A collective of structured Beams, doing Slow & Quiet Branding for businesses who really walk the talk

Do you know about Carlo Petrini's Slow Food Movement and its vision for a world where every individual has access to good, clean, and fair food? We are quite familiar with it and are enthusiastic fans. We believe our work shares similar values: ethics are highly important to our approach, authenticity is crucial in conveying a brand effectively, and we definitely have high standards. Inspired by the principles of Slow Food, we want to establish the concept of “Slow Branding”.

For us, Slow Branding is similar to the philosophy of Dieter Rams: “Less, but better” . We want to offer our services to a handful of clients, delivering works that almost reach the status of art (art being Platon’s world of ideas). Our commitment lies in creating profoundly meaningful, elegant, and exquisite works. In order to do that, we use an immersive approach to deeply understand your brand and your context. This dedication to understanding takes time.

Slow Branding is also intrinsically practical. In the words of Massimo Vignelli,“Design is not art; design is utilitarian”. Our focus is on creating systems that can be easily integrated into your day-to-day marketing efforts. Branding extends beyond a mere logo and well-designed materials. Similar to the structural BEAMs that provide the necessary structure within a building, our work maintains brand coherence across all your media channels while remaining aligned with your business objectives. The result? Paradox: Slow Branding delivers quite fast.

We know it’s quite a cliché to start with a quote, but giving credits to ideas is fundamental, so we have no choice:

"If the Self were a vessel of clay, the Stoics would work all their lives to fill it. Our-days, with Social Media we can't stop showing it to others from all possible angles, especially when we haven't poured any substance inside. We pretend that our vessel contains something just because it exists." - M’" - Mihnea Măruță

Businesses that really walk the talk are vessels that create value through their products or services. Branding would be the guiding light that points the way to their beautiful craft.

We love to work with:

• Brands whose owners are involved and concerned about their legacy.

• Those for whom ethics are highly important.

• Companies dedicated to genuine craftsmanship.

• Providers of honest services.

• Those who still love the offline touch.

• Organizations that are thoughtful about the environment.

• Brands that are authentic and transparent in their approach.

• Those with a long-term perspective.

• Brands with a fine, exquisite, and premium attitude.

Brand audit

It’s like going to the doctor’s: you have some ideas of what g’s wrong, but you don’t know exactly how to put it into words. Or you just need an extra opinion about your branding & marketing. Or you’re exploring the idea of a rebranding and you don’t know where to start.

You can choose between an hourly consultation or a full audit. On our audit, you’ll get a document with recommendations, a short plan and ideas to move forward within your context.

Branding

You’re starting a business from scratch and you need a partner for your branding. Or you want a rebranding and you don’t know where to start.

We will evaluate your needs and can suggest and deliver communication plans, visual identity, all the way to an end-to-end strategy for your brand.

Website content architecture & copy

You want to move further with your online presence and build your own website. Maybe you already have a developer (if not, we can help), but you don’t really know how to organise and structure your content.

We’ll give you mockups with the storytelling & structure of your website, written content and art direction for your visual content. We can also coordinate the full website development.

Communication strategy & planning

You’ve been running your business for a while, maybe tried a few advertising solutions, but it feels too complex and difficult to manage. Something feels off and you need some structure.

We’ll give you a plan for a full year: where to communicate, what to communicate and in what instances. Or if you prefer, we can even implement it and take charge of your communication.

For Social Media we’re going to send you editorial plans, content ideas & art direction aligned with your business objectives.

Training & education

Maybe you already have a marketing department or someone in charge of your communication and you want to ramp up your team’s expertise. Or you just want to learn new stuff.

First of all, check out our “learning center” section on our website.

Second of all, we’ll train your team on various topics: branding, strategy, design, art direction or project management. Give us a call.

We kind of have the classical story: someone gets overly excited with a concept and talks about it repeatedly and compulsively, over and over again. This makes a few people gather around the original idea, falling in love with it and starting a business together.

In this case, Alexandra, who was studying for her art history class, falls in love with modernism. She decides to start a branding agency with modernism’s values and tries to find an appropriate name for it.

She remembers this beautiful late-modernist building in New York, designed by German-American architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. And one amazingly simple detail on the façade catches her eye: the non-structural bronze-toned I-beams, brought to the surface of the building by the architect and arranged in vertical lines like mullions, in order to suggest structure and order. Something outrageous for those times, but proven beautiful and timeless.

In architecture, steel beams provide structure. They give the building strength (and sometimes, in the Mies van der Rohe building: an aesthetically beautiful façade) just as strategy puts the strength in branding & communication. True branding must have thoroughly-analysed intentions behind aesthetics and every detail must be aligned with the so called ‘red line' of communication. Without beams and without strategy, the building will fall.

We talked before about Ludwig Mies van der Rohe because we’re big fans of modernism. Modernism is both a philosophical movement and an art movement that, along with cultural trends and changes, arose from wide-scale and far-reaching transformations in the Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Modernist architecture, or Modernism, is associated with the function of the buildings, approached from an analytical viewpoint, a rational use of materials, the elimination of embellishments and decoration, and openness to structural innovation.

Modernism encompasses many different variations, including Futurism, Constructivism, De Stijl, and Bauhaus. Adolf Loos, Gerrit Rietveld, Gropius, Ludwig van der Rohe, Corbusier, Bauhaus, and the amazing Louis Kahn are just a few names associated with the movement.

Why Modernism? Because we love this idea of removing the noise and leaving there only what’s essential. Not in a minimalist matter, but quite the opposite, more like a brutalist/modernist matter. We love textures, we love details, the analytical details. Strategy driven details.