Jem

Jem went to market selling earned wage access. It worked. But something else was working better.

A newer product — a mobile payslip and employee communication tool delivered over WhatsApp — was quietly becoming the thing customers valued most. The business had outgrown the box it had put itself in, and had no language for the box it was moving into.

The insight was in who was actually using it. Not office workers. Not HR departments in glass towers. Deskless workers — retail floors, kitchens, warehouses, factories, farms. Roughly 90% of the global workforce, and almost entirely ignored by an HR software industry building for the other 10%.

So we stopped positioning Jem as a product and started positioning it as a category: HR technology built for deskless workers. New name, new identity, new narrative, and a point of view that was both defensible and true.

Roughly a year later, a global incumbent in the category began describing itself the same way.