Earlier this week design supplier Cafe Culture + Insitu announced that it was rebranding to Design Nation. ADR catches up with founder and director Marnie Hammond to take a behind-the-scenes look at the newly named company.

Cafe Culture + Insitu started out in Canterbury, Sydney in 1998 with a trade showroom supplying café furniture direct to hospitality owners. Since then, the company has evolved and now provides designers working across hospitality, workplace, residential, education, healthcare and aged care sectors with furniture and design solutions.

To better communicate this – and to mark 20 years in business – founder and director Marnie Hammond decided to go on a rebranding journey to create a name that would become synonymous with the brands the company represents and the type of projects it works on across Australia and beyond. Hammond and the team worked with a branding expert and held a workshop with clients, key industry professionals, media, internal stakeholders and a handful of people from corporate Australia outside of the industry.

“The workshop looked at who we were and really delved into the DNA of us as a company and our culture,” says Hammond. “I was a little bit nervous going into the workshop because rebranding is a big thing to do, but everybody was so open and it was such a great experience talking about the company.

“It was actually quite nostalgic – a lot of the stories from many years ago and the experiences we went through came to the fore, so it was a fantastic experience,” she says.

Following the workshop, a session with the branding and creative team took place, which looked at the company’s archetypes, how it appears visually and how that was going to be represented in a brand name or a logo.

“What came out in the creative session was that the [current] logo is very identifiable to who we [are] and we needed to continue with that. That’s also why it’s at the front of the new name – because it represents where we’ve come from in the past and how we start to move forward to the future.” The Design Nation brand name officially came into effect on 11 February.

Images courtesy of Design Nation