Energy to impact.
How do you revitalize and unify a global brand with 75+ years of history, but varying products, markets and service models?
Paul Mueller Company has always been known for hard work, quality and expert craftsmanship. These traits allowed them to grow from a small, midwestern sheet metal shop to a global supplier of heating, cooling and storage solutions for farmers, brewers and engineers.
In the midst of this growth, they needed a brand identity that would elevate their heritage, while solving some of their growing pains—allowing them to move forward as a global industry leader.
In order to solve these problems, our team began to answer:
A. How do we proceed when half the world knows us as Paul Mueller Company and the other as Mueller, a name associated with many other North American and European brands?
B. How do we move beyond a product producer into a position of evolving industry solutions?
C. How does Mueller move forward, without forgetting who we are?
We returned again and again to one core idea.
Create Quality for Life
We evolved the Mueller mark to maintain equity in their blue rectangle and shortened the long, lanky shape to work better across digital and social media contexts. We then updated the wide, extended letterforms for greater legibility at small sizes and created a full Paul Mueller Company wordmark and new heritage symbol.
A visual identity system supporting these marks began to take shape, balancing heritage with more modern sensibilities that point to their European side. The system consistently builds on the rectangle as a graphic device—translating to angular iconography, masculine typography, a modular web experience and sub-brand architecture that utilizes the shape.
We complimented the visual identity with a proud, yet modern brand voice that helps position them as a leading force in the market.
“The rebranding process was visually evolutionary, but the underlying brand strategy changes have been revolutionary. We are now beginning to see the fruit of the effort.”
—Jay Holden, Global Marketing Manager
