Brands are personal

Our collaboration with izzy began in the office furniture company’s startup phase, continuing to today where you’ll find izzy competing as a mainstream player in its industry. When they found us, the company, named after the founder’s granddaughter, with products named after their children, broadcasted a brand that didn’t carry the company’s distinctly human, witty, smart personality.  Izzy hired us to help them find their voice, and then use it to make some noise in their market.

We developed a brand guideline we dubbed “Simple Pleasures,” things that make people smile, helping izzy appeal to the emotional factors of office life – the balancing act office dwellers perform between work and life.

We helped to recreate and repackage this feeling in an office setting, which is hard to do with furniture. In fact, STEP Magazine featured our work in an article a few years ago along side five other much larger brands – Apple, IKEA, HP, IBM, and Citigroup. Being a fraction of the size of these companies, with a fraction of their budget, we earned the kind of attention and differentiation izzy was seeking within and outside their industry.

As a result, izzy has received a lot of good press and built a larger space in their Chicago showroom, where the annual contract furniture tradeshow, Neocon, is held. Izzy has extended its reach farther by acquiring a parallel company, a move they were able to make, partly on the strength of their brand equity. MMQB, a notable industry publication, reported that Peopledesign not only transformed izzy, but also their magazine cover direction, when we began designing their covers as izzy advertising space. Izzy’s design intelligence helps them gain the audience of prestigious A&D firms more easily than other furniture companies of their size, prompting others to upgrade their design game.

You can read more about izzy in our book, Brand Identity Essentials.