Telenzo Carpets is a premium brand with a rich history in distinctive wool loop carpets which are sold through more than 1,000 retailers around the UK. Innovation, high product quality and a high level of service are core values of the business.

Telenzo Carpets is a brand with a long and rich history with over 100 years of experience, producing carpets since 1918. The company’s roots go back to 1918 when the founders started to produce rush matting in Genemuiden in Northern Holland. 

Despite having all this going for it, the existing brand was ripe for transformation. The parent company had acquired the brand some 18 months before and Bob was brought in to bring the brand to life. Through workshop sessions with the client we learned that Telenzo is ‘well-respected’ but otherwise ‘dull as ditchwater’, ‘wishy washy’ and ‘you wouldn’t be excited in the retailer in the when you saw it.’ 

As a premium brand the client was keen to move Telenzo Carpets away from the general rule that carpets are a distress purchase. Their vision was a modernised brand that was more aspirational, improving sales to the consumer with an interest in interior design prepared to buy because they want ‘a look’ and not just in need of a new carpet.

What the brand did have going for it was a product that is superb quality and the aforementioned long history of producing quality carpets.

We began with a deep dive researching the company. The client workshops gave us a number of areas of research to pursue including aspects the client wanted the new brand identity to reflect. Some of those areas included:

• The history of the brand
• The area where the brand originated
• Dutch design (as a Dutch brand, the client was keen to see some subtle reflection of this).

Our initial research into the background of Telenzo Carpets revealed the company was based near a national nature reserve which featured the famous polder landscape of rectilinear landscape features – the strips of land divided by irrigated water channels. The sense of drawing on the idea of nature seemed suitable as our other strand of research into Dutch design was indicating the close relationship to nature many Dutch designers draw upon in their work.

We arrived at a sense of what we were looking to achieve, summed up as: we will explore how simplicity and effortlessness might be presented with a natural spirit through flowing, organic forms.

From here we began to explore the polder landscape form in a visual sense, playing with the repeating lines to create simple graphical forms. We compared a drawing we had overlaid of a wavy shape on an arial view of a polder field with the shape of loop pile carpet and realised we were looking at the same shape. In an instant we had the essence of a brand device that would reference the geography of the company’s location, the close connection to nature in Dutch design and the form and shape of the product itself.

Once we had refined the brand logo and brand assets, we worked with the client to roll out the new look. We began by creating a comprehensive brand guidelines document to give the company a solid basis for future communications. We then worked on multiple aspects of the customer journey from swatch packs to retail displays, social media assets to carpet sample labelling.