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When an academic project starts becoming a company, the way you talk about it has to change too.
ABOUT
Versive was coming out of academia with something genuinely different: a wheelchair built on a new steering mechanism, based on leaning. The technology worked, and the team knew it cold. But as the company grew - new hires, new conversations with customers, suppliers, partners, investors - the language around it stayed scientific. Everyone agreed on what Versive was building. Fewer people agreed on how to say it.
As co-founder Reto put it: "We realised there are so many different ways to talk about it and we needed to sort of clarify and distill."
As co-founder Reto put it: "We realised there are so many different ways to talk about it and we needed to sort of clarify and distill."
The problem
The insight
A conversation with a supplier isn't a conversation with an investor. Context and emphasis shift constantly, and that's exactly where a technical company loses the thread. Reto called it getting "lost in the situational, context-specific language." Versive didn't need a different story for every audience, it needed one story that could stretch without changing underneath.
The promise
We stepped back "half a meter," in Reto's words - far enough from the technology to see the shape of the whole thing.
The work wasn't about inventing a new story. It was sorting through what Versive already knew - the technology, the user experience, the research, the existing language, and finding what actually connected it.
That surfaced a shift already latent in the company:
Instead of opening with the steering mechanism, the narrative could open with the experience of moving through the world - explaining why it matters, not just what the chair does.
The work wasn't about inventing a new story. It was sorting through what Versive already knew - the technology, the user experience, the research, the existing language, and finding what actually connected it.
That surfaced a shift already latent in the company:
- less effort → more flow
- restriction → freedom
- technical performance → human experience
Instead of opening with the steering mechanism, the narrative could open with the experience of moving through the world - explaining why it matters, not just what the chair does.
The transformation
The result was a narrative playbook: a shared foundation for how the whole company communicates. Not a document to copy-paste, but a way of thinking - value proposition, four messaging pillars, story structure, audience, tone, and simple working rules the team could actually use.
As Reto put it: "Now we have really good, really good sort of simple steps on how to move away from the scientific language to something emotional."
One month in, Versive had the playbook live in Notion as a company-wide reference and were using it to train their tone-of-voice AI agent, so the system could help the wider team stay consistent without founders rewriting every message by hand.
As Reto put it: "Now we have really good, really good sort of simple steps on how to move away from the scientific language to something emotional."
One month in, Versive had the playbook live in Notion as a company-wide reference and were using it to train their tone-of-voice AI agent, so the system could help the wider team stay consistent without founders rewriting every message by hand.
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narrative diagnostics
narrative diagnostics
IN RETO'S WORDS
Short film about our company. Moroccan ceramics are known for their vivid hand-painted designs, it’s hard not to get lured into those mesmerizing whirlpools of color.
We're a Zurich-based narrative studio for technical founders whose product is ready before their story is. We don't invent a story - we extract the one that's already true and turn it into a system your team can use.
ABOUT US
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