Portico Design Group
Repositioning an interior design firm as a collaborative business with years of experience & high professional standards.
CHALLENGE
Founded by two partners in 1992, Portico Design Group is a Vancouver-based, full-service interior design firm specializing in multi-family, resort, and hotel developments in Canada and internationally. Throughout its 20-year history, Portico has built a reputation as a trustworthy brand with consistently high-quality standards and service. Word of mouth has been the primary means of new client acquisition.
However, with recent market and economy changes, the company decided to diversify into new and different clientele—a challenging task to tackle with a stale identity and old marketing materials. Both the Portico logo and website were dated and no longer accurately conveyed the expertise and refined approach of the business, their vision, beliefs, creativity, or values. In addition, the website was no longer maintainable, and not readily accessible by current mobile devices.
APPROACH
Portico Design Group faced a challenge not unfamiliar to many prestigious and well-established professional services firms of their calibre. When Portico first started, the brand was closely tied to the personal brand of the founding principal. Twenty years later, this was no longer true: the firm’s output and reputation is composed of all of Portico’s staff.
We conducted staff, vendor, and client surveys, followed by an intensive brand discovery process. This lead us to several key insights that drove the new website content strategy and design, including introducing a more user-friendly content management system that gives administrative power back to Portico to manage their online presence. The new work is an outward expression of the fresh, fun, and modern attitude of everyone who works at Portico—not just the owners.
RESULTS
Besides a refreshed brand identity, stationery, and related materials, we provided Portico with a website oriented toward their desired clientele that shows not just their work, but reveals some of the fun personality behind the scenes too. The new website is hosted on a secure and an easy-to-use content management system and is fully responsive, optimized, and mobile-compliant. Users have quick access to key areas of the site with minimal clicks, yet the site is intended to encourage exploration too.
We also implemented a social media strategy for Portico to fuel the their online presence and promote team involvement. The benefits of implementing visually based sharing sites like Pinterest were also impossible to ignore here. In fact, the principals and staff so thoroughly embraced this they went from zero social network pages to five (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Houzz and LinkedIn) on their new site. Portico now has an online experience much more aligned with the group of talented and fun-loving people of which it is comprised.
Launch website: porticodesign.com
