Brand-Supportive Design


By Paul Miller

Interior Designer, IDS Professional Member


Every space tells a story. 

We tell the story of the families who dwell within our projects by allowing their interests and patterns to read in the flow and aesthetic details of their homes.  When our job is to design restaurants, lounges, and lobbies, we aim to tell a different narrative: brand story.

 
 

At the bare minimum, the task of a marketing agency is to help a company refine and present its message to the appropriate audience.  In the hands of the extraordinarily thoughtful and creative marketer, a company can even develop a stronger sense of its core identity - sometimes learning that it has yet to establish one. 

Many brands are not a physical location to the public as much as a sense of place.  Coca-Cola isn’t a plant with offices and conveyer belts to the average soda lover.  It’s a twist of white on a field of red or a half time ad that draws a chuckle. Deeper still in our consciousness, it’s the sweet, fizzy burn in a childhood memory, as fleeting a pleasure as fireflies lighting a meadow.

Yet for restauranteurs and many experience-based enterprises, the location of their business is as strong a sense of place as the food the chef creates, the drinks the bartender crafts or the way in which staff engages them during their visit.  In the lobby of a service provider, the stability of the business is suggested by the weight of the actual furnishings.  One hesitates to invest money with a firm that lines up folding chairs in the front room and perches a fax machine on a moving box tagged: Ship Next Tuesday.

We believe the designer working on a commercial project must understand the brand identity of the business.  Knowing who the audience for the business is and determining what they will want out of the experience drives every detail of the outcome.  In the best case scenario, the design blows out past what the brand audience could have imagined, providing a memorable journey that sets a business in a class by itself.

We have helped determine the aesthetic and functional details of restaurants, salons, lounges, professional office lobbies,  as well as public spaces in university housing and learning facilities. Without exception, the best outcomes were always arrived at when the brand story of the client was clearly understood and integrated in the design process.

Part of our goal is to underscore our unique sensitivity to branding through design.  The procedure for our commercial projects is to dig deep to discover the intentions, the audience, the narrative, and the brand standard of the company.   In this way,  MakeNest can not only impact the function and beauty of professional and hospitality spaces, but help businesses to edit and project their own brand story.

 

If you are interested in our design services, please tell us about your project!

The Next Chapter Is Green

John Strauss Furniture

By the time we left Market Square, we had not only found an exciting new furniture source, we had sat in on an impromptu lesson on craft and passion. The maker is John Strauss, who we had researched before coming to High Point for the spring market. We spent over an hour learning about the collections.  John showed us a curious little doodle the French use to line up wood cuts for drawer fronts.  It was no accident that we were spending this much quality time with one furniture maker.

Our goal is to kickstart an initiative to make our entire furniture offering both sustainable and American made. We found out about John's company while doing our research.  Going into market with these standards in place was transformative.  While we spent time with new resources - most of them artisans who chose to come to market in person to represent their lines - the rest of the attendees buzzed past with an air of confusion and agitation.  They seemed shell-shocked by the vast quantities of vendors and they reminded me of myself in past years: hit with a sugar rush of goods rather than nourished by a quality experience. 

We discovered so much of value in our research this market, as well as forging relationships with passionate craftspeople.  The American furniture makers of today are maintaining our treasury of hardwoods through responsible harvesting.  And our small-batch makers comply with the kind of workplace safety guidelines that are simply not present in most overseas markets. Most seductive to a designer's mind is the fact that our artisan resources thrive on customization, which allows us to offer more design options to our clients.

In recent decades there has been much talk about globalization.  In the sense that we knit nations together through robust trade and that we find common humanity through shared resources and knowledge, the concept of globalization is very attractive.  Yet we are deeply satisfied to opt out of doing trade with makers who are not sensitive to the needs of workers and the environment.  

When I was younger, I was a fierce environmentalist. Then I drifted, seduced by an industry that seemed careless to the matter.  When the determination to make changes in my company asserted itself, I knew the time had come to commit to the progressive values in business that I cherish personally.  Looking inward has helped me to discover seeds waiting to sprout and so the next chapter is green.

                     -PM