M&C Saatchi’s global branding agency Re has relaunched itself as a global design business to help organisations rebuild, renew and inspire connections.
Thirteen years since its doors first opened in Sydney, Re now has studios across Australia, the UK and USA. It boasts a roster of clients including FIFA, Skyscanner, Optus, Woolworths, OPPO, Swisscom, The Commonwealth Bank, Franklin Templeton and The Global Fund to name a few.
As of today, Re sheds its legacy as a branding agency, and becomes a design business. This doesn’t mean forgetting about the important role that brand has to play, but in recent years, design has emerged as a field capable of addressing highly complex and often intangible problems that eclipses traditional solutions. And it’s this potential of design – it’s potential to connect (or reconnect), to provide pathways, hope, emotional engagement – that has informed the relaunch of Re’s brand.
Re has gone to market with a new offer, new website re.design and a new positioning: Design to Connect.
“Design to Connect is our new positioning, but it’s more than a sales pitch. Over the years, we’ve seen how design has the ability to connect hearts with minds, problems with solutions, and people with products and experiences. We’re obsessed with the power of design, so for us, Design to Connect is a call to arms. And we call ourselves a design business. Not an agency. It’s important because design goes deeper than how something looks, or the message it conveys,” said founder and CEO Patrick Guerrera (main photo).
The shift comes off the back of a number of new business wins and significant growth that have seen the business increasingly use design-led thinking to solve business problems and create experiences that extend beyond the everyday rebrand.
Guerrera added, “Increasingly, we’re witnessing that the traditional rebrand simply isn’t cutting it for businesses that are seeking to stand out, and scale at speed. Our clients, both new and old, see the value of design and want it to touch every part of their organisation. They want (and need) the promises their brand is making to customers to resonate with their employees as well as society at large. What we do at Re is use design to connect every layer of a business, from the C-suite to a company’s people, to consumers – so everything about them and their business are connected. We call it full-stack design.”
The new Re offer, which has helped attract global tech businesses including Skyscanner in the UK and online education giant Imagine Learning in the US, includes digital products and service design, consumer experience design, spatial design and employee experience design. These specialist capabilities have been bolstered by 40+ hires across the group in 2021.
