ikon | Boutique Branding & Creative Agency

Please describe your company and your position there.

Preventicum offers one of the most advanced health assessments in the world to a range of private and corporate clients. I manage the marketing and PR.

For what projects/services did your company hire ikon | Boutique Branding Agency?

We have been working with Ikon for a few years to improve our Preventicum brand which had become outdated, the work included a logo redesign as well as a number of marketing projects.

What were your goals for this project?

To update and modernise our brand identity, logo and printed material.

How did you select this vendor?

We were familiar with some of Ikon's work and met with Alex to discuss our requirements. The proposals put forward and the examples of previous work helped us to go with them

Describe the scope of their work in detail.

The discussions started with an in-depth analysis of the company and what we were looking for and ultimately wanted to achieve. Ikon visited our site to understand the business and reviewed our current material. Ikon put together a proposal including a number of design ideas which we felt confident had fulfilled the brief. Ikon's understanding and research into our business was key.

What was the team composition?

We worked directly with Alex who took the time to gain a real understanding of the business and what we wanted to gain.

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Since working with Ikon, we have had a number of compliments on our updated work. When we moved to a multi million pound new clinic in central London, Ikon's work fitted the change in location perfectly. We are continuing various projects with Ikon due to their in-depth understanding of our business and the delivery of exceptional work.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

The workflow was very effective.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Ikon's understanding of our business through research and discussion and an on-site visit. They have always delivered work on time, and the quality exceeded our expectations.

Are there any areas for improvement?

We are so happy with the work to date that we will continue future projects with them.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I work for the Rejuvi Venture, a startup. We have been in development mode for about three years and we've been incorporated for about a year and a half. We are a software to service organization that delivers leadership development excellence by the way of products and services to organizations across the globe. My role with the organization is the co-president.

What challenge were you trying to address with ikon | Boutique Branding Agency?

Because we are a startup SaaS organization, we needed ikon to do three things. One was we needed them to develop our brand identity. We knew what our name was, but we needed a logo and brand elements associated with it. The second thing was to establish our website to work in relationship with our application, reporting engine, and resource repository. Finally, we needed them to build out some next-level reporting templates for our application.

The brand work applies to our entire organization, but the website and reporting were for the organizations and people that would be brought in underneath the Rejuvi Venture umbrella—our customers.

What was the scope of their involvement?

For the brand, all we had was a name, so they needed to start from scratch to produce everything from our logo and complete color scheme to typography and wordmark. The wordmark was actually just trademark recently, so we’re excited about that.

When it came to the website, they also had to start from scratch, pulling together something that would act as a frontend our application and our reporting engine. In the beginning, they conceptualized what it could and should look like and articulated each of its components. Then they build it out and instituted the colors they identified for our brand, as well as photography and graphic elements. They did it all.  

If you use our software you're going to get an intelligence report produced instantaneously based on your leadership capability and organizational capacities. We needed three templates built, one for executive leaders, another for sales leaders, and the last for service leaders. The output of our reporting engine had to be in alignment with one of our differentiators. ikon designed the templates to specifically not look like technical documents. We wanted them to be very easy to understand with lots of graphic elements. This allows users to look at it and get quick insights.

What is the team composition?

Alex (Creative Director, ikon | Boutique Branding Agency) was with us all of the time. Whether he had others do some of the leg work behind the scenes, I'm not really sure. There were times when we had lots of heavy writing to do, so he brought in a guy named James who also did a great job.

How did you come to work with ikon | Boutique Branding Agency?

We were already working with a firm based out of the UK (as ikon is), and when that first firm heard we were looking for a branding company, they referred us to ikon. We considered a number of other firms as well. We weren't necessarily looking for a firm based out of the UK, as much as a company that could meet our needs. We spent time with a number of firms and interviewed four. We knew right away that ikon was the right fit for us.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked together from July until December 2018.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

First, the fact that we went through the very arduous process of getting these things trademarked, which is not easy to do is the first significant result for us. If what ikon produced was not unique, that would have caused difficulties in the trademark process, but we didn’t have any of those.

We play in two very busy, high-traffic spaces: software as a service and leadership development. Everything they produced for us needed to pop and not look like everybody else’s in the industry, especially because there are colors you see most leadership development companies use. Alex helped us to understand those industry patterns.

People are, quite frankly, blown away by the quality of our website design. It pops because of the beautiful brand, its look and feel, its graphic elements, the combination of colors, and the richness of the data we put out there. What I love most is that we use so many different graphic elements: photography, custom graphics, a pencil drawing. They were able to weave it all together so you can look at our website and know that it wasn’t done with a standard website creation tool.

How did ikon | Boutique Branding Agency perform from a project management standpoint?

They were clear up-front about understanding what our deadlines were. They also asked really good questions about how we liked to work and how we liked to keep track of things, meaning they worked inside of our parameters, which I really appreciated. We held onto our deadline, our meeting structures, our collaboration sites, and they molded to us. That was the first thing I noticed about them. They molded to us.

We’d never been through this kind of branding thing before, so even though this was hard work, it was fun. There were moments throughout the process—whenever he saw us going in a direction he might've been concerned about—where he pushed us to think beyond what we knew and helped get us to a very different place. He did it so gracefully, not saying we had to follow him because he was an expert, but just kindly point out different ideas and inform us about things.

We’re based on two different continents and three time zones, so we worked in regularly scheduled calls and email, but we also established two other things that were really easy. One was WhatsApp, which we used for quick informal, water-cooler-type conversations. We’d create a thread to have short pieces of information passed around. There were also impromptu phone calls. Finally, we did have some regularly scheduled meetings.

What did you find most impressive about them?

We had another company that did the backend implementation, but one of the pieces of feedback I have for ikon is that they worked incredibly well as a trio of people trying to get this accomplished. There was us, there was ikon, who was our branding design team, and then we had a technical team and they worked very, very well in that environment. And they built a great partnership with our technical team.

We went through this process and it was, it was so much hard work. I had never done this particular piece before so it was a lot, a lot of hard work, but Alex made the process enjoyable. We had a blast actually putting it together.

Are there any areas they could improve?

To be honest with you, I can't think of anything meaningful that I would want them to work on

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

The first thing would be to be open, to be really open to not having all the answers. This firm is going to take you to places you never thought you could go, and you've got to be open to that.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am an Associate at Form Structural Design, consulting structural engineers based in London

For what projects/services did your company hire ikon | Boutique Branding Agency?

We hired ikon, to design and build a new website for our company.

What were your goals for this project?

We wanted a website that enabled potential clients to see our volume of work via multiple images across several sectors.

How did you select this vendor?

ikon came highly recommended by a company employee. After meeting with Alex, we had no hesitation in selecting ikon to carry out the work

Describe the project in detail.

Our website was built from the ground up, incorporating all of our very specific requests. ikon offered design solutions and improvements to our own ideas every step of the way.

What was the team composition?

All of my communications were with Alex, while the website build was carried out by his development team.

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Our main aim was to have a professional looking website that we can direct clients to that clearly illustrates our portfolio of work. This has been a success.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

We had absolutely no issues dealing with ikon throughout the website build and continue to use them for ongoing support and development.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Communication was excellent. They were always happy to listen and contribute in a positive and proactive way.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Nothing.

Please describe your company and your position there.

Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield is a global retail property company with Westfield London being the biggest shopping mall in Europe. My role is Director of Creative, Media, Comms and Events across Europe.

For what projects/services did your company hire ikon | Boutique Branding Agency?

We have used ikon over the past 4 years for varied creative needs from retailer/brand and development pitch decks, to creating insitu graphics to rollout of campaigns.

What were your goals for this project?

The goal for each project vary due to the nature of the projects. The key objective in all our projects is to bring the ‘Westfield’ brand to life visually within our core brand filters of always being epic, fashionable, zeitgeist, fun and simple. Whilst maintaining a high premium finish.

How did you select this vendor?

Through a recommendation

Describe the scope of their work in detail.

We have worked with ikon on projects with various scopes. Retail is very fast paced and Ikon have been responsible for turning around a high standard of creative in very short timelines.

Other projects have been receiving a creative brief and presenting back concepts and then delivering the creative work. Working with illustrators, copywriters and our marketing team to produce the final outcome.

What was the team composition?

Mainly working with Alex Colley, the Creative Director who would instruct his team on projects where necessary. Alex works with a wide range of stakeholders within the organisation from the marketing managers, commercial team, CMO and pitch decks for the CEO.

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

One was helping us create a pitch deck that aided us in securing one of the largest advertising deals in Westfield history. He has constantly helped us pitch to win new strategic partners.

Another successful project was designing literature for us to go to every resident of a new property development we were involved with, that got a really great response from everyone involved.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

The workflow is always pretty seamless, they have worked well with me and my team. Due to their small size, they're able to respond quickly and are very flexible. They have also become brand guardians as an extension of the marketing team enabling them to work with departments within the organisation.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

I would say reliability and being available for emergencies outside the normal 9-5 working hours! Regardless of what we have thrown at ikon, they have always delivered a high standard of work and personal service every single time.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Not really, we have been pleased with the close relationship we have built with ikon.