Volta Electric
Built for buildings that last.
When Volta Electric closed their Series A, they had a €12M mandate, 47 charge points across the Oslo metro area, and a website that looked like it had been assembled in a weekend by someone who had just discovered Webflow.
The design was not bad, exactly. It was simply invisible — indistinguishable from every other Nordic SaaS product launched between 2020 and 2023. Inter font, teal accent, a hero section with a stock photo of a man gesturing at a laptop, three feature cards with icons from Heroicons. The messaging was product-first and literal: here is a charger, here is an app, here is a price.
The problem was the audience. Volta was selling to property developers managing portfolios worth hundreds of millions of kroner. These were people who spent their days evaluating contractors, infrastructure partners, and long-term capital commitments. When they did their due diligence on Volta — and they always did — what they found was a website that read as a startup finding its feet. The gap between the pitch deck and the website was visible and it mattered. Three separate investors flagged the website as a concern during funding conversations before the round closed. The CEO, Erik Solberg, knew what the problem was before we spoke. He just needed a team who could solve it.
The brief was clean: make the site worthy of the company. Everything else was ours to figure out.
Company: Volta Electric
Founded: 2021
Location: Oslo, Norway
Industry: EV Charging Infrastructure / B2B SaaS
Stage: Series A (€12M)
Customers: Property developers, building managers, commercial real estate operators
Volta Electric installs and operates fast-charging networks inside apartment buildings and commercial properties. Their customers are not individual drivers — they are the people who own and manage the buildings those drivers live and work in. It's a B2B infrastructure play, and the platform behind the hardware — real-time usage analytics, automated billing, tenant onboarding — is what makes Volta genuinely different from a company that just installs cables.
Brand personality: Precise. Authoritative. Forward-built.
Services
- Positioning & Messaging
- Design System
- Data Visualisation Design
- Website Design
- SvelteKit Development
- Motion Design
- Interactive ROI Calculator
- Mapbox Integration
- Phase 01
Positioning & Messaging
The first thing we did was stop talking about the hardware.
Volta's chargers are good — robust, fast, CE-certified, IP65-rated. But hardware is table stakes. Every competitor has hardware. What Volta had that competitors didn't was a software layer that gave property managers something genuinely useful: a live dashboard showing charging utilisation by unit, automated billing routed directly to tenant accounts, and a frictionless onboarding flow that meant a new resident could activate their charging access in under four minutes. The cable was the commodity. The platform was the product.
We spent two weeks on positioning before touching a single design file. We interviewed six of Volta's existing property clients, mapped their decision criteria, and identified where Volta consistently won deals. The answer was always the same: certainty. Property managers chose Volta because they believed Volta would still be there in ten years — maintaining the network, handling the billing disputes, updating the software. The hardware was a given. The partnership was the differentiator.
From this, we developed a new messaging hierarchy anchored on the idea of infrastructure confidence. The new tagline — Built for buildings that last — was designed to speak directly to the long-term, risk-averse mindset of a property developer while signalling that Volta was not a startup experiment but a permanent piece of the building's infrastructure stack.
We also built a full messaging matrix: primary claims, proof points, objection responses, and tone guidelines. This document became the reference for every line of copy on the site.
- Phase 02
Design System
The aesthetic brief was non-negotiable: this needed to feel engineered.
We anchored the system in Swiss International Typographic Style — Müller-Brockmann discipline applied to a digital product. Dark background (
#0b0d11, a cool near-black with a slight blue undertone), electric green accent (#00e87a) used exclusively for live data, states, and primary actions. Three greys for structural hierarchy. Off-white (#f0f0f0) for body text. No gradients. No decorative elements. No photography of people.Typography: Helvetica Neue exclusively. This was a deliberate, somewhat confrontational choice, and we stand by it. Helvetica carries weight. It is the font of airport signage, Swiss federal documents, and American Apparel. It communicates that whoever chose it was confident enough not to reach for something more interesting. For a company asking property developers to trust them with their building's infrastructure, that confidence reads correctly.
The type scale runs from 11px (data labels, table headers) to 96px (hero statistics), with nothing in between that doesn't earn its place. Grid: 8-column desktop layout, strict 8px baseline grid. Every component snaps. Nothing floats.
We built a full design token set: colour, typography, spacing, radius (none — no border radius anywhere), shadow (none), and a separate data visualisation token set covering chart colours, sparkline stroke weights, and table typography.
- Phase 03
Data Design
Volta had real data. Thousands of charging sessions, uptime records going back eighteen months, kWh delivered across the network. Most companies in their position would bury this in a PDF on the press page. We made it the centrepiece of the website.
The central section of the site — positioned between the hero and the case studies — is a live-ish dashboard displaying anonymised, aggregated real network statistics. It is not decorative. It is evidence. A property developer looking at that section sees: 99.3% network uptime. 847 charging sessions this week. 12,400 kWh delivered in the last 30 days. These are not projections. They are operational metrics from a running network.
We designed six data components for this section:
1. Utilisation heatmap — a 7-day × 24-hour grid showing charging demand by hour, rendered in three green intensities against the dark background. Precise. Readable. Visually distinctive. 2. Uptime sparklines — per-station uptime over a rolling 90-day window, rendered as hairline charts in a compact card grid. 3. Network map — all 47 charge points plotted on a minimal Mapbox basemap in dark mode, with cluster indicators and individual station tooltips. 4. Stat blocks — large-format KPI display: four metrics, one per card, counter-animated on scroll. 5. Comparison table — Volta vs. typical property installation: uptime, billing automation, onboarding time, maintenance response. Typography-only, no icons, no colour except green for Volta's column. 6. ROI calculator — the most important component on the page.
- Phase 04
Website Design & Build
The site is built in SvelteKit. We chose it for its performance characteristics, the quality of its animation primitives, and because the Volta engineering team — who would own the codebase post-handoff — were already familiar with the framework.
Key technical decisions:
Lenis smooth scroll throughout, tuned to feel deliberate rather than floaty. The site does not bounce. It moves with the same measured pace as the design system.
GSAP for stat counter animations. When a stat block enters the viewport, the numbers count up from zero to their current value over 1.2 seconds with an easeOut curve. This is a small effect. It works because the numbers themselves are meaningful — when you watch the counter reach 99.3%, you feel what that number represents.
The ROI calculator is the primary conversion tool on the site. A property manager inputs two variables — building size in square metres and resident count — and receives a monthly revenue projection based on Volta's actual network utilisation data. The output includes a breakdown: expected monthly charging sessions, projected kWh delivered, net revenue after Volta's platform fee, and a payback period for the installation cost. The calculator is not a gimmick. It is a sales tool built to the precision of a financial model, and it shows. Average time on the calculator in the first 60 days post-launch: 3 minutes 40 seconds.
Case study pages for three existing property clients (anonymised by building type: urban residential tower, suburban mixed-use, commercial office park), each following a consistent data-forward template.
The interactive network map (Mapbox, dark basemap) showing all 47 current charge points with real addresses, station types, and a toggle to view planned 2024 expansions.
- Phase 05
Results
The site launched in Q3 2023.
Within 60 days: demo requests up 280%. The sales team reported that inbound prospects were arriving to calls having already used the ROI calculator — they had done their own analysis before speaking to anyone at Volta. Two enterprise deals — a 340-unit residential development in Stavanger and a commercial park in Lysaker — were directly attributed to the website by the sales team. In both cases, the prospects cited the data dashboard and the ROI calculator as the reasons they reached out.
The site was recognised at the Nordic Startup Awards as Best B2B Digital Experience 2023.
- 01 Positioning document and competitive landscape analysis
- 02 Messaging matrix (primary claims, proof points, objection handling, tone guidelines)
- 03 Design system (Figma) — tokens, components, documentation
- 04 Data component library — 6 components with responsive variants and animation specs
- 05 ROI calculator — designed, built, and documented
- 06 Interactive network map — Mapbox integration with custom dark basemap
- 07 Website — SvelteKit, fully responsive, accessible (WCAG AA)
- 08 Motion specification document — all animation timings, curves, and trigger conditions
- 09 Handoff documentation for Volta's internal engineering team
Leading with data, not features.
Most SaaS websites lead with features because features are easy to describe and easy to illustrate. We led with data because data is evidence. The dashboard section communicates something that a feature list cannot: this network is running, right now, at high performance, at scale. For a risk-averse property developer evaluating a long-term infrastructure partner, evidence beats description every time. The decision to put operational metrics in the hero section of the page was the single most important design choice we made.
Helvetica Neue, exclusively.
We considered Suisse Int'l, ABC Diatype, and a handful of other contemporary grotesques. All of them would have been fine — technically competent, aesthetically current. We chose Helvetica because it carries a different kind of authority. It is not trying to be interesting. It is trying to be correct. For a company whose product is the invisible infrastructure underneath a building, a typeface that makes no attempt to charm is exactly right.
The ROI calculator as the primary CTA.
Conventional thinking would place a "Book a Demo" button as the primary call to action. We pushed the ROI calculator above the fold instead, on the grounds that a property developer who has already calculated their projected return is a fundamentally different prospect than one who has not. The calculator does pre-sales work at scale. It filters for serious buyers. It starts the commercial conversation before a human being has to.
No photography.
There are no photographs anywhere on the site — no people, no hardware, no lifestyle imagery. Everything is typography, data, and the network map. This was partly aesthetic (photography would have softened the precision of the design system) and partly strategic (stock photography of EV chargers looks like every other EV charger website). The absence of photography is itself a statement: this company has the confidence to show you the numbers instead of the mood board.
We were walking into meetings with property groups managing billion-kroner portfolios and then sending them to a website that looked like a student project. The gap was embarrassing, and I knew it was costing us deals. What Hjortsholm built wasn't just a better-looking site — it was a sales tool. The ROI calculator alone has shortened our average sales cycle by three weeks. We had an investor from our Series A reach out after the launch just to say the site finally matched the company. That's the one that stuck with me.
See the website in full.
A faithful in-browser recreation of the Volta Electric site as launched.
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