Building Cleo • 03/27/26

How we built Cleo’s visual world

Behind the scenes of Cleo’s first brand photography shoot, and the futuristic but warm visual language that came out of it.

Two people laughing in a sunlit field, one giving the other a piggyback ride, with a mountain rising in the background.

Utopias aren’t always visually engaging. The smoothness of contentment gets boring fast, and attempts to visualize progress can easily come out as bland as a stock photo.

Cleo’s mission is to change the world’s relationship with money, which means we’re showing people a vision of what life looks like when financial stress has been lifted. For our first brand photography shoot, we wanted to make that financial utopia feel vivid and believable, and to make it interesting enough that viewers want to stay in it.

We did that by building in intentional friction and contrasts. Users know Cleo as funny and personal; she’s the friend who tells you the truth about your spending even when you don’t want to hear it, giving you budgeting tips with empathy and the occasional roast. This shoot aimed to add a sense of sophistication and credibility that could sit alongside Cleo’s playfulness without displacing it.

The vision

This shoot was part of a change in our approach to brand imagery. Although we intentionally use generative AI in some contexts (on TikTok, for instance, where we lean into its weirdness), photography gives us something that AI can’t. For the visual foundation of our brand, we needed the tactility and precision of a human photographer, who can choose specific faces and settings and pivot when something unexpected presents itself.

The aesthetic that emerged started with a vision of a technology-driven future that didn’t look like the tech-company stereotype of cool blue light and metal. Instead, we wanted greenery, earth tones, warm light, and spaces where the built environment and the natural world coexist rather than compete. This led us to Cape Town, South Africa, where we found that contrast already present in the landscape, with concrete brutalist architecture alongside natural elements like green hills and wild grasses.

Three people occupy different levels of a modernist concrete building perched above the ocean at golden hour.

That principle extended to casting and styling, where we prioritized people who looked like they had lives beyond the frame. We wanted to evoke the feeling of a near future that we internally described as 2031, with minimal makeup, natural hairstyles, and clothes that didn’t feel so futuristic that they became costume-adjacent.

And we applied the same thinking to our depictions of Cleo as a product, highlighting outcomes like the social experience of sharing something on your device with another person. Rather than foregrounding screens and UI, we let phones and smartwatches appear throughout the images without always revealing what’s on them, enhancing the screen glow in post-production with subtle tints from Cleo’s interface.

Two people sit together on wide concrete steps at a brutalist monument with towering pointed spires, smiling at something on a phone, while two other figures walk up the staircase behind them.

The shoot

We knew that we needed a photographer who could bridge editorial and commercial sensibilities, with images that felt distinctive and showed craft while still functioning as brand assets. James Perolls’ work immediately stood out. His portfolio had a compositional density that we kept returning to, with layers of activity in the foreground, midground, and background that rewarded sustained attention.

This storytelling quality felt different from typical commercial photography. When James sent back his treatment, with figures sketched on top of reference images to block out how he’d stage our cast in those spaces, it confirmed to us that he could see past a reference to what it might become in Cleo’s world.

Behind-the-scenes shot of a model in a teal dress standing in a golden grass field with Cape Town mountains in the background, framed by silhouetted crew members with camera equipment.

The shoot spanned four locations across two days, with 12- to 14-hour shooting days and sometimes just 15 minutes to nail a setup before the crew needed to move on. Having our in-house creative team on set, rather than working through an external agency, meant we could make decisions in real time. We were able to evaluate a setup, decide whether it was working, and move on, all without external signoff, which enabled us to shoot significantly more than a typical production schedule would allow.

That flexibility also meant we could act on instinct when opportunities emerged. Midway through the second day, a member of our team spotted a field of flowers with mountains rising behind it as we drove between locations. We pulled over immediately, some of us scouting angles while production tracked down the landowner and secured permission that same day. Those images, a product of someone happening to look out the window at the right moment, became some of our favorite shots.

Four people stride through a field of tall grass and wildflowers with mountains behind them, captured mid-movement in warm, low-angled light.

We’re excited to share this photography, and we’re already thinking about what comes next. The visual vocabulary we established in Cape Town gives us a foundation for future campaigns. It’s a visual language that’s flexible enough to tell unique stories for different markets and products, while creating a cohesive world that’s distinctly Cleo.