, agent run |
| commerce, e-commerce | online retail, e-tail, digital commerce |
| merchant | client, customer, user, end-user |
| ops lead, growth lead, founder | stakeholder, decision-maker, executive |
| connector | integration, plugin, app |
| Nerve Centre, Vortex Mind, Ask Viq, Vortex Apps | any paraphrase, any lower-case version |
| Ask Viq™ on first prominent mention | AskViq, Ask VIQ, ask viq |
| detect, explain, fix | monitor, analyse, recommend |
| safe, predictable, controlled | bulletproof, guaranteed, foolproof |
| over 200 connectors, in the Vortex IQ connector catalogue | many, all the major, 215+, 70+ |
| catalogue, mapped | supported, integrated |
| 14-day free trial, free for 14 days | free forever, freemium |
| technical foundations, operating loop | six pillars as the buyer journey |
Banned phrases
Punctuation
Never use an em dash. Never use an en dash either.
Not in marketing copy, not in docs, not in CMS content, not in a social post. The em dash is overused, it reads as machine-written to a lot of readers, and the voice prefers shorter, more declarative sentences anyway. A hyphen covers every legitimate compound case.
| Where you would reach for one | Use instead | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Parenthetical aside | comma, comma | Vortex IQ, the AI workforce for ecommerce, runs on every connector you have. |
| Emphasis or summary clause | colon or full stop | One AI workforce. Detect, explain, fix. |
| Strong aside or clarification | parentheses | Connect your stack (10 minutes max). The Nerve Centre does the rest. |
| Range or span | to, or a hyphen | 5 to 15 minutes. Q2-Q3. |
| Compound modifier | hyphen | AI-driven, 24-7, top-quartile. |
Owned hooks
Four structures that carry most of our writing.
When you are staring at a blank page, pick the pattern that matches the format and fill it in. The structure is already approved, so you only have to be good at the sentences.
StoryBrand
- Character: name the merchant and what they want
- Problem: external (fragmented tools), internal (overwhelmed team), philosophical (this shouldn't feel like firefighting)
- Guide: empathy (we've lived it) plus authority (the logos, the case studies)
- Plan: choose Stop revenue leaks or Accelerate growth, then enter through Ask, Fix, Run, Watch or Workbench
- Call to action: direct (start free) plus transitional (see a sample report)
- Success: what life looks like running Vortex IQ
- Failure: what it costs to keep doing it the old way
PEACE soundbite
- Problem: the one most readers nod at
- Empathy: we know how this feels
- Authority: one credible proof point
- CTA: one clear next step
- Evidence: one quantified outcome
Three-option close
- Always offer exactly three
- Position ours as the middle
- Make the other two real options, not strawmen
- Mark the middle one, the way pricing marks Growth as most popular
Card body
- Card class line, category, tier
- At a glance
- Calculation
- Worked example
- Sibling cards
- Reconciling against the vendor's own dashboard
- Known limitations and merchant FAQs
- Tracked live in Nerve Centre, the closing CTA
What changes, surface by surface.
The rules below sit on top of everything above. Where a channel carries extra legal or trust risk, the voice gets tighter, not louder.
Marketing site
- Lead the homepage and broad entry pages with Stop revenue leaks and Accelerate growth.
- On a Run or Grow page, state the chosen outcome in the hero before naming a capability or technical foundation.
- The hero must pass the half-second scan test.
- One big proof point per page, never a wall of logos.
- One headline price per pricing tier, with the annual maths in small print.
- Keep Growth as the marked middle of the self-serve path.
Comparison hub
- Facts only. Every competitor claim sourced to their own public pages and cited on the page.
- No disparagement. Describe accurately what they do well.
- Complementary, not superior. They own one slice. We work across the whole stack, alongside the tools the merchant already has.
- One clear CTA at the end, the free audit.
Limits and guardrails
- Boring by design. State the hard rules in flat prose. The calm tone is the message.
- Transparent trade-offs. Ranges not guarantees, live connector counts not roadmap totals.
- Keep safety mechanics scoped. Staging and one-click rollback are BigCommerce, Shopify, and Adobe Commerce. Approval-gating is universal.
Help docs
- The documentation front door starts with the same two outcomes as the website.
- Task pages may name technical foundations after the user understands the task and expected result.
- Avoid jargon the merchant will not recognise. Never avoid our own product names.
- Worked examples stay concrete and merchant-readable.
In-app
- Name what the merchant recognises (a fix, a change, an approval), not how the system is built (Kanban, crew workbench, agent run).
- Buttons: one to three words, verb-led, saying exactly what happens. Approve change, then Change approved once it is done. Run Audit, Connect, View finding.
- Every proposed change shows what will change, that it needs approval, and whether it can be undone.
- Empty states: warm and specific. No findings yet. Connect your first source to put the Nerve Centre to work.
- Errors: monotone and factual. Say what went wrong and what to do next.
- Alerts: lead with impact in plain English. Catalogue drift on 14 SKUs. £8,400 at risk.
- Onboarding: ask which outcome matters first, then route the buyer into Ask, Fix, Run, Watch or Workbench.
- Use Run as an action only when it dispatches work. Use Stop revenue leaks for the buyer outcome.
Social
- All five voice pillars run high. The format rewards voice density.
- One mechanism named per post.
- One proof point per post.
- Short. If it needs a scroll, it needs a cut.
The rules, applied.
Five edits from our own surfaces. Use them as anchors when you are unsure whether a draft is on brand.
The AI Operating System That Runs Your Entire eCommerce Operation. Deploy a 24/7 Digital Workforce that connects every app in your stack. We give your business the Eyes to monitor every KPI, the Voice to strategize, and the Hands to execute tasks automatically.
Stop revenue leaks. Accelerate growth. Choose the outcome that matters now, then see the evidence and approve what happens next.
Active Subscribers (Est.) is a customer lifecycle metric tracked from ActiveCampaign data.
Accelerate growth: watch subscriber momentum, ask why it changed and review the evidence before you act.
You don't have any findings yet. To get started, please connect your first data source by going to the Connectors page in your Settings.
No findings yet. Connect your first source, then choose what you want to watch.
Vortex IQ: your weekly performance report is ready
Revenue leaks found in your store this week
Starter £39/month. Save 20%. £199/month.
Growth $1,199/mo, most popular. Billed annually at $14,388. Save 20% a year.
Take the whole thing with you.
The complete brand book, including the Run and Grow content hierarchy, in the format that suits your workflow. No form, no sign-up. The HTML version prints straight to PDF from any browser.
Brand guidelines, Markdown
The full book as plain Markdown. Drop it into Notion, a docs repo, or an AI writing assistant as the house style file.
One file, no assetsDownload.htmlBrand guidelines, HTML
A styled, self-contained page with the Run and Grow hierarchy. Share it with an agency or print it to PDF from any browser.
One file, print-readyDownload.svgLogo, full colour
The primary mark for white and light surfaces. Vector, so it scales to any size without loss.
SVG, transparentDownload.svgLogo, white
The reversed mark for dark and brand-deep backgrounds. Same geometry, single colour.
SVG, transparentDownloadWriting about us, or building with us?
For interviews, founder bios, partnership announcements, or a tailored asset pack, get in touch and the right person on our team will help.
