Northwind: rebuilding a voice from the inside out

Situation

Northwind had spent twenty years becoming the least memorable company in a category where everyone sounds the same. Three acquisitions had left them with four logos, two tones of voice and a sales team writing their own decks.

Strategy

We started with the people who actually talk to customers. Six weeks of listening produced a single organising idea: say the hard part first. It was already how their best account managers worked — it had simply never been written down.

• One voice, documented, with the awkward sentences kept in
• A visual system that survives being set by non-designers
• Film that shows the depot, not the boardroom

Work

The identity is deliberately plain: one typeface, two weights, a single accent. Everything that could be a rule became a rule, so the system holds when we are not in the room. We shot the launch film over four days across three depots, entirely with staff rather than actors.