Member-only story

Rivian: A Masterclass in Brand Narrative

Rei Inamoto
UX Collective
Published in
4 min readDec 20, 2021

Just a few weeks ago, we witnessed a company with almost no revenue become one of the most valuable brands in the world literally over night.

It managed to do so with one word: “Forever.”

The top 4 automakers in the world by their market capitalizations

Rivian went public on Nov 10, 2021. Three days after its IPO, Rivian’s valuation was $127.3 billion. A week later, it reached $140 billion, surpassing VW at $137 billion. This has made Rivian the №3 car manufacturer in the world behind Toyota ($306 billion) and Tesla ($1 trillion).

To be fair, this wasn’t an overnight success, nor was it the result of one word. It was over a decade in the making and thousands of people and their hard work. On top of that, there must have been countless efforts we the public don’t see, including what must have been a carefully orchestrated road show to lure investors prior to the IPO.

Rivian as a company was founded in 2009. It took almost 11 years for Rivian to ship the first production of R1T, an electric truck and its first consumer product to roll off the assembly line on Sept 14, 2021.

Recently, my business partner at I&CO made an observation on Rivian’s website: It doesn’t show any…

Written by Rei Inamoto

A designer by trade, a minimalist at heart. Founding Partner of I&CO. Named in “Creativity 50,” “The Top 25 Most Creative People in Advertising.”

Responses (5)

Write a response

It has all the elements of a scam, and probably is. Or if it's not a scam, definitely an investment bubble. Which is, by definition, a scam.

Regardless of what state Rivian is in currently, they've done something no other other company has. They've made me want to purchase a pickup.

Agreed that the narrative is better than other automotive companies, but so far, since launch, rivian’s shares have only gone down to half. It is try it’s been a challenging year. So Jury is still out on this one.