Building a High-Impact Brand for Craftsmanship
Client: Carpenter Oak
Location: UK
The Problem
The company was navigating some big changes with a merger, change in leadership and migration to an employee ownership model.
The existing brand identity was well known throughout the industry and whilst it had good recall amongst the target market it dated back to the early 1990’s and needed refreshing.
Similarly, the website was functioning as an online brochure but wasn’t visually cohesive and wasn’t attracting as many visitors as it had the potential to.
The new leadership team wanted to use an update to the look and feel of the brand as a way to unite the team and move forward collaboratively.
What we Did
The PR Communications agency and creative brand agency led a period consultation internally where the marketing team, leadership team and employee representatives came together to collaboratively made decisions on brand direction. Decisions were made to keep the circular and hand-drawn feel to the logo, and retain the orange colour.
The brand team played with concepts that resulted in the final logo being taken directly from a carved piece of oak which was painted, stamped onto paper and then scanned before being redrawn as the digital logo. Then they designed printable case studies and a branded envelope so that new sales enquiries could be sent a tailored package of brochures and a selection of small, postable gifts such as a luxury branded pen and tea bags.
The web agency created a high-performance WordPress website that used heat-mapping to create data-led insights into how the site could be optimised.
The Results
Over 18 months, Cath worked in-house alongside the internal marketing and sales teams, leading the rebrand, resourcing, and coordinating associated agencies.
After launching the new identity and website, the data showed that the new luxury look and feel had resulted in much more targeted customer enquiries.
The website results included a huge drop in bounce rate averaging at 5.8%. Compared to the previous website which was losing around 50% of all traffic.
The client has gone on to win numerous awards for its exceptional hand-crafted timber framing.