Customer Experience Design

Customer journey design is the critical bridge between your strategic brand vision, and a realistic plan to deliver it. 

A customer journey design exercise typically involves mapping the customer journey, touchpoint by touchpoint, as it exists today, and then engaging in creative exercises to define how it can be improved in the future. This process helps clients to identify and coordinate the different resources they need to turn the vision into reality.  

Naming & Brand Identity

Modern identity design must be flexible enough to live and breathe in many contexts at once.

A successful brand reaches people on their screens, in their cars, entering a store, and walking down the street. Our design philosophy is a fusion of timeless and contemporary themes. A brand identity must both endure and inspire. 

Web Platforms & Apps

We have significant experience working with startups and mature brands alike to create digital brand experiences. We have have worked with both “digital first” app-based companies to define their core offering and user experiences, and with “brick and mortar” companies looking to extend customer relationships deeper into the digital realm, e.g. via CRM and loyalty programs. 

Our most significant source of value creation in this area comes in project definition and strategic alignment. We help our clients adequately understand the customer and brand experience problems (or opportunities) that the technology is trying to solve. We then work with clients to create compelling user experience (UX) flows and user interface (UI) designs to deliver on the intent. In cases with complex engineering needs (e.g. complex account management, e-commerce), we also collaborate with third-party technical providers to ensure seamless delivery of an integrated solution. 

Interior Design

Built environments offer an opportunity to create the stage, props, and scrips that brands need to create memorable experiences. Doing this effectively means going beyond superficial approaches that see brands as a veneer over an otherwise unchanged experience. We bring an interactive design mentality to bear on the design of physical spaces; role-playing the human interactions informs our understanding of how people can relate the spaces around them.

What matters is not only how the space looks to customers, but how it responds to them and meets their needs. A complete view incorporates people’s interactions with with technology, products, services and each other. 

We work across multiple design disciplines to make this happen: customer journey design, graphic design, interior design, art curation, furnishings procurement, massing, finishes, services and technology must come together to create exceptional experiences. The result is spaces that connect with people, and that they want to return to. 

Product & Packaging Design

In addition to our own core strengths in visual system and packaging design, we also work with a number of partners who specialize in designing specific types of products.

In recent years we have developed deep relationships with food and beverage menu designers in both the packaged and fresh food markets. We have been involved in a number of successful collaborations in the convenience store, fast casual and casual dining markets.  

Service Design

Designing and developing the way a brand interacts with its customers is critical to brand coherence. We guide our clients in creating a solid union between brand strategy and how that is expressed through employees actions towards customers.

Most people associate design with aesthetic flourishes, and while it’s certainly true that design has an aesthetic component, this focus can mask design’s true value. Design is a powerful tool for value creation when it’s aligned with your business goals.

It is the design process, more than any particular outcome, which creates value: by putting human beings (customers and employees) at its center. Creating brands and offerings with a “designer’s mindset” addresses people’s functional and emotional needs as they interact with products, technologies, spaces and each other. Truly effective design is about more than just looking good, it’s about achieving a balance of pure function and emotional engagement.