crypto had a look, and it was a rut
Flashback to 2024. Almost every crypto project looked the same. Cyberpunk, neon, dark-mode-only, edgy for the sake of it, and barely usable.
There was a reason. The aesthetic was inherited from crypto's early days, when it was a niche built by and for a very specific kind of person: deeply technical, anti-establishment, fluent in code, suspicious of anything that looked too polished. The look matched the crowd.
But by 2024 the crowd had changed. Crypto had gone mainstream, a flood of new users and builders who'd never touched the early scene. The builders, unsure what to do, just ran the old playbook. So you got a sea of projects that all looked like someone's idea of what a crypto project is supposed to look like.
The loudest conversation that year was usability. Most of these apps were unusable for the "next billion users" everyone kept talking about. So at Garden, we went the other way.
the bet was wholesome
We wanted a brand an amateur could walk into without feeling stupid, and that a veteran would find a relief after all the noise.
The word we kept coming back to was wholesome.
Crypto is FOMO, volatility, intensity. We wanted Garden to feel like the opposite. Calm, reassuring, a walk in the park. That's the whole reason for the name. Using Garden should feel like stepping outside, not refreshing a chart at 3am.
That one word became the filter for everything. Landing page, the app, graphics, social copy, announcements, video style, campaigns. If it wasn't wholesome and a little understated, it didn't ship.
seasons
The clearest example was our first incentive program. Most projects run these as a grind: points, leaderboards, pressure. We themed ours around nature and called it Seasons.
Each campaign was a season. Snowman for winter. Harvest, timed to the harvest season in India. Blossom, around the time Japan blooms. Calm seasonal visuals, cute characters, copy to match. An incentive program that felt like a change of weather instead of a treadmill.
2025: show your face
Crypto runs on anon. Pseudonyms, cartoon avatars, faceless brands. In 2025 we made a bet: do the opposite. Show real people. Go in real life. Stand out by being human in a space that mostly isn't.
We started with IRL-shot launch videos for our co-marketing campaigns. They hit. One peaked at 200k impressions, and the style basically put us on the map. For a while, plenty of people knew Garden purely from these videos.
We did the same with events. Instead of the default mixer-and-badges format, we ran things people actually wanted to show up to. Morning runs in Singapore and Bangkok. A poker night. A hawker centre crawl in Singapore.
Then crypto caught up. Runs, wellness sessions, and curated little experiences slowly became the conference norm, replacing the mixers we'd been standing out against. The run club we started is still going on Strava.
what it added up to
Over the trailing year Garden did 1M+ impressions on X, with a single post peaking around 200k. But the real payoff was top-of-funnel. We stood out, and people knew us.
Walk into a conference, say "Garden," and you'd hear it back. They remembered the videos on X, or they just thought the brand was cool, different, nice to look at. In a category where everything blurs together, being the one people can describe is most of the battle.
Brand is the hardest thing in marketing to put a clean number on, and I won't pretend otherwise. But when the field starts copying the format you built, and strangers describe you in the words you'd have picked yourself, something worked.
what i'd take anywhere
When everyone in a market looks the same, looking the same is the risk, not the safe choice.
The move was to find the honest opposite of the category's default. Wholesome against the FOMO, faces against the anon. Then commit to it everywhere until it became the thing people remembered. That's not a crypto trick. It's what you do for any brand drowning in a sea of sameness.