CALYX
Built to change minds.
Claridge Products is a leading manufacturer of whiteboards and office furniture. Good, solid, reliable stuff. They came to us with a vision for a new brand. A sister brand, if you will. A sophisticated, chic sister brand. A brand designed to change minds—and a lot of them. Specifically, the minds of high-end interior designers and architects. People who spec $20K whiteboards for the Fortune 100 set. An audience who, very rightly, sees Claridge products as better suited to schools than Salesforce.com’s new digs. To achieve Claridge’s vision, we’d have to create a brand that, despite overwhelming perceptions to the contrary, exudes sophistication and shows that we do have the juice to be the heart of collaboration in today’s ultra-modern workplace.
WHAT WE DID:
Research
Naming
Strategy
Brand purpose
Identity design
Logo design
Site design
Usability
Programming
QA Testing
The new brand would somehow have to speak to the changing nature of collaboration. We started with the name. “Claridge” would not do. Working with the client team, we co-created a name that would. Enter “Calyx.” For you non-botanists out there, a calyx is the part of the flower that holds the incipient bud. In essence, it holds the promise and potential of the flower itself.
A blossoming new name.
Inspired by growth.
From the identity to the logo to the eventual site design, everything we created was designed to support the story behind the name: this idea of becoming, of growth, and of inspiration. Of collaboration. We had the pieces. Name, check. Logo, check. Identity, check. Endowed with potential. Made beautiful through collaboration.
An organic user experience.
The site design grew almost organically out of the strategy. Taking cues from high-end retail experiences and reinforcing the brand promise in every detail and interaction, the new Calyx.com came into sharp relief. At once more beautiful and more functional than its predecessor and parent, Calyx.com delivered a dynamic and flexible user experience centered around a completely reimagined shopping experience. There’s so much more to it, but those are the broad strokes. So there you have it: beauty, collaboration and growth as brand strategy. As it is in art, so it is in life.
