Insulet Brand Guidelines: A Napkin Sketch, Acton 2000 & the Tubeless Omnipod

A patch pump with no tube.

Insulet was founded in Massachusetts in 2000 by the entrepreneur John L. Brooks III, the local newspaper The Acton Exchange reported in June 2025. The company tells its beginning as a sketch: Brooks and a business partner, it says, scribbled ideas for a disposable insulin-delivery system on a napkin during a five-hour flight. That idea became the Omnipod, which Insulet describes as a tubeless, wearable, disposable insulin Pod.

The idea was a patch pump. As The Acton Exchange described it, the insulin pumps of the time used tubing, and Brooks set out to make an adhesive patch, worn on the body, that delivers insulin through a thin cannula under the skin, with no tube in between. Insulet says each Pod provides up to three days of insulin delivery before it is replaced. The company also says Brooks is a former president, chief executive and chairman of the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston, and that he returned to its Acton headquarters in 2025 for its 25th-anniversary celebrations.

Insulet is listed on Nasdaq under the ticker PODD. The Omnipod developed through several generations. Drug Delivery Business News reported in September 2019 that the Omnipod DASH, with a Bluetooth-enabled Pod and a touch-screen handheld controller, had received FDA 510(k) clearance in June 2018 and launched in early 2019, and that the FDA had now also cleared it to communicate with compatible devices. The same report noted the launch of the Omnipod Display and Omnipod View apps for the iPhone. From July 2018, Insulet says, it took over distribution of Omnipod in Europe itself, including sales, marketing, training and customer support.

From a handheld controller to a phone.

The Omnipod 5 is an automated insulin-delivery system: the Pod pairs with a continuous glucose monitor and adjusts insulin delivery itself. Drug Delivery Business News described its SmartAdjust technology as using sensor readings to predict glucose 60 minutes ahead, then increasing, decreasing or pausing insulin towards a target the user sets. Insulet calls it a wearable, automated system controlled by a phone. It was cleared by the FDA in 2022 for people with type 1 diabetes aged two and over, according to The Acton Exchange and Drug Delivery Business News.

The indications have widened since. On 26 August 2024 Drug Delivery Business News reported FDA clearance of Omnipod 5 for adults aged 18 and over with type 2 diabetes. The same report named the sensors that work with it — Abbott’s FreeStyle Libre 2 Plus and Dexcom’s G7 — and mentioned Omnipod GO, a basal-only Pod cleared for people with type 2 diabetes, as well as a limited release in 2024 of an Omnipod 5 app for the iPhone.

The link with Dexcom goes back to February 2020, when the two companies signed a non-exclusive global agreement to combine Dexcom sensors with Insulet’s tubeless Pod, according to English Wikipedia’s article on Dexcom. The Acton Exchange described the Omnipod 5 as communicating wirelessly with sensors such as Dexcom’s and sending alerts to the user’s phone or watch.

The people behind the product appear in the press as well. The Acton Exchange profiled Trang Ly, a physician-scientist who joined Insulet in 2016 and, as senior vice president and chief medical officer, oversaw the clinical trials in children and adults that led to the 2022 clearance. She explained the product’s difference with a consumer comparison: a tubeless pump, she said, is “like the difference between wired headphones and AirPods.” In 2019 the then chief executive, Shacey Petrovic, said the Omnipod DASH had been “designed with interoperability in mind,” Drug Delivery Business News reported.

Insulet also offers its Pod beyond insulin. Through its Delivery Systems group, the company says, it tailors the Pod platform for drugs other than insulin that are given under the skin, working with drug makers across several therapeutic areas.

Wearables, phone graphs and congresses.

Diabetes device makers sell small things that people wear, carry or use many times a day: continuous glucose monitors worn on the upper arm or the belly, insulin pumps and tubeless patch pumps, blood-glucose meters with their test strips, and the pen needles and syringes used for injections. Their brand worlds are built around those objects, and increasingly around the data the objects produce.

A typical presentation pairs a close-up of a sensor or pump on skin with a phone screen showing a glucose graph and trend arrows. Apps and watch faces have become as central as the hardware: sensor makers describe readings sent wirelessly to phones, shared with family members and passed to insulin pumps, and that connection between devices is often the story the brand tells.

Photography in the category tends to be bright and active, with runners, swimmers, parents and children, while meter-and-strip brands lean on clean packshots of the meter, the strip pot and the lancing device. Regulation shapes the words as much as the pictures: product names come with indications, approval dates and age ranges, and marketing copy stays within what regulators such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration have cleared.

The industry meets at medical congresses such as the American Diabetes Association’s Scientific Sessions, the annual meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) and the ATTD conference on advanced technologies and treatments for diabetes, where new devices and study results are presented to clinicians. This guide sets out what can be checked about each maker — who founded it, who owns it, where it says its products are made and what regulators have said — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Acton headquarters, a plant in Malaysia.

Insulet is headquartered in Acton, Massachusetts. The Acton Exchange reported in June 2025 that its new headquarters there was completed in 2018 and that it is the town’s largest employer, with three shifts a day working in a highly automated plant that makes the Pods; the paper gave the workforce as about 1,300 in Massachusetts and 6,000 worldwide.

The company says it also runs a 400,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Johor Bahru, Malaysia, has offices in other parts of the United States and in Australia, Canada, China, England, France, Germany, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Spain and the United Arab Emirates, and sells Omnipod in 26 countries. Saudi Arabia serves as its regional headquarters for the Middle East and North Africa, it says.

Its own pages speak to users as a community: the Omnipod site addresses a “Podder” community, and its staff have a Podder Alliance Network employee group, according to the company’s 25th-anniversary pages.

For a design guide, Insulet shows how a brand can be built around one small shape worn on the body and a single name, Omnipod, carried through each product generation. Compare Dexcom, whose sensors work with the Omnipod 5, and Tandem Diabetes Care, whose t:slim X2 pump also works with Dexcom sensors. For this guide we use a deep plum, a soft lilac and a warm coral with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Insulet’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.