GuideOne turns to Lat­i­tude to rebrand its buildings…TWICE

Every busi­ness loves return cus­tomers, but it’s pret­ty spe­cial when a client returns almost 20 years after their first deal togeth­er. In 1999, GuideOne under­went a name change and rebrand­ing. They worked with a design firm in Den­ver who reached out to Lat­i­tude to com­plete the sig­nage por­tion of the rebrand­ing process. Lat­i­tude man­u­fac­tured a vari­ety of logo signs and installed them through­out the cor­po­rate head­quar­ters in West Des Moines, as well as in sev­er­al branch offices.

PROAC­TIVE APPROACH

Fast for­ward almost 19 years as GuideOne pre­pares for anoth­er rebrand­ing. Pat Mesch­er, who worked on the orig­i­nal GuideOne project, heard about the rebrand­ing plans and reached out to GuideOne’s mar­ket­ing team.

“To be proac­tive, I gath­ered all my records from the first instal­la­tion,” Mesch­er says. ​“Based on the old plans, I could esti­mate costs for them at our very first meet­ing because I already knew how many signs they need­ed to replace and where every sign had been installed.” Mescher’s knowl­edge of the build­ing and scope of work secured the bid for Lat­i­tude, and in the end the project came in under his ini­tial estimate.

TIME­LINE

The next step was to cre­ate a com­pre­hen­sive time­line. GuideOne want­ed to unveil the new logo on May 1. Mesch­er worked with pro­duc­tion and the project man­ag­er to make sure every­thing would be ready by the dead­line. Lat­i­tude installed the first logo in the GuideOne cafe­te­ria the evening before the relaunch to pro­vide an opti­mal ​“reveal” of the new logo. The next day GuideOne exec­u­tives unveiled the new look, and Lat­i­tude began installing all the exte­ri­or logo signs, which includ­ed reverse chan­nel illu­mi­nat­ed signs and large paint­ed alu­minum let­ters with ground lights. Once the exte­ri­or had been updat­ed, inte­ri­or sig­nage was com­plet­ed over the next two weeks.

BEGIN WITH THE END IN MIND

Because Lat­i­tude man­ages projects from start to fin­ish (design, man­u­fac­tur­ing, and instal­la­tion), they antic­i­pate issues before they ever become prob­lems. Chang­ing large dimen­sion­al logo signs has the poten­tial to dam­age walls or reveal old holes. From the very begin­ning of the GuideOne rebrand­ing project, Lat­i­tude was aware of old mount­ing hard­ware and designed each sign to be big enough to cov­er any holes from old sig­nage. Lat­i­tude also paid care­ful atten­tion to the envi­ron­ment to which the signs would be mounted.

“One of the sig­na­ture logo signs is mount­ed on traver­tine,” Mesch­er says. ​“Because Lat­i­tude employs our own expe­ri­enced installers, I had no wor­ries about our peo­ple drilling through traver­tine, but in less expe­ri­enced hands that type of instal­la­tion can be tricky.“ Latitude’s instal­la­tion team also placed signs on wood pan­eled walls, glass, and drywall.

Latitude’s turnkey approach to sig­nage eas­es the process for clients. From design to instal­la­tion, Lat­i­tude han­dles it all, and antic­i­pates issues before they become prob­lems. This proac­tive style keeps projects run­ning on time and on budget.