Neupulse. A new name, a brand and a first website for a Nottingham spin-out.

In January 2021, Nottingham Technology Ventures, the University of Nottingham’s company for spin-outs and a client of ours, introduced us to a new company it was backing. It was registered as Neurotherapeutics Solutions Limited, and its brief asked for a brand, a website and the address neurotherapeutics.com.

The science behind it was serious: twenty years of research by Professors Stephen and Georgina Jackson into the brain networks involved in Tourette syndrome, and a team developing a wrist-worn device and an app. The name, though, was a mouthful, and we said so in our proposal:

The .com belonged to someone else anyway. Our first thought was a product name such as TicTracker, but we flagged the catch ourselves: if the company made more than one product, a name about tics would hold it back. At the kick-off meeting in September 2021 we heard the plan was to look beyond Tourette’s to other brain health conditions, so the name had to leave room to grow.

We ran the naming in a shared Google Doc, so the team could see every idea and add their own. It started with a few rules:

• Don’t go too narrow: a name about tics would limit what comes next
• Lean on “neuro” and its shorter forms, neura and neu, rather than “therapeutics”, which could mean almost anything
• No “solutions” or “tech”
• An unusual spelling can help a brand, and is easier to register
• Pulse is a good suffix!

Then the homework. We looked at more than forty companies already working in the “neuro” space, from Neuralink to Flow Neuroscience, and built a word bank from the company’s own science: stimulation, oscillation, rhythm, phase, pulse. From that came a long list of 116 names, each checked for web addresses, trade marks and businesses already using it. Plenty fell at that hurdle: Neuropulse and Cortex were taken, Neuriln turned out to be a medicine and Neurall a sports drink.

On 5 October we sent the first logo sheet: twelve names set as wordmarks beside four ideas for a symbol, with Neupulse at the top. The board met two days later and picked a shortlist. We checked every name on it, and a few more, for web addresses and trade marks:

1. NeuroStimWeb address and a UK trade mark taken
2. NStimA US company in the same field
3. NeuraAlready used by several companies
4. NeulifeWeb address taken
5. NeuStimAn early favourite, but trade-marked
6. NeuraStimMade the final five
7. NeuChoiceMade the final five
8. NeuControlMade the final five. “Maybe a little Orwellian?”
9. NeupulseChosen on 14 October 2021. We registered neupulse.co.uk the same afternoon.

It was our choice too. Neu comes from neuro, neuron and new. A pulse is what the device gives: gentle, rhythmic pulses at the wrist. And the word is short, easy to say and spell, and not tied to tics, so it can grow with the company. Neurotherapeutics stayed on as the company’s legal name; Neupulse became the name everyone sees.

The symbol came straight out of the name: a pulse line, like the trace on a monitor, stepping up, down and up again so that it draws an N inside a teal circle. The board was split at first between the circle and the line on its own, and chose the circle. In the wordmark, NEU is heavy and PULSE lighter and widely spaced, so the name reads as its two halves.

We drew it to work small and in a single colour, and supplied every version as files for screen and print: full colour, white for dark backgrounds and photos, white with a teal pulse, and the symbol on its own. In January 2022 the name was registered as a trade mark in the EU, and the ® went on.

Before there was a product, there was a prototype. The device used in the 2022 clinical trial was a black wrist unit with a hand-and-arrow symbol on its face and two gel pads underneath, kept in a carry case with spares. Neupulse sent us these photos of it in March 2022, as we were finishing their first website.

In January 2023 Lewis Capaldi came to the Neupulse office in Nottingham to try the device, with one of the banner stands we designed in the background. From there it was designed with Ensera Design (formerly Kinneir Dufort) and refined over four years into Neupulse C, shipping since June 2026.

Next came everything the team hands over or sends out. On the business cards the logo has one side to itself, and a QR code sits with the name and details on the other, where it doesn’t compete with the logo. Paper samples went to Nottingham so the team could feel the card before it was printed.

There are two letterheads in Word, with and without the angled teal graphic. The graphic only appears on the first page, so letters can start higher on the pages after; Word’s own headers take care of that, so nobody has to think about it. And a PowerPoint template, with a “Flexible Layout” slide for busy content, which we walked the team through in a short video.

Four years later, when Neupulse’s new e-commerce lead needed business cards, the request came to us: “People keep pointing me in your direction.”

Neupulse spends a lot of time in front of people, at conferences, community events and awards. For its stand we designed two roller banners in 2022, each 85 by 200 cm: one for scientists and clinicians, one for everybody else. We designed a printed tablecloth to match, and arranged the printing of the banners.

The scientific banner leads with the research, with brain scans comparing stimulation with a sham. The other explains the wrist device and the app in a few plain words, with a QR code to the website. A banner is read from across a hall, so each one has a single job and big type.

In 2025, with a conference coming up in May, the team asked for fresh banners. We redrew the artwork for two new ones and added tracking to their QR codes, so the team could see how many people scanned them.

The website was planned in the same shared document as the name, with every page’s words in one place, written with the team and the scientists. Our brief for ourselves: plain words rather than jargon, real people in the photos, and only a hint of the brain imagery every “neuro” company uses.

We built it in WordPress over the winter, and it went live in spring 2022 at neupulse.co.uk. It had pages for the science, the app and the wrist device, the team, questions and answers, and research papers, a “Stay updated” sign-up linked to the team’s HubSpot, and a news section. More than thirty stories went up by the end of 2024, from awards and the clinical trial to funding rounds and features on BBC Radio 4 and Channel 5.

We looked after the site for three years, adding pages, people and news as the company grew.

By 2025 Neupulse was getting ready to sell its device directly, with subscriptions and an app that needed to work with the shop. Its new e-commerce lead weighed up the options, chose Shopify and rebuilt the site there. We agreed it was the right choice: Shopify handles the e-commerce side, from payments and stock to deliveries and customer accounts, which leaves the team free to concentrate on the product.

Our part was the move. A change of address is where a website can lose years of search rankings, so we went through every page and news story on the old site and sent each one to its new home on neupulse.co with a permanent redirect: 55 of them. We kept the old address running to do the redirecting, the team told Google about the move in Search Console, as we’d advised, and we then handed the domains, analytics and social media accounts over to Neupulse’s own team.

Neupulse makes the news, and it deserves to: it’s a remarkable device, and we think it will change a lot of lives. Over the last few years it has been on BBC Breakfast, Sky News, ITV and Channel 5, in an American TV series, and in a BAFTA-winning film.

The film was the surprise. I Swear, the 2025 film about the Tourette’s campaigner John Davidson, ends in a Nottingham lab, with John trying the wrist device in its 2022 clinical trial and the researcher Bàrbara Morera Màiquez running it. For us, seeing the device turn up in a BAFTA-winning film was a strange and lovely moment.