Interview Story - Accomplishment
When I was hired by Bar-Welmer as the director of design, I was tasked with leading their rebranding project. Bar-Welmer is a manufacturing company, but we wanted a new look and feel to separate it from other manufacturing companies, a new brand that reflected its people culture. That was the “WHY” for the change.
The old branding was around for over 20 years and the CEO was stuck on it. We knew getting him to accept a new look was going to be a challenge.
I did some research to find out how Bar-Welmer’s competitors branded themselves and what type of brand architecture they used throughout all their divisions. After that, it was up to me and another designer to design some logo concepts with some help from a creative director from an outside agency. We developed concepts that both closely aligned to their old branding, along with other options that were visually quite different, but all aligned to the company’s people culture.
The problem wasn’t really coming up with new ideas for a new corporate logo as it was how to handle the architecture of the branding for the divisions and companies that were underneath it. The old divisions’ logos had a tagline that said “A Bar-Welmer Company.” We wanted to address that in a different way.
We were in a meeting one afternoon, trying to come up with a way to set the divisions apart from the corporate branding and from each other, while still looking like they belong to the same parent company. Then it hit me; “What if we had the same abbreviated icon on all the divisions’ materials but in their own colors? For instance, Accraply’s materials could have the new red Accraply logo and a BW icon in red. For Pneumatic Scale, we have the blue PS logo with the same BW icon, in blue.” Everyone liked this approach, so another designer and I got to work on some concepts.
After hashing out ideas for a week, we couldn’t agree on how to move forward. We talked about our designs and realized that while I didn’t agree with some of his layouts, I liked the colors he used. Meanwhile, he didn’t like my colors, but he liked the icon shapes, typography, and general layout. We combined our ideas and tested these designs.
Next, we met with the marketing director and narrowed it down to three concepts. We then had a meeting with the CEO. To make the CEO feel more comfortable with these potential options and a change in branding, we created representations of how this logo would look on the side of the building, stationary, PowerPoints, and other collateral. We shared this content in a presentation, along with showing him how competitors had modernized their branding as well.
After some hard questions during the presentation, the CEO was excited by the message conveyed by this new image and gave us the green light. We launched internally first. We held a launch party showing a PPT presentation of the new look. The redesign was very well received. Other departments were very excited. They couldn’t wait for their materials to be branded with this new design. They felt like the new look was more modern and connected more with the company’s culture. A few weeks later we rolled this new branding out to the public, and over the following months, updated all of the business collateral.