Recognition
Transform Awards 2018
Gold: Best Visual Identity from the Engineering and Manufacturing sector
Silver: Best Use of a Visual Property
Reiss
How a white-label lighting producer became an impactful brand with dramatic imagery and a tough new visual palette.
Transform Awards 2018
Gold: Best Visual Identity from the Engineering and Manufacturing sector
Silver: Best Use of a Visual Property
Manufacturing (Lighting)
Brand Strategy
Brand Identity
UX (User Experience)
Website Design
Brand Film
Product Photography
Guidelines
Reiss has been making lighting for 90 years. They specialise in lighting extreme environments of all kinds – from oil rigs and arctic vessels to steel plants and pollution-heavy road tunnels. Anywhere you really don’t want the lights to fail.
Historically a white-label producer, Reiss turned to GW+Co to help them fulfil their ambitious plans for growth via a new customer-facing brand.
To meet their vision of being recognised as a global leader in heavy industrial, hazardous and extreme lighting, we created a positioning around the simple concept of toughness. This boiled down to an almost cinematic line: When lighting gets tough.
This idea was brought to life by building an illuminated model of the new logo and subjecting it to elemental forces – balls of fire, waves of water, explosions, freezing ice, corrosive smoke and heavy impact.
To bring the stills to life, we shot an ambitious one-minute brand film. The two-day shoot required very high-speed cameras and a special effects crew, who were busy pumping the studio with dry ice, setting up a flamethrower, making mini-bombs with electrical detonators and piling rocks on rigs.
A second shoot featured ten key Reiss products. We exposed them to the environments they were designed to withstand and captured the results on camera, from high-pressure water to a vandal’s beer bottle.
In a sector with little personality, the new brand has launched with big impact. Demonstrating toughness through the logo itself has proved powerful, and the new look is being extended into product catalogues, marketing and a new website.