Building a platform for fair labour worldwide

Verité is an independent nonprofit that has spent thirty years working to advance fair labour standards across global supply chains. With a team of ninety people operating globally, and clients including Apple, Walmart, and the US Department of State, the organisation works at every level of the labour rights system – from C-suite strategy to field-worker support.

Verité’s website is central to everything they do. It’s the primary way they articulate their value to potential clients and funders, the channel through which they publish research and guidance used by practitioners worldwide, and the platform connecting audiences to a growing portfolio of targeted initiatives and programmes.

When they approached us at the end of 2024, the stakes could not have been higher. The cancellation of USAID funding had removed a significant portion of Verité’s income overnight, making the website’s role in communicating its value to private-sector clients more critical than ever.

At the same time, their decade-old site was struggling under the weight of its responsibilities: expertise buried in dense prose, resources impossible to search or share, and a visual identity that no longer reflected who they had become. Verité came to us to build a platform fit for their next thirty years of impact.

An architecture informed by insight

We began with a thorough discovery phase, mapping Verité’s audiences across the full spectrum of their reach – from global corporations navigating human rights due diligence to worker organisations seeking practical guidance. Rather than assumed user types, the work was grounded in behavioural insight: what each audience was trying to achieve, what would build their trust in Verité, and what the site needed to help them do.

This work directly shaped the site architecture. The navigation follows the order in which Verité’s audiences actually need to encounter the organisation: Priorities leads with the issues Verité works on – forced labour, child labour, migrant labour, working conditions – so visitors understand what’s at stake before they explore the offer. Expertise sets out what Verité can do, structured around three service areas with clear journeys for business and government audiences. Our Work and Resources then provide the proof and the tools. The structure is the value proposition, made navigable.

Designing an identity with empathy

The rebrand followed the same logic as the architecture – starting with a clear picture of how Verité needed to feel to each of its audiences.

The brand character work established something specific: Verité needed to be experienced and authoritative – an organisation with thirty years of hard-won knowledge that speaks with confidence – but also forward-thinking, imaginative, and genuinely caring about the people their work ultimately serves.

The new identity expresses this directly. A new logo, a serif headline font, a deeper, richer colour palette and a new brand voice – intentional, insightful, relatable – all developed from that foundation and documented in a full brand book handed over to Verité’s internal design team. The result is an identity that looks and sounds like the organisation it represents.

Making thirty years of expertise accessible

The resources library was one of the most significant improvements on the previous site. A trade union researcher and a procurement manager are looking for very different things, and the new structure serves both. The full library can be searched and filtered by topic, type, and language. Each resource now has its own landing page, with a visual summary, descriptive content, reference tags and metadata. Every aspect is designed in conformance with WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility standards, ensuring the resources reach the people who need them regardless of how they access the web.

The same logic shaped our approach to Verité’s initiatives. Previously, major programmes were housed on external microsites of varying brand alignment, each requiring significant investment to build. We developed a microsite engine within the site itself: a scalable system that allows Verité to create and publish individual initiative microsites independently, without agency involvement – all while maintaining visual consistency with the core brand.

A platform and team equipped to grow

Verité publishes continuously – resources, initiatives, research, updates – and the platform needed to support that without creating dependency on external support.

The site was designed from the outset as a publishing platform, and handover was treated as seriously as the build. A Notion-based knowledge base, locked reference content, and a programme of training sessions for Verité’s whole team ensured that capability transferred completely. The organisation left the project not just with a new website but with the confidence and tools to run it themselves – and to keep running it as their work grows.

Since launch, average engagement time and engaged sessions per user are both up by more than a quarter. Among users arriving through organic search – the practitioner audience Verité most needs to reach – engaged sessions per active user increased by 40%, and average engagement time grew by over 80%.