Case study · Manufacturing
Sixty years of excellence,but nobody knew.
Lambson Building Products had been leading the way in manufacturing practices, sustainability, research and delivery of laminated materials for yachts, caravans and more. Their transition to an EoT marked a new age for the business, so the brand needed updating.
- Client
- Lambson Innovate
- Where
- Castleford, West Yorkshire
- Sector
- Manufacturing
- Built with
- Adobe, Figma, WordPress
The client
One of the biggest employersin Castleford.
Lambson make laminated products, profiles, decorative panels and bonded components, in a factory in West Yorkshire, using techniques that are their own. They specialise in marine and leisure, they have been doing it for over sixty years, and they are one of the largest independent suppliers of their kind in Europe.
They are also one of the biggest employers in the town they are in, and around the time this work started they became employee owned - profits shared with the people making the products. It was, by any measure, a good moment in the company's history.
None of which was visible from outside. The identity was the one the business had grown up with, and it described a supplier rather than a company doing any of the above.
The decision
A well-kept secretis still a secret.
David Bean, the managing director, put it plainly: Lambson were leading their industry, and it felt like a very well-kept secret. Being the best at something nobody has heard of is a commercial problem eventually, and it is a recruitment problem immediately.
So the decision was to rebrand, and the brave part is not the money. David had never commissioned anything like this and a rebrand is abstract in a way a machine or a building is not - you cannot walk around it before you buy it, and the thing being changed is the name over the door of a sixty-year-old business.
He also decided what it had to be about, which is the harder half. Sustainability and the circular economy, because that is genuinely where the manufacturing is going. The people, because the company had just handed itself to them. And underneath both, the products - because a manufacturer that stops sounding like a manufacturer has lost the plot.
How it went
A deep dive first,and then a new identity.
The temptation with a rebrand is to start drawing. What a sixty-year-old manufacturer needs first is a decision about what it is for.
David gave us the time, and by the end of it he was the one arguing about brand decisions. That shift - from a managing director buying a logo to a managing director who has a view on what the company sounds like - is the part of this we are proudest of, and it happened in the strategy sessions rather than at the presentation.
01
We asked what they wanted to be known for
Not what they make. What they want said about them by an employee, a supplier and a customer, which are three different answers and have to survive being the same brand.
02
Sustainability as a position, not a page
The circular economy is where their industry is heading and they were already further along it than they were saying. That went into the middle of the brand rather than into a section of the website.
03
Innovate, added to the name
Lambson Innovate rather than Lambson Building Products. The word does the work the old name could not: it says the company has a direction, not just a catalogue.
What we made
A brand,and everywhere it goes.
New workwear for the whole team, worn with genuine pride across the factory floor and the offices.
Still going
Still growingthe brand with them.
We help Lambson stay online and maintain a web presence, and we make sure their team can get hold of the branded materials they need to do their jobs - a presentation for a customer meeting, artwork for a campaign, something for social. As the people who helped to build the brand, we're the best people to keep it going, and growing.
More of the work
No pitch, no deck
Tell us what isactually happening.
Describe the mess in your own words. We will say what we think is going on underneath it, and whether there is anything we could usefully do about it.
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Worksop Road, Sheffield S9 3TL
Registered in England and Wales, company no. 16375453