Hellloooo there – cannot believe it’s been 3 years. I’d rather not think about how much I’ve aged since then, but like a fine wine, I’m now ready to uncork. I had the urge to re-kindle this blog after a particularly awesome year filled with world travels, graduating from Cornell and embarking on my career. I just stumbled upon it while Googling myself (everyone’s done it from time to time, right?) and figured why not give it a shot again? I LOVE to write, so here I go.
My step-father’s real estate company is going through a huge series of changes, and I’ve been fortunate enough to play a big role in developing his branding strategy. Considering we spent the better half of the entire day on Sunday developing a strategy and our own logo mock-ups, I realized how important this stuff is to me and how interesting it really is.
We used pencils and paper – quite old school of us – then resorted to Powerpoint, as we don’t have Photoshop or InDesign readily available. It was fun to watch the CEO so invested in the artistic and creative process of his company, and rewarding to know that in just 6 months post-grad, I could already offer him much of what a branding firm would charge an arm and a leg for – all from the comfort of our own couch. We had a lot of fun determining that he’d like to move the brand into a modernized direction, while still showing people that it’s a family run company rooted in tradition (His father started the agency in 1974 and he currently runs it with one of his brothers). My step-dad, Mark Laffey, and his brother Phillip are 100% Irish, and we wanted that to come across too somehow, without a gaudy, obvious shamrock.
So we came up with a new logo – an L with a celtic knot in the middle (a symbol of trust and famously Irish), sitting inside a clean double box and just above the name LAFFEY, well familiar to the local market at this point. Just below that, we have a dividing line and a tag line, “Heritage and Distinction since 1974.” Though we are not yet finished tweaking final details, we had a blast re-imagining the brand. We added green to the logo, the color of Ireland. Of course we intended for the subliminal ties to money and wealth, well applicable to a luxury real estate agency, as well as green serving as a symbol of nature. Since The Laffey brothers pride themselves on family roots, green automatically makes me think of a tree – family tree, and might lead others to do the same subconsciously.
I’m excited to see how this plays out, think I’ll help out with the website design too. It’s been a lot of fun to sit down with him and see this vision come to life.
On another note about branding, I just got home from a trip to Colombia with one of my best friends from Cornell. We are two very identical minds, hers a psychology background, mine communications. We wandered around grocery stores more than your average tourists, looking at all the chips, noticing how they had “Pollo” flavored Lays chips to localize the brand, and “Oreos de Fresca,” for the same reason. Strawberry, and many other fruit, is a very popular flavor in Colombia, so the localized touch of the big guys like Pringles and Oreos certainly did not go unnoticed. We also loved sitting in the plazas, people watching in the nicest/least creepy way possible, making observations about how different things were, yet how many similarities we’d also noticed to NYC.
More brand news to come..hopefully in less than 3 years this time. Perhaps I’ll even post the new Laffey logo once it’s finished 🙂