Claim Central bet nearly $1M that rebranding could cover cracks in their US expansion. They renamed themselves Wilbur, aiming for Wilbur Wright but evoking Charlotte’s Web instead. It became the perfect case of lipstick on a pig: flashy brand identity masking a confused business identity and a product with no real market fit.

TL;DR

• Claim Central: market leader in Australia, unknown in US.
• Core claims platform failed: no Xactware integration.
• TradesPlus worked but fought US market incentives (TPAs did repairs for free).
• Leadership doubled down on buzzwords and a $1M rebranding to Wilbur.
• US audiences thought pig or horse, not innovation → brand confusion.
• Rebranding became lipstick on a pig, hiding deeper flaws: no product-market fit or clear business identity.
• After wasted years, they abandoned the marketplace pivot and circled back to TradesPlus (Wilbur Repair), proving that brand identity without business identity is hollow.

Results at a Glance

📉 $1M+ spent on rebranding to “Wilbur”
📉 Failed marketplace model, never gained traction
📉 Claims platform unsellable in the US
✅ Only traction came from re-licensing TradesPlus (Wilbur Repair) to Eberls

Big Fish, Wrong Ocean

In 2020, right after the pandemic lockdowns, I joined Claim Central Consolidated, an Australian insurtech company that wanted to crack the U.S. market. In Australia, they were a big deal—a market leader with a strong business identity, trusted brand recognition, and true product-market fit.

But in the U.S.? Nobody knew their name.

This was the first crack in the facade. Claim Central’s leadership carried themselves like the same big fish they were back home, but they had just jumped from a small pond into the open ocean. In Australia, they could flex their size and reputation. In the U.S., surrounded by entrenched players and massive incumbents, they were a minnow.

That overconfidence shaped everything. Instead of asking the hard questions—Who are we here? What problem do we solve in this market?—the company assumed its Australian identity would carry across borders. It was ego dressed up as strategy.

The result: a team that believed it was building on a solid foundation when, in reality, the foundation hadn’t even been poured. And when the first real obstacles appeared—like a product that didn’t integrate with U.S. market standards—the cracks widened into chasms.

Business Identity Crisis

It didn’t take long to see that Claim Central’s biggest problem wasn’t brand recognition—it was business identity. In Australia, they knew exactly who they were and what they offered. In the U.S., they never stopped to ask those questions.

The company really had two products when I came on board.

• A claims management platform that, frankly, didn’t work in the U.S. market. If you want to sell claims technology here, you must integrate with Xactware’s Xactimate. It’s the standard. Symbility (now CoreLogic) had a sliver of market share, but Xactware owned the space. Our platform didn’t integrate at all. That made it dead on arrival.
• TradesPlus, a managed repair platform with at least one decent-sized customer. The concept worked, but it swam against the current. In the U.S., carriers had little incentive to bring repair management in-house. Why? Because TPAs (Third-Party Administrators) already handled it—and took their cut from contractor invoices. For carriers, it was essentially free.

Here’s the hard truth: neither product had product-market fit in the U.S.

But instead of recognizing that and redefining their business identity around the reality of this market, leadership leaned into ego. They told themselves the problem wasn’t the product or strategy—it was awareness. In other words, if people just knew the name, sales would follow.

That assumption set the stage for one of the most expensive cases of lipstick on a pig I’ve ever witnessed.

Rebranding as a Smokescreen

When the products failed to gain traction, leadership didn’t ask why. They didn’t re-examine their business identity or confront the lack of product-market fit. Instead, they reached for a shiny distraction: rebranding.

The plan came with a leadership shuffle—new managing director, new director of product, and a new vision. Their big idea? Turn Claim Central into a “marketplace.” It was a buzzword-heavy pivot, the kind of strategy that sounded great in a boardroom. Never mind that even Guidewire, the world’s largest claims platform, had struggled to pull off the same model.

And then came the million-dollar makeover. An Australian agency was hired to lead a full-scale rebrand. After months of work and nearly $1M spent, the big reveal arrived:

We were now Wilbur.

The logic, I was told, was noble—Wilbur Wright, innovation, flight, forward motion. The problem? This was the U.S. market. Here, “Wilbur” brought two things to mind:

1. Wilbur the pig from Charlotte’s Web 🐷
2. The horse on Mr. Ed yelling, “Wilbur!” 🐴

Not exactly the innovation story we were hoping to tell.

I even suggested tying the brand to its intended inspiration with imagery of the Wright Flyer, something to help U.S. audiences connect the dots. Instead, leadership chose a modern, abstract design—shapes and symbols that said nothing about who we were.

So instead of clarity, we got confusion. Instead of traction, we got blank stares. The rebrand didn’t solve the identity crisis; it just painted over it.

It was the perfect case of lipstick on a pig—and unfortunately, the pig’s name was Wilbur.

When Brand Identity Can’t Replace Product-Market Fit

The Wilbur rebrand made a splash internally, but outside our walls? Nothing changed. Insurance carriers didn’t suddenly forget that the claims platform didn’t integrate with Xactware. They didn’t stop leaning on TPAs just because we had a new logo.

That’s the trap so many companies fall into: mistaking brand identity for business identity, and hoping a new coat of paint will fix structural cracks. But rebranding can’t create product-market fit. It can only amplify what’s already real.

And in Claim Central’s case, the rebrand ironically did amplify something—it amplified the confusion. The name “Wilbur” puzzled the market in the same way the company puzzled itself. The branding misfire became a mirror of the bigger problem: a leadership team that wasn’t aligned on who they were, what they solved, or how they fit into the U.S. market. Some leaders recognized the disconnect, but it wasn’t enough to change course.

Customers aren’t fooled by hype. They buy solutions that solve their problems, fit their workflows, and make their lives easier. And if you’re fighting against entrenched incentives—as TradesPlus did against the TPA model—you’re not just selling software, you’re asking the entire market to change how it works. That’s not a branding problem. That’s a business identity and product-market fit problem.

In the end, the Wilbur rebrand didn’t just fail to move the needle—it highlighted the gap between perception and reality. The more leadership leaned on brand identity, the more obvious it became that the foundation was missing.

The Ironic Ending

After all the pivots, buzzwords, and branding exercises, reality eventually caught up. The marketplace vision fizzled. The claims management platform stalled without Xactware integration. And the big, expensive Wilbur rebrand—instead of clarifying who we were—had only spotlighted the confusion.

In the end, Claim Central circled back to the one product that had at least worked: TradesPlus. Only now, it carried the Wilbur name—reintroduced as Wilbur Repair.

The real breakthrough wasn’t the rebrand. It was a shift in market focus. By licensing Wilbur Repair to Eberls, one of the largest independent adjusting firms in the U.S., the company finally found a path to product-market fit.

Why? Because unlike carriers, independent adjusters (IAs) had incentive to adopt the platform. They could share in the revenue from repairs, making the economics attractive. And since Eberls was already established with a large base of carrier customers, they could position Wilbur Repair as a value-added service alongside their core offering.

In other words, traction finally came not from rebranding or marketing hype, but from aligning the product with the right customer segment.

The lesson was hard but obvious: rebranding can’t fix a misaligned business identity or create product-market fit. All it can do is magnify what’s already there. For Claim Central, that meant years of confusion, wasted resources, and a pig named Wilbur—until the market forced them back to a product and a segment that actually worked.

Closing Thoughts

Claim Central’s U.S. expansion is a cautionary tale that every founder should take to heart. Brand identity matters—but only as an amplifier. Without clarity of business identity and alignment with product-market fit, brand work becomes little more than lipstick on a pig.

That’s exactly what happened here. The Wilbur rebrand didn’t clarify the company’s story—it accidentally highlighted the confusion that already existed. Customers weren’t buying a new name or a shiny logo; they were buying a solution that fit their workflows and incentives. And until Claim Central shifted focus and licensed Wilbur Repair to Eberls, they didn’t have one.

The irony is that when they finally stopped trying to sell the wrong product to the wrong customer, they found traction. Not because of the rebrand, but because they aligned their business identity with a market segment that actually had something to gain. That’s what product-market fit really means.

The takeaway? Don’t confuse branding with strategy. Rebranding can polish what’s already there, but it can’t paper over structural cracks. Get the foundation right—business identity and product-market fit—and only then will your brand identity have something real to amplify.

🔗 For a deeper dive into the fundamentals, see my guides on brand identity and business identity.

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