Tomato
From a cheap telco to an unignorable challenger brand.
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The Challenge
Tomato is the value brand inside A1 Hrvatska, Croatia’s largest telco. The product is genuinely different — no contracts, no confusing tariffs, no fine print, and a flexible unit system where talk, texts, and data all draw from one pot. Two decades in, none of that was remembered. In people’s minds, Tomato had shrunk to a single word: cheap.
A1 came to us in 2025 with a small brief — refresh the mobile experience around the new tariff model. But the deeper we looked, the clearer it got: there was no point polishing the screens while the brand underneath was having an identity crisis.
Our Solution
A full brand transformation, built on one insight already sitting in Tomato’s own history. The name comes from a form of protest — throwing tomatoes at what isn’t working. And a mobile industry built on contracts and conditions designed for telcos rather than the people paying for them was exactly that.
So we stopped fighting for the “cheapest” label and gave Tomato a reason to exist: the telco for people who want mobile on their own terms. The work went end-to-end — strategy, positioning, identity, motion, and the launch campaign. Our engineering colleagues at Infinum rewrote the Tomato app alongside us, so product, brand, and experience finally told one story.
The Outcomes
A1 came for a refresh and stayed for a relaunch — the scope grew as the work earned trust. The new brand drew strong industry feedback, and A1's Head of Brand called it a chance to take a 20-year-old brand and rethink it 360, not just refresh it.- Brand Strategy
- Brand Audit
- Positioning
- Messaging & Tone of Voice
- Creative Direction
- Visual & Motion Identity
- Brand Guidelines
- Campaign & Launch Toolkit
Tomato is the value brand of A1 Hrvatska, Croatia's leading telco. Its promise is simple: the best price on the market, with none of the usual catches. No contracts. No tariff maze. No fine print.
The product backs it up. One unit covers a text, a minute of talk, or a chunk of data, and people spend them however they like — tomayto, tomahto. A system that bends to the customer instead of the other way around.
Infinum and A1 have been partners for 20 years, and together built both the Moj A1 and Moj Tomato apps. When A1 came back in 2025, the ask was about the app: reflect the new tariff model and let people self-serve. But a genuinely different product had been flattened, in the public mind, to one idea — cheap. New screens wouldn’t fix that. The brand had to.
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A category that all looks the same
Walk the telco aisle and everything blurs. The same corporate blues, the same polished promises, the same careful language. Tomato had been swept into that sameness from the wrong end of it — the low-cost fallback, not a brand anyone picked on purpose, least of all the younger, savvier audience A1 wanted.
We started where the evidence was. Reviewing A1’s existing research and adding our own, the picture came back clear: Tomato was a last resort people reached for on price alone.
The same research handed us the opening. A growing audience was already out there and already aligned with what Tomato offered. We called them smart shoppers — defined by attitude, not age or income. They want the option that makes the most sense for their life, and price is only one part of that. Repositioning Tomato meant walking away from "cheap" and planting a flag in smart value that fits your week.
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Rebel with a cause
Tomato’s product was already a quiet act of rebellion. No lock-in, no nasty surprises, a unit system that bends to your week. Even the name carries it — throwing tomatoes is how audiences have heckled what they won't accept for centuries. The fight was in the brand's DNA. It had just been forgotten.
So we built the strategy on it, against one sharp belief: the mobile industry is broken. It runs on contracts, conditions, and plans built for telcos.
Tomato exists to flip that — giving people the freedom to live on their own terms, change their plan whenever, and stop worrying about what's buried in the small print. To make that usable across every touchpoint, from a billboard to a push notification, we defined five brand pillars that shape how Tomato thinks, speaks, and behaves.
“The initial response has been very encouraging. Industry feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, and one of the most telling signals is that people are actually stopping to notice our ads and taking the time to read and engage with them. In today’s fast-paced media environment, that is a strong indicator that the new Tomato is resonating.”
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Ana Ključević
Marketing Communications Expert, A1 Hrvatska
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Saucy by Nature
The new proposition needed a look as loud as its attitude. We called the creative direction Saucy by Nature — proud, unpolished, a little unhinged. Every decision traces back to two sources: the physical world of the tomato, and the anti-corporate streak at the heart of the brand.
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The rallying type
Tomato's primary typeface is the kind you'd scrawl on a placard at a protest. We worked with foundry Pangram Pangram to cut a bespoke version of Agrandir — heavier, louder, unmistakably Tomato.
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When life gives you tomatoes, make a colour palette
The palette is built from real tomato varieties: Kumato, Roma, Valencia, Lemon, Tomatillo. Roma red anchors everything; the rest brings the heat.
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Stickers, splats, and deliberately imperfect icons
A few devices carry the brand's irreverence:
- Stickers — inspired by DIY culture and fruit labels, slapped over other elements with short, cheeky lines, as if stuck there after the fact.
- Iconography — big, characterful, deliberately a little wonky, where a major telco reaches for clean geometry.
- Splat 2.0 — Tomato's original splat read like a scientific diagram, so we rebuilt it into a system with real logic: each splat is a tomato caught at a different stage of hitting a wall.
All motion runs at 12fps for a raw, stop-motion feel — a small, deliberate jab at the smooth, over-polished look every big telco defaults to.
“Bold is having the conviction to express an idea without apologising for it, and for Tomato, loud was simply the most honest expression of that conviction. The louder a visual system becomes, the more disciplined it has to be across every touchpoint.”
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Joost Huver
Design Director, Your Majesty
AI imagery with a face you’d remember
Every telco reaches for the same forgettable stock photography. We went the other way and used AI to generate surreal, slightly-off imagery — the kind that makes someone look twice. It paid off in production too: what a studio would shoot in a month, we delivered in two days.
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“AI gave us the freedom to explore unexpected compositions and textures, putting a tomato in all kinds of environments — and helping us build a world around the brand that feels fresh, memorable, and ownable.”
Ana Ključević
Marketing Communications Expert, A1 Hrvatska
One story, end to end
A brand this confident only works if the product delivers the same promise. While we rebuilt the brand, our engineering colleagues at Infinum rewrote and redesigned the Moj Tomato app from the ground up — server-driven, so A1’s team can change content, pricing, and promotions without shipping a release- and built on a modular, brand-agnostic system that flexes as Tomato grows.
The result is one coherent story. Product, brand, and app now say the same thing: mobile that works on your terms, with zero corporate nonsense and nothing hidden in the fine print.
Outcomes
What began as a mobile refresh grew into a full brand revolution. Infinum and A1 Hrvatska continue the partnership — nurturing both the brand and the app — with one shared ambition: for Tomato to help shape its category rather than just compete in it.
Work with us
Curious about how your company could go from ignored to unignorable?
Book a free intake with one of our principals.
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