Twenty years of reputation in textiles, built on the quality of what they make and almost nothing else. GM Syntex came to Yellow for a rebrand that would claim the position they already held.
A B2B textile manufacturer, twenty years in, exporting most of what it makes. The trade knew the name and bought from them regularly, but there was nothing in the brand itself that said any of that.
The ask was a rebrand that would claim dominance: identity, guidelines and a website.
In the founder interviews Dalbir kept coming back to one word, timeless, and he was as clear about what it ruled out as what it asked for. Not new, not cool.
The companies he measured GM against were de Le Cuona, Vanelli and Elitis, and GM was already selling into that market.
This was not a brand that had lost its position and needed winning back.
The credibility had already been earned. It had just never been given a form.
A visual system that holds from a business-card mark up to a truck panel, and a swatch card, which is where a textile brand actually meets its buyer.
The wordmark and the monogram share a typeface, so either one can carry a surface on its own.
I ran the founder interviews and set the direction from them. I cracked the visual route after spotting a fabric running on an embroidery machine at their factory. The team and I found the executions, and the Creative Director made the final creative calls.
The visual route was stuck until a factory visit. One of the embroidery machines was running a fabric with an abstract repeat, and the logic transferred: textile design repeats a motif and crops into it, so the letterforms were built the same way.
The wordmark took longer. Dalbir's own reference was de Le Cuona, and he was set enough on it that we set their typeface on GM Syntex and presented it back to him. Borrowed, it carried de Le Cuona's character rather than GM's.
The next round kept the caps but put a slight swell back into the strokes. His note was that it was doing too much.
The final is that wordmark with the modulation taken out, even weight and straight diagonals.
Seventy-five-plus physical touchpoints since launch, and a head office that opened a few months after the rebrand carrying it throughout.
The identity had its first outing at Heimtextil, one of the world's largest home-textile fairs, which is the B2B room it was built for. The refreshed website went live in July 2023.
