Brand creation & visual identity for The Growth Works
Developing the name, brand proposition, brand positioning and visual system of The Growth Works, a new, nimble consultancy dedicated to helping startups grow sustainably.
www.thegrowthworks.com
The background and brief
James Lemon is a leading travel expert who's led strategy and operations at IHG, Travelport or Hostmaker, among others. To expand his consultancy work, he was keen to create a brand that would resonate with a variety of clients, yet be pragmatic and starightforward, to match his own values.
After a series of introductory meetings to delve into values, approach, existing portfolio and ways of working, we compiled the different elements of his personal brand with the vision he had for the brand.
Brand naming: The Growth Works
The original work first cristallised into a series of different brand naming exercices. We considered over 120 different options, iterating on favourites and documenting the rationales for or against each.
It was crucial to take this time, for the right option only materialised late in the process. It would be The Growth Works.
It would this clearly state the key client challenge and service offered - growth - while referring to a systematic, all-encompassing approach to it - works.
A second layer of interpretation also surfaced the ideas of an industrial atelier and grand scale, but also of growth as a solution that can be engineered, like a well-oiled machine.
Brand strategy: start-up growth, on tap
Distilling the idea, vision and scope of The Growth Works into a strategy required understanding who the clients would be, what their main challenges were, and what the solutions the consultancy could offer may be.
Start-up growth, on tap captures the key elements of the brand strategy:
- on/off, flexible, "asset-light" business model (based on ad hoc expert teams of freelancers)
- speed and action-orientated solutions (for time-poor start-up leaders)
- clear positioning in the start-up space
Consciously driving away from using consultancy language and keywords, the brand was to revolve around growth instead.
Brand mark & logo
Inspired by the ascent of a spiral staircase, the three-story logo plays on the idea of step changes, levels, and going up. The angles stem from the elevations of airports travelators, and oscillate between the most extreme angle (going up left to right) and the most comfortable angle (going right to left).
Colour palette, tone of voice, applications
The Growth Works brings a fresh take on consulting, which needed to come forth through the palette, tone and applications. Bold anchor colours allowed for a more playful identity, while the tone values straightforwardness above all, discarding the usual stuffiness of business consulting.