HSSMI

Ask a room of engineers what their company does and you expect a precise answer. HSSMI’s answer had grown complicated. It helped manufacturers scale up low carbon technologies, improve productivity and move to a circular economy, and it brought chemical, mechanical, civil and electrical engineering together with business strategy, design and change management. By 2019 it had supported over 50 manufacturers, from SMEs to global OEMs. As HSSMI’s own guidelines later put it, describing what the company does had become “understandably confusing”.

That mattered inside the business as much as outside it. Teams across HSSMI’s offices and disciplines needed to reconnect around one story about who the company is and why it exists. The old identity didn’t help: a blue block logo spelling out High Speed Sustainable Manufacturing Institute in full.

We listened first. In a Brandscape workshop with HSSMI in April 2019 we built profiles of the three people it most needed to win: an operations director at a large manufacturer who needs the ‘how’, not just the vision; a director of government funding who wants value for money and clear deliverables; and the CEO of a smaller private company who is fighting fires and wants immediate value. For each one we mapped the pains HSSMI relieves and the gains it creates.

Then we took the brand to the people who would have to live it. We ran workshops with a representative group of employees from each office and asked why they work at HSSMI until the answers ran out. Four themes came through: over 40% named impact, nearly 30% innovation, about 15% the culture and 12% agility. As one person put it, “It shows the company cares about us by bringing us along.”

The same sessions tested the elevator pitch, mission statement, values and tone of voice, and we rewrote them from the feedback. People asked for plain English, more weight on research and engineering, and ‘open minded and inquisitive’ in place of ‘unashamedly challenging’. HSSMI’s guidelines put it plainly: the final answers could only be decided by its people.

We explored new names alongside a refresh of HSSMI itself, and in the end HSSMI kept its name. The identity we built for it centres on a folded symbol in orange, silver and blue, and each colour carries a job: orange for friendly, confident energy, silver for technical experience, blue for wisdom, trust and loyalty.

Alongside it we wrote communications guidelines that tell every team who HSSMI is, who it is talking to and how to sound: pragmatic, realistic and honest, passionate but collaborative, innovative but practical. They give HSSMI an elevator pitch its people helped shape, “Our agile, solution led approach makes us the only sustainable manufacturing innovation consultancy that works alongside our Partners to have meaningful impact and create real, lasting change”, plus descriptions of the business at 14, 57 and 112 words and a brand persona to write towards.

Then we put the identity to work. We designed the everyday kit, from business cards for the London, Midlands and Scotland offices to letterheads, a presentation template, monthly newsletter headers, lanyards and screen wallpapers.

For events we designed an interactive board, with a matching roller banner, that invites visitors to share the most pressing challenges facing EV manufacture today under Scale Up, Productivity, Circular Economy and Add Your Own, with postcards for their answers. We also showed how the brand could live in HSSMI’s own space, with concepts for branded walls, reception and wayfinding that points to a meeting room named Albatross, after the brand animal HSSMI chose during the brand work.