PLEX SYSTEMS
Manufacturing disruption
For decades, Plex software has been helping manufacturers make the mind-blowingly awesome products of the future. But by 2017, manufacturing had changed. With the advent of concepts like Industry 4.0, connected manufacturing and the Internet of Things… Plex was asking where it fit in, and did it? The industry needed to be reminded who Plex was. What Plex is. What Plex can do. The game was afoot. Working with new leadership, we set out to author a case study in disruption.
WHAT WE DID:
Purpose
Strategy
Tagline
Naming
Positioning
Identity
Guidelines
Messaging
Digital
Collateral
Environmental
We turned Plex into a purpose-driven organization with a brand that embodies their new vision and vigor. Our advice: if ever your own industry forgets how great your brand is… you don’t bore them into remembering. With that, an outlaw brand was born.
Moving away from the cloud-based story that had served it so well for so long, we renamed the product “Smart Manufacturing Platform.” It unified the company’s commitment to what they do best—bringing technology to the shop floor. “Make It Smart” did the same for their new purpose: “to help the world’s innovators make awesome stuff.”
In a design system coined “Bold Simplicity,” the new identity used the idea of “complex data being simplified” as its guide.
Grove designed a custom iconography system for Plex that built off this “complex things being made simple” idea using the shapes of the Plex logo and its typeface. The forms of the icons were reduced to their most basic elements. Bold and simple, they reinforce the principles of the identity.
This is the kind of transformation more often associated with B2C brands. It made waves. The new brand rolled out to much fanfare at the company’s largest annual gathering. Print, collateral, a new site and an internal brand microsite all challenged and inspired employees to “get smart” on the new brand.
