When BKR approached us to pitch for a full rebrand and website rebuild, we couldn’t have been more excited by the opportunity. A top tier accountancy association with global reach but with a very dated brand and old, clunky website. The scope for bringing the business up to date was enormous. 

The pitch process was gruelling, with several rounds of proposals, but being able to execute both the re-brand and build the web portal in-house, swung the decision our way. 

The first step was to bring the BKR senior leadership into or Marlborough studio, to take them through our brand development process:

Discover – Learning all there is to know about BKR and their members through research, interviews, questionnaires and a morning of workshops with the senior leadership team

Define – Taking everything we learnt and distilling into the brand story for BKR, defining their reason for being and role in the world 

Design – using the brand story as a jumping off point for the design development of the new logo, look and feel 

Deliver – consolidating this into a brand guideline document 

We knew from the Discovery stage that the name was to remain untouched, so this formed part of our thinking from day one. The Brand Idea for BKR centred around the ‘Expansive Power of Community’ and core within this was the redefinition of their acronym to three core reasons for being of:
BUSINESS
KNOWLEDGE
RELATIONSHIPS

The design phase took this ‘power of three’ and created what we dubbed as the ascenders; the three pillars that become a graphic mark deployed throughout the new look and feel. With a fresh new colour scheme, new suite of photography (also done in house!) and some modern typography, BKR is now dressed to take on the next phase of its growth. 

The website rebuild presented a range of challenges; most importantly, it needed to deliver the revised brand message to a wide spread of stakeholders. Additionally, the website was a channel through which members would communicate; sharing knowledge and building relationships. With these requirements in mind, we set out to understand the task from the ground up, focusing on data sets and processes.  This enabled us to model behaviour in a highly visual way before committing to a direction in terms of design and development.  

Throughout the web process we collaborated routinely with the senior leadership to create agile and meaningful feedback loops We ensured that the rebuild was transparent and met requirements at every step. It is worthy of note that the project had a very firm deadline as it was intended to deliver the new brand and website at the annual conference in Washington DC. Silverless delivered both aspects of the project on time and on budget.

This project is the epitome of what Silverless does best, which is using our vast mix of in-house skills to create and grow brands from the ground up; strategy, graphic design, web design and build, photography and film, coming together under one roof, to create a full brand experience for BKR members and internal stakeholders. You can see the new website here.