The problem

Despite successful operational improvements and value-enhancing acquisitions, the company’s branding is limiting value realization

The brand is outdated or inconsistently expressed, and doesn’t support the strategy. The website is old and fails to take advantage of modern web technology.

What’s needed?

A strong refinement of the brand, website, and visual identity to solidify the company for holding and make it appealing to the next investor.

What we do

You tell us the investment thesis, we align the brand to the strategy, early or late stage in the hold period, to increase IRR and drive top-line growth. Using your investment thesis, we employ design, marketing strategy, and narrative thinking to refresh the portfolio company’s brand. We provide a comprehensive visual identity system and brand road map aligned to strategy. We redesign the website.

Our advantage is we know how to distill your investment strategy into actionable branding to drive top-line growth and facilitate the exit sale.

Why you need us 

• Your portfolio support team doesn’t have the resources to do the brand work your investment needs.
• You don’t want to spend fund money on a big-name consulting firm.
• You can’t invest the time to manage an outside branding agency that doesn’t have strategy and finance markets expertise.

Our competitive advantage 

We’ve done this a lot. We have the knowledge and skill that can only be acquired through years of designing and strategizing for brands. We work autonomously and know how to make the leap from investment thesis to effective branding. You access brand strategy experts directly (no interns, no junior people).

Our process

We work at a sprint-walk pace. We absorb your investment thesis and goals. We go away to work. We generate ideas about what changes need to be made. We create possible solutions. We prototype with type studies and concepts. We write copy. We test and iterate and refine, revise, review, edit then test in situ to assess scalability and usability. We think then rethink. When we are satisfied, we come back with a comprehensive visual identity system that can be used by the company’s marketing department, outside agencies, or company divisions responsible for business communication – or we implement it for you.

Deliverables

A comprehensive visual identity system:

• Refined or redesigned logo
• Comprehensive set of professional standards for the usage including: logo, photography, illustration, typography, color (primary and secondary palettes), grids and formats, copy components (tone, grammar, usage), tagline construct.
• Written system for implementing the identity across media.
• Prototypes of tactical implementation for social media, print collateral, website, etc.
• If a website is needed, you have everything for a web developer, or we can redesign the website for you.

Who we are

A left-brain right-brain pair: An award-winning designer and a Wharton M.B.A. We use design thinking to revitalize the underperforming brand of a portfolio company. We are a turnkey solution to extract ROI through re-branding.

Robert Gallerani is an award-winning designer, educator, and creative director with 20+ years of experience. He occupies the intersection of design disciplines, from architectural and information graphics to print and interaction. His formal design skills are shaped by work at Tucson and Chicago-based graphic design consultancies and as a corporate creative director, with emphasis on technology-based business-to-business print collateral, packaging, identity, and branded communications. He has a B.A. in English from Virginia Commonwealth University and a B.F.A. in Visual Communication from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Holly Gardner is a marketing executive and strategy leader from a Bain consulting background with 25+ years of experience in branding and product management. In addition to applying market research, she incorporates tenets of behavioral economics, narrative storytelling, and philosophy in the development of brands that achieve above-average returns. She has worked in Europe, South America, and the U.S. and managed consumer brands, rebranded financial services products, led a marketing department, and directed advertising and media agency campaigns. She’s also an essayist and editor. She has a B.A. in Economics from the University of Virginia, an M.A. in English from Middlebury College, and an M.B.A. from Wharton at the  University of Pennsylvania.

Case Studies