Author: Sam

Evara launches with a brand built for scale

Posted on by Sam

When a nine-year-old fintech consultancy decides to rebrand, the reasons behind that decision matter as much as the outcome. For Fran Sánchez, Managing Director of Evara, formerly Inbound Fintech, the launch on 27 April 2026 was the result of a deliberate, multi-year growth and evolution process. The brand work was its natural conclusion.

“If you want to scale and you cannot communicate properly who you are, then you are nobody.”

Background

Designhouse worked with Evara through every stage of the programme, from the strategic positioning through to naming, visual identity and brand architecture. The brief was demanding. Evara operates in the highly competitive financial services sector, and after nearly a decade of strong growth and responsive product development, it is repositioning from its origins as a digital marketing agency. The business now needs a brand strategy that reflects who it is and where it is heading over the next decade, as a leading growth systems consultancy for financial services.

“We found our personality, we identified who we are”

Speaking at the launch, Sánchez was direct about where the value of the process lay. “For me, the most impressive part of all the work we did with Designhouse was the strategy. We found our personality, we identified who we are. People building systems, systems building growth. That was an amazing piece of work because it is exactly what we want to do.”

Process

The name itself reflects that strategic clarity. Evoking the word ‘evolve’,  Evara also resonates as a name with a strong feminine feel, significant to a business founded by two women in a sector that remains male-dominated. “We always said the company is a woman,” Sánchez explained. “It was founded by two strong women, Sheila Mitham and Marie Hanes, and we didn’t want to dilute that.”

The name emerged through three rounds of internal review with the full team and was the consistent first choice throughout. Short, memorable, and free of the literal descriptiveness that constrained the previous name, it is built for scale.

ROI

For Sánchez, the investment case for brand work of this depth is straightforward, even if it is rarely easy to articulate to a finance director. “We can have the best operations in the world, the best services in the world. If nobody is looking at us, or if nobody is able to understand us, then we have a problem. Brand is an investment that is key, essential.”

“Brand is an investment that is essential”

The timing aligned with a broader operational transformation: more than 100 internal processes created in the past year, a new office in New York, restructured service lines, and a move into AI consultancy. A business preparing to scale needs a brand that can carry that weight.

The launch coincided with Evara’s first full-company retreat, bringing together team members from across multiple geographies. Sánchez noted that the visual identity performed across every surface tested, from digital assets to merchandise, and that the team’s response was immediate and unanimous.

“to be nobody is a big problem”

The Evara engagement illustrates a pattern Designhouse consistently observes in B2B rebrands done well. The visual system and the name are the tangible deliverables. The work that makes them land is investing in the strategic architecture underneath. As Sánchez put it at the launch: “If you want to scale and you cannot communicate properly who you are, then you are nobody. And to be nobody is a big problem.” When the foundation is right, nobody becomes somebody very quickly.

Evara is operational at evara.co

written by Sam Steele, Marketing and Communications Director

 

Designhouse has partnered with FTSE 250 companies and global enterprises for over 50 years. We also work with start ups and scale ups to create brand identities that can grow with their business.  If you’d like to discuss your brand challenges, we’d be glad to talk.

Contact us

Do You Need a Brand Storyteller or a Brand Architect?

Posted on by Sam

It seems everyone wants a brand storyteller these days. But, perhaps what they really need is a brand architect?

In the year to 26 November 2025, the proportion of US LinkedIn postings using the word “storyteller” doubled, covering roughly 50,000 marketing roles and a further 20,000 in media and communications. Chime received over 500 applicants for a single storyteller opening. In the US, Google, Microsoft, even the National Wild Turkey Federation are all recruiting into the category. Accenture have an entire “storytellers team”, who exist to help C-Suite execs gain clarity on business challenges using a narrative framework.

And, according to WSJ, executive mentions of “storytelling” on earnings calls climbed from 147 in 2015 to 469 in 2025. That’s a 3.2x increase over a decade. It’s a steady upward trend for yarn spinners. When CFOs start using a soft word like “storytelling” in front of financial analysts, the narrative has clearly moved from the marketing department to the boardroom.

Most of the commentary around this trend has framed it as a communications story. Google frame it as a business development role: “As storytellers,” a recent Google Storyteller job ad said, “we play an integral role in driving customer acquisition and long-term growth.”

Either way, earned media is shrinking. Newsrooms are contracting. Brands now own their distribution, so they need to produce their own content. AI has flooded the channel with sloppy generic output. Audiences, particularly Gen Z are digital natives who value authenticity over all else.

And all of this, though true, is only one chapter of the story.

 

Risky Business

 

In our increasingly complex, interconnected, always on, multi-channel world, narrative is the only thing that holds a business together. It connects customers to suppliers, the through-line from front to back room staff, from C-suite to facilities.

Story is the connective tissue of a complex system. The corporate instinct to hire for storytelling is a reaction to the pressure modern business is under.

And reaction is where the risk lies.

Dropping a journalist into a campaign-driven marketing department is a 20th century response to a 21st century problem. It treats storytelling as a single-set problem with a single-set solution. Buy the skill. Fill the role. Produce the content.

 

 

“every piece of content a storyteller produces will read well in isolation and contradict itself in aggregate”

 

 

A storyteller can write an excellent case study. They cannot produce coherence across a complex organisation, if that organisation does not already know what it stands for. Without a clear strategic foundation, every piece of content a storyteller produces will read well in isolation and contradict itself in aggregate. The podcast will pull one way. The investor narrative will pull another. The internal comms deck will pull a third. Six months in, the business will have more content and less coherence than ever.

The need for a storyteller is the canary in the coalmine. A symptom of the failure of brand architecture.

Strategic brand architecture is the infrastructure that lets narrative survive contact with complexity. Providing positioning that is distinctive rather than descriptive, specific enough to brief every story the business tells. The set of strategic pillars that filter on-strategy stories from noise. It is the architecture that holds meaning across divisions, projects, platforms, and audiences.

 

 

“Strategic brand architecture is the infrastructure that lets narrative survive contact with complexity”

 

 

This is upstream work. It does not replace the storyteller. It makes the storyteller effective. Given architecture, a journalist can produce content that compounds. Without it, the same journalist will produce content that at best cancels itself out. At worst is completely dilutes and undermines the brand.

 

Happy Endings

 

Adura, the joint venture between Shell and Equinor, demonstrates this principle. Two complex, multinational parent organisations integrated under a single brand architecture with one coherent narrative. This start up JV was solid enough to unite multiple stakeholders and authentic enough to land a £3 billion credit facility, within months of launch. This is because every communication has a coherent brand platform to stand on.

 

 

“the brand story told itself once the brand architecture was right”

 

 

3Sixty Duty Free is the commercial transformation version of the same strategy. Founder Benny Klepach had a sprawling company on his hands. Designhouse created a coherent brand story and identity to support aggregate growth. Disparate brands, DFASS, Duty Free Air and Ship Supply, became 3Sixty Duty Free & More. A comprehensive brand designed to signal scale and increase market visibility.

Twelve months after the award-winning rebrand launched, Hotel Shilla, the Korean operator behind the world’s third largest travel retailer, announced a subscription to 44% of the share capital of 3Sixty Holding LLC. Industry analysts at The Moodie Davitt Report valued the deal at upwards of US$140 million. Shilla Travel Retail President Ingyu Han specifically cited 3Sixty’s “continued commitment to its strategic approach” as the trigger for finalising the investment, after previous negotiations had broken down two years earlier. The architecture did not just support the story. It unlocked the capital.

In both cases, the brand story told itself once the brand architecture was right.

 

The Moral Of This Story…

 

The WSJ numbers suggest that corporate storytelling is firmly on the boardroom agenda in 2026. The consideration for brand and marketing leaders is more fundamental than simply hiring a storytelling into the marketing team.

 

 

“turn a complex organisation into a coherent one”

 

 

The first question to ask – and answer – is whether the business has the strategic infrastructure to make the hire worthwhile. If you are applying 20th century brand architecture to solve for a 21st century complexity problem, a new hire, no matter how talented, will not help.

The storyteller is not the answer. The work is much further upstream, in the positioning and the architecture that turn a complex organisation into a coherent one. Get that right, and the stories take care of themselves.

 

written by Sam Steele, Marketing and Communications Director

 

Designhouse has partnered with FTSE 250 companies and global enterprises for over 55 years. We also work with start ups and scale ups to create brand identities that can grow with their business.  If you’d like to discuss your brand challenges, we’d be glad to talk.

Contact us

How do you build a £3 billion brand from scratch?

Posted on by Sam

Designhouse Creative Director Peter Dobie on authenticity, risk and the future of design.

Peter Dobie, Creative Director at Designhouse, faced exactly that question when the agency was appointed to name and brand Adura, the Shell and Equinor North Sea joint venture. The business secured a £3 billion credit facility, within months of launch. The brand had to be worth lending against before it had time to earn an operational track record.

“we’re very much about the relationship with the client”

Interviewed by Transform Magazine ahead of their recent awards, Peter’s answer begins with honesty as a structural requirement of the brief. The name, the identity, the entire positioning had to reflect the genuine character of the business. That authenticity is precisely what made it bankable.

In the interview Peter discusses the contrast with Cruxy, Designhouse’s other award-winning project at Transform Europe 2026.

Understand Objectives

Adura needed to slip into the market and feel established. Cruxy, a data-led growth consultancy, needed to earn attention in a sector with deeply established visual and verbal conventions. Playing it safe would have been invisible.

“you don’t always get asked to create a brand that stands out”

Designhouse built Cruxy’s entire brand around a single strategic idea: the Calculated Maverick. Taking considered risks, in a controlled way, to deliver a superior result.

Be Brave

Peter describes the point at which the team knew the work was right: they felt genuinely uncomfortable with how far they had pushed the ideas. That discomfort was the signal.

“just push the envelope, go as far as you can”

The client supported every element of it without hesitation, which for a creative director, Peter notes, is precisely the brief you want. The commercial outcome, 136% revenue growth in the first half of 2025 is what happens when a brand position is specific, committed to, and executed with discipline.

Those two projects sit at opposite ends of a spectrum that Designhouse navigates regularly. It requires a precise understanding of the competitive landscape, the audience, and the commercial objectives.

Human Centred AI

Peter is excited about what comes next. On AI, his position is direct: it is as significant a shift as the arrival of the Apple Mac. The anxiety the industry feels now is the same anxiety designers felt when digital tools arrived and proceeded to define the next era of the craft.

“in terms of design AI opens the door to a whole boat-load of new thinking”

The ideas have always been the irreducibly human part of the work. The intellectual rigour, the strategic positioning, the creative judgement, none of that is what changes. The tools that realise those ideas are simply becoming more powerful, and that opens the door to outcomes that were previously beyond the reach of smaller clients’ budgets. That, Peter argues, is straightforwardly good for the industry.

Watch the full interview with Peter Dobie

 

Designhouse collected six awards at the Transform Awards Europe 2026, including three Golds, for the Adura and Cruxy projects.

 

 

Designhouse has partnered with FTSE 250 companies and global enterprises for over 55 years. We also work with start ups and scale ups to create brand identities that can grow with their business.  If you’d like to discuss your brand challenges, we’d be glad to talk.

Contact us

Sweeping the Board at The Transform Europe Awards

Posted on by Sam

Last night, at the Transform Awards Europe 2026, Designhouse took home six awards across two projects. A result that places us among the most decorated independent brand design agencies in Europe.

The awards cover 53 categories. With entries across the full spectrum of the industry, from major international networks to boutique studios. Three Gold awards, two Silver awards and one Bronze, makes us one of only ten agencies this year to achieve multiple Golds.

 

“We love partnering with you, and appreciate the immense push to just DO GREAT WORK. Yeeeha! “
Carrie Osman, Cruxy CEO & Founder

 

Creative Excellence

 

The awards recognise excellence across the full breadth of brand development. Including naming strategy and creative direction through to visual identity and brand evolution. To win across so many disciplines in a single evening reflects the strategic rigour that underpins everything we do.

Our work with data-led growth consultancy Cruxy was the standout story of the evening. We bagged four awards: Gold for Best Brand Evolution (Business), Gold for Best Visual Identity in the Professional Services sector, Silver for Best Visual Identity in the Financial Services sector, and Silver for Best Creative Strategy.

Adura, the Shell and Equinor  joint venture, won Gold for Best Naming Strategy (New Name) and Bronze for Best Visual Identity.

 

Getting to the Cruxy Gold

 

We worked closely with the Cruxy leadership team through a series of collaborative workshops to understand the firm’s genuine competitive differentiation. From those conversations, we identified a brand personality we named the “Calculated Maverick”. A balance of  intellectual precision combined with a daring, challenging energy. That single insight shaped every subsequent decision, from the visual identity to the tone of voice.

 

“an outstanding brand evolution that shifted the business with great results”

 

The judges were unambiguous in their assessment. On the Gold for Best Brand Evolution, the panel noted it was “an outstanding brand evolution that shifted the business with great results”.

On the Gold for Best Visual Identity, judges described it as “a strong rebrand that brings a unique brand personality to the sector”. The Silver for Best Visual Identity in Financial Services recognised “a design solution that succeeds with an identity that demands attention”.

 

“a design solution that succeeds with an identity that demands attention”

 

Additionally, the Silver for Best Creative Strategy acknowledged the work’s strategic foundation. Judges noted  the Calculated Maverick strategy, “expressed through bold geometry, a confident colour system and a voice that is incisive yet approachable, reimagined Cruxy as a consultancy that does not just advise, but also accelerates.”

 

“bold geometry, a confident colour system and a voice that is incisive yet approachable”

 

The commercial results speak for themselves. In the first half of 2025, Cruxy achieved a 136% increase in revenue compared to the same period in 2024. They went on to secure  over $250 billion in additional Assets Under Management.

These are not vanity metrics. This is strong brand strategy, designed coherently, to create commercial momentum that compounds over time.

You can read more about the Cruxy project here

Explore our thinking on brand strategy and ROI in our related piece here.

Building A New North Sea Brand, Adura

 

The Adura brief was a really demanding naming challenge. A JV between international energy companies, Shell and Equinor, needs a name that accomplishes several seemingly contradictory things at once. It has to establish immediate credibility as a major operator without any operational track record. A the same time it has to differentiate itself  from two parent companies whose combined heritage spans more than a century. And it has to resonate authentically with the broadest number of stakeholders. This includes the local Aberdonian community, government regulators, 1,300 transferring employees, and commercial partners in billion-pound negotiations.

 

“highly rigorous work that gives Adura a credible foundation”

 

Designhouse developed a rigorous naming methodology built around five criteria: authority, independence, regional connection, durability and flexibility.

The result “Adura” fuses Aberdeen with durability, embedding both geographical heritage and brand promise. A name that is a single, distinctive word that sits outside all the conventional naming conventions of the sector. Crucially, the phonetics were deliberate. Spoken with a Scottish accent, the hard D softens to produce a sound that carries regional warmth. At the same time, the visual identity system, with its granite-dense custom logotype and trapezium symmetry, reinforces the name’s qualities of permanence and structural integrity.

 

“super-strong concept with execution to match”

 

The judges responded with considerable enthusiasm. On the Gold for Best Naming Strategy, the panel described it as a “super-strong concept with execution to match”. They noted the brand name is “memorable and ownable, with great results.” The Bronze for Best Visual Identity acknowledged “highly rigorous work that gives Adura a credible foundation”.

 

“memorable and ownable, with great results”

 

You can read more about the Adura project here

Visit the Adura brand at adura.com

 

Celebrating with Clients

The evening was made all the more memorable by the warmth of our clients. Cruxy CEO Carrie Osman responded to the wins with genuine enthusiasm, “we love partnering with you, and appreciate the immense push to just DO GREAT WORK. Yeeeha!”

Cruxy Business Development Executive, Rosie Sugarman wrote. “Seeing it recognised like that really reinforces the quality, creativity and thought your team brings to everything we do together.”

 

“the quality, creativity and thought your team brings to everything we do together.”
Six awards at the Transform Awards Europe, including three Golds, is a result to be proud of. These awards are judged by a highly prestigious panel of experienced international Design Directors, brand and marketing leaders and industry creatives. The accolades reflect the quality of the work. They also reflect the close relationships we build with the clients who trust us with genuinely high-stakes briefs.

This is how great brand design actually works. Close, sustained collaboration between creative teams and client leadership. Relationships built on mutual trust and a shared commitment to ambitious outcomes.

For 55 years, that has been the Designhouse way. Last night was a fine reminder of why it matters.

 

 

Designhouse has partnered with FTSE 250 companies and global enterprises for over 50 years. We also work with start ups and scale ups to create brand identities that can grow with their business.  If you’d like to discuss your brand challenges, we’d be glad to talk.

Contact us

When The Shopper is an Algorithm

Posted on by Sam

AI isn’t just changing how people shop. It is becoming the shopper of choice. In this post we’ll explain why that matters for your brand strategy.

Agentic commerce is when AI systems act on behalf of consumers to discover, evaluate, and purchase products. This is no longer a speculative scenario. It is taking shape now, in enterprise procurement tools, in consumer AI assistants, and in the broader infrastructure being built by the world’s largest technology companies.

If you’re responsible for brand strategy, the implications are significant. And they are arriving faster than a laser blink.

  • 63% of global retailers agree that companies without AI agents will fall behind within two years*
  • 58% believe AI agents will handle most customer interactions within five years*
  • 60% of shoppers will use agentic AI to make purchases within the next 12 months**

sources: *Deloitte, **Harvard Business Review

Marketing managers must fundamentally rethink how brands, customers, and AI interact. For anyone responsible for brand, the implications are significant. Read on to understand why and what to do about it…

 

The AI Customer

 

To understand the stakes, you need to understand the process.

A personal AI agent operating on behalf of a consumer or a procurement team does not browse in the way a human does. It does not linger on a homepage, respond to a mood board, or a well-crafted headline. Instead, it queries structured data, cross-references criteria, weighs variables against stated preferences, and returns a shortlist or a decision.

created using Gemini AI

Agentic commerce compresses days of human research, discovery, and comparison into instantaneous moments of evaluation. And this fundamentally changes how consumers allocate attention and make choices.

 

The New Criteria

 

The inputs AI agents use include

  • product specifications
  • pricing data
  • availability
  • reviews
  • sustainability ratings
  • structured brand data – machine-readable and consistently maintained across digital touchpoints

For example, I ask my AI agent find me options for a new TV.  And then the AI agent retrieves and filters options, applying a weighting to the search based on both my stated and inferred priorities. As a result, it may present recommendations, or increasingly, simply complete the transaction. Alternatively, it may advise me to wait while it monitors price fluctuations, and then will automatically buy when the price drops. My input is minimal, the AI is doing all the leg work and, crucially a lot of the decision making.

Therefore, a brand whose product appears in the agentic search has won. The brand that does not is invisible, regardless of how compelling its creative work might be.

This shift is already happening. Adobe reported that AI-driven traffic to US retail sites jumped 670% year-on-year on Cyber Monday. OpenAI is partnering with Walmart, Shopify and payment platforms like Stripe. Perplexity is working with PayPal. And Google just released agentic checkout options. All of which means a bot will search, shop and ship your favourite goods to you, with minimal human input. (GeekWire)

In the B2B space, the pattern is equally pronounced. B2B buyers are increasingly using AI tools to conduct the early stages of vendor research. The tools filter out a significant proportion of the competitive set before the human even sees them.

If your brand is not structured, consistent, and legible to machine systems at that filtering stage, it may never reach the conversation at all.

 

Brand Identity that’s Visible to Both Computer and Human

 

Research from Pernod Ricard’s head of digital and design illustrates the risk acutely. When the company analysed how leading AI models represented its brands, they saw immediate issues of mislabelling and lack of visibility. LLM data was often incomplete or incorrect, with one popular model miscategorising an affordable mass-market whisky as a prestige product (Harvard Business Review). The consequences of that kind of misrepresentation, at scale and at speed, are considerable.

Most brand investment is built around human perception. Visual identity conveys authority. Tone of voice builds trust. Campaigns that create emotional connection. These things remain valuable, but now, they are only part of the picture.

The other part, the one that agentic systems respond to, is structural. It is the coherence and consistency of your

  • product data
  • brand architecture across digital channels
  • accuracy and completeness of the information that AI systems read

The disciplines of brand management and data architecture are becoming inseparable.

The Brand Coherence Advantage

 

By 2030, the US consumer retail market alone could see up to $1 trillion in revenue generated by agentic commerce. Global projections are estimated at as much as $5 trillion. (Microsoft) 

In this new world, organisations with strong, consistently maintained brand architecture have the advantage. A brand that means one thing clearly, that presents itself consistently across every channel and system, is easier for an AI agent to assess and surface. A brand with fragmented positioning, inconsistent written content, or poorly structured digital infrastructure presents as ambiguous. And ambiguity is completely incompatible with algorithmic decision-making.

The organisations that are best placed in an agentic commerce environment will be those that have invested in brand foundations:-

  • clear positioning
  • rigorous consistency
  • well-structured brand architecture

Brand equity now needs to be read by the systems increasingly making decisions on behalf of your customers. If that’s not happening, your  equity  is quietly being eroded. Have a look at your brand architecture today and ask yourself

  • is it coherent?
  • is it consistent?
  • is it searchable?

The brands best placed for this shift are already asking these questions. If you are not yet, now is a good time to start. We can help.

Contact

Case Study: ISIS Markets

 

Preserva: a new brand that’s more than a load of old balls

Posted on by Sam

Young entrepreneur Freddie Bott was 23 when he looked at a dead tennis ball and thought, there has to be a better way.

The result is Preserva  a brand that is as fun to look at as it is clever in concept.

from L: Design Director Matt Gillman, Account Exec Millie Regan and Freddie Bott discussing the project

Product

 

The product is simple and brilliant. Preserva is a fully automatic, rechargeable pressuriser that restores tennis and padel balls to their original playing condition, keeping them performing like new for at least four times longer.

With over 300 million tennis balls going to landfill every year, Bott’s solution is timely, practical and genuinely impactful.

 

Solution

 

The brand identity we created for Preserva reflects exactly what the product is: unpretentious, energetic and a little bit cheeky. The logo is deliberately soft and rounded, playful in its form. It has a squishy quality that feels at home on a court bag as much as it does on screen. Like Freddie, the logo does not take itself too seriously, and that is entirely the point.

 

 

After a detailed briefing with Freddie, the creative treatment is inspired by the pressure inside the balls and the tube. The logo’s letterforms designed to reflect that pressure.

And while many sports brand are  heavily visually influenced by data and performance, Preserva deliberately is not. For example, brands like F1, Adidas, NBA, WHOOP and Oura build their entire visual identity around metrics, waveforms and performance-data.

While there is an obvious performance benefit to keeping tennis and padel ball pressure at their best, the brand isn’t truly about this. At it’s heart it’s about extending ball life, and in doing so extending play-time, as well as being more economical and sustainable along the way.

The bright, bold and confident green and orange of the colour palette are synonymous with the worlds of tennis and padel. They also pay more than a passing nod to the enthusiastic energy of the founder.

All of which make for a brand that’s hard to miss on a crowded retail shelf or a fast-moving social feed.

Underneath the playful exterior, the functional message is always present. The packaging is clean and clear, the product promise is front and centre, and every touchpoint communicates reliability without sacrificing the brand’s character.

 

 

Freddie set out to solve a real problem. Designhouse set out to make sure the world noticed. We think we managed both.

 

Designhouse has partnered with FTSE 250 companies and global enterprises for over 50 years. We also work with start ups and scale ups to create brand identities that can grow with their business.  If you’d like to discuss your brand challenges, we’d be glad to talk.

Contact us

200 Million Dollar Lesson in Brand Trust

Posted on by Sam

Earlier this month, when Anthropic refused the Pentagon’s demand to remove ethical guardrails from ClaudeAI, it lost a 200 million dollar contract overnight. Ouch!

Within hours, OpenAI, parent of ChatGPT, stepped in and took the deal.

Smart business move by ChatGPT’s Sam Altman? Not really.

  • ChatGPT uninstalls surged 295%
  • Social media was alight with calls to “cancel ChatGPT”
  • Key staff quit Open AI
  • Claude hit number one on the App Store for the first time ever
  • Claude installs rose by 51%
  • 36% increase in revenue for Anthropic in just two weeks

 

Chat GPT agentic soldier created using AI

Trust Vs Profit

 

This is not a new story for brand equity watchers. At huge cost, Johnson & Johnson recalled 31 million bottles of Tylenol, and gained an invaluable long term reputation as the guardian of America’s public health. Patagonia told customers not to buy its products during Black Friday sales. Nike put Colin Kaepernick on its billboards while the stock was falling. In each case, the short-term loss was visible and measurable. The long-term gain was something ultimately more valuable. You can’t put a number on consumer trust.

This is the brand loyalty that comes from watching a company absorb a hard financial hit and hold its line anyway.

Consumers have become sophisticated readers of corporate behaviour. They know the difference between a brand that talks about values and one that walks them.

In the face of overwhelming consumer backlash, Altman publicly admitted his move “looked opportunistic and sloppy” and has rolled back back his Pentagon support. The damage to the ChatGPT brand may be harder to recover.

Integrity is not the enemy of growth. It is the foundation of it.

 

 

Designhouse has partnered with FTSE 250 companies and global enterprises for over 50 years. We create brand identities that are authentic and long lasting.  If you’d like to discuss your brand challenges, we’d be glad to talk.

Contact us

When a Cheaper Competitor Launches, Does Your Brand Hold?

Posted on by Sam

Sometimes brand investment is short term and dates quickly. And then there is a smarter investment, brand design that compounds and lasts. The Heathrow Express story is the latter. This is a case study in strategic brand investment that delivered measurable ROI across fifteen years, through competitive disruption, a global pandemic, and a market that looked very different in 2025 than it did in 2011.

Where We Started

 

When we partnered with Heathrow Express way back in 2011, ahead of the 2012 London Olympics, the brief was about more than a visual refresh. The challenge was to modernise a recognised brand without losing the equity already built into it. We had to create a visual system robust enough to sustain premium positioning for the long term.

We started with hard research, not aesthetics.

  • Passenger perception
  • Journey mapping
  • Competitive landscape
  • Careful auditing of what to retain versus what to evolve

The result was a comprehensive brand architecture, applied consistently across

  • 150 daily services
  • Every customer touchpoint, from livery and uniforms to ticketing, wayfinding, and real-time digital communications

The work was recognised immediately. Heathrow Express won a Transform Awards Gold for Best UK Rebrand, seen as the most innovative, premium train brand in the country, closely aligned with business and first-class air travel.

The commercial impact was equally swift. In 2011, Heathrow Express carried 5.68 million passengers, a 5.9% increase on the previous year. In 2012, despite the Olympic period triggering a significant reduction in overall airline passengers across the board, the service still carried 5.6 million. Corporate client retention grew to 88%, and the number of corporate accounts grew 94% year on year. The new brand was already doing its job.

Where We Ended

 

The more telling results came a decade later.

In 2022, the state of the art Elizabeth Line launched. Lower fares, broader connectivity, and a direct competitive challenge to Heathrow Express’s passenger base. Brand equity, in moments like this, either holds or it doesn’t. For Heathrow Express, it held, delivering

  • 94% Customer satisfaction, the highest in UK rail.
  • 73% Value-for-money ratings, the highest of any UK train operator, despite premium pricing.
  • 93% Punctuality satisfaction
  • 91% Cleanliness
  • 94% Personal safety at 94%

By Q3 2025, passenger journeys had grown 18% year on year, making Heathrow Express the primary driver of growth across all open access operators, according to the Office of Rail and Road.

TLDR

 

  • Premium pricing
  • Volume growth
  • Industry-leading satisfaction
  • Fifteen years after the original investment

This is what strategic brand work looks like when it’s built properly. Not a campaign, not a cosmetic update, but a system designed to create competitive advantage over time and resilient enough to withstand genuine market disruption.

Read the full case study

 

 

Designhouse has partnered with FTSE 250 companies and global enterprises for over 50 years, delivering strategic brand consultancy that creates measurable competitive advantage. If you’d like to discuss your brand challenges, we’d be glad to talk.

Contact us

2025 Brand Glow-ups and Blow-ups

Posted on by Sam

The Year Digital-First Design Became Non-Negotiable

 

2025 marked a turning point – the world’s most valuable brands stopped designing for print and started designing for screens. The evidence is clear in the work, and more importantly, in the results.

  • 30% of stock market value for S&P 500 companies is driven by brand strength (The Economist)
  • 40%+ of a company’s market cap comes from brand and reputation, according to 60% of CEOs. (World Economic Forum)
  • 56% higher total returns and 32% more shareholder return come from strong-reputation brands (McKinsey & Company).

Play with your brand equity at your balance sheet peril (yes, we’re looking at you Cracker Barrel and HBO Max)

So who were the winners and losers in the rebrands, evolutions, make-overs and muck ups of the year? We’ve listed a few below, and identified the three strategic trends that have defined 2025…

 

Trend 1: The Gradient Shift, Signalling Adaptability in Static Logos

 

Google, Microsoft, TDK Electronics, and Eventbrite all introduced gradient colour systems where solid blocks previously existed

 

TDK logo redesign, before and after

 

Microsoft’s Jon Friedman explicitly connected this shift to AI and “how AI is shifting the discipline of design.” Gradients signal continuous transformation and adaptability, critical messages when your market perceives change as the only constant. TDK’s gradient, developed by Interbrand “symbolizes TDK Transformation,” directly tying visual evolution to business strategy.

 

the evolution of MS icons

 

These aren’t aesthetic choices, they’re positioning statements that communicate organisational agility with innovation to secure ROI.

 

Trend 2: Screen-Native Design (The Death of Print-First Thinking)

 

Rounded corners replaced sharp edges across Microsoft Office, Walmart‘s spark motif, and Bentley’s winged B. Lufthansa Group removed its circular frame entirely. Amazon‘s rebrand by Koto prioritized “digital-first” colour saturation for Prime.

 

Simpler shapes, sharper, brighter colours all features of 2025 most successful brand redesigns

 

With Microsoft alone serving 400+ million Office users daily on screens, legibility at small sizes became business-critical. The Word icon dropped from four rectangles to three specifically to “reduce visual noise”, a direct response to mobile-first usage patterns.

Brands that haven’t optimized for 20px favicon displays and notification icons are actively losing recognition in the environments where engagement happens.

 

 

Trend 3: Vibrant Colour Recalibration: Standing Out in Saturated Digital Feeds

 

Eventbrite introduced “highlighter neons,” Alpen moved from heritage muted tones to “creams, blues and greens designed to bring vitality,” Amazon standardized “Smile Orange” after years of iterating sub brands with different colours, type fonts and inconsistent shades. And Walmart’s “spark” motif logo and yellow and blue palette were designed to be bolder and brighter than the 2008 iteration while remaining largely similar.

 

Eventbrite’s neons, Alpen’s colour glow-up, Walmart’s subtle evolution, with more vibrant blues and yellows

 

In algorithmically-curated feeds where users scroll past 300+ posts daily, colour becomes the primary stopping mechanism. Brands competing for attention needed saturation levels that registered on backlit screens, not just printed packaging.

 

The Billion Dollar Cost of Brand Equity

 

Cracker Barrel demonstrated how not to mess with your brand logo this year:

  • Removed 98-year heritage logo for generic wordmark
  • Stock dropped 10% within days (-$200M value)
  • Full reversal within weeks

 

original logo -> August 21 2025 rebrand -> August 27 2025 revert

 

And Cracker Barrel were not alone in what industry experts call the “corporate walk of shame”.

The HBO Max → Max → HBO Max debacle was roundly ridiculed and described as “the pinnacle of walking away from brand equity.” Having dropped the most recognisable and much loved brand element, HBO, two years ago, HBO has now been re-instated to the platform branding. The rebrand cost alone exceeded “what some streamers spend on content.”

 

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HBO Max’s log walk of brand shame

Both brands confused modernisation with erasure. The strategic failure is the knowledge that 50+ years of consumer recognition has quantifiable value that vastly exceeds the cost of evolutionary refinement.

 

The New Brand Paradox: Instant Credibility Without Heritage

 

When Shell and Equinor needed branding for their North Sea joint venture, they faced the opposite problem: how to project 50 years of credibility on day one when entering a market where competitors were actively exiting.

The solution required encoding durability into every design decision, from the name (the A of Aberdeen + dura of durability) to the custom wordmark “deliberately designed to feel dense, as if carved out of granite.” Even the phonetics were strategic: spoken with a Scottish accent, the hard “D” softens to “Ajura,” balancing industrial authority with regional warmth.

Instant authority, Adura, Shell and Equinor’s North Sea joint venture

 

Whether preserving existing equity or manufacturing instant credibility, strategic design must encode the business positioning into visual systems that communicate before words do.

 

 

Designing For Tomorrow’s Digital Context

 

The brand evolutions we’ve seen in 2025 are infrastructure investments responding to three measurable pressures:

  1. Mobile-first consumption: 60%+ of brand interactions now happen on screens under 6 inches
  2. Algorithmic distribution: Brands must optimize for feed-based discovery, not destination sites
  3. Global scalability: Multi-market operations demand systematic consistency over artisanal variation

The best redesigns came from creatives at Interbrand, Koto, Buck Design Ltd, BrandOpus, and our teams at Designhouse, all delivering work that prioritized systematic scalability over singular creative expression.

Whether unifying 50+ sub-brands (Amazon/Koto) or encoding instant credibility into new ventures (Adura/DesignHouse), the emphasis shifted from logo artistry to strategic systems thinking.

 

 

What This Means for B2B Brands in 2026

 

If your brand identity was designed before 2020, it likely optimizes for contexts that no longer drive business outcomes:

  • Print collateral that sits in drawers
  • Trade show booths visited by declining attendance
  • Desktop-first websites losing traffic to mobile

The question isn’t whether to evolve, it’s whether to do so proactively or reactively after your competitors have already captured the positioning premium.

 

DesignHouse has created strategic brand transformations for global leaders across telecommunications, transport, energy, and consumer sectors for over 50 years. Based in London, we combine strategic rigor with design excellence to create identities that drive business outcomes.

https://designhouse.co.uk/