Sefast
Context & Challenge: Real estate is more than buildings. They are people's homes, workplaces and investments. They are schools and institutions for health care and emergency services. These properties that exist today work for us today, but we would want them to work equally efficiently over the decades to come. This is why it's important to care for them so they can stay intact in a changing society, and also to influence development positively with as little impact on the environment and climate as possible. It is better to solve the problems today before they begin tomorrow.
However, 9/10 times, property owners don't know how to identify the problems, let alone solve them. Finding and getting in touch with contractors for different jobs is difficult for those who are not accustomed to the market, and in trying to do so, they end up wasting time, money and resources. Hence, making it easy for owners to keep their properties well maintained without worrying about doing it themselves is a vital bridge that needs to be bridged. This is where Sefast comes into picture.
Sefast is a team of dedicated construction project managers and surveyors who help tenant-owner associations, real estate companies and industries to build, manage and maintain their properties.
At the time, when founders Johan Eklund and Erik Sundblad approached Hyper Island, they only had a temporary name that they weren't too sure about. So they asked us to come up with a name as well as a brand identity for their new start-up - something that they could build their vision on.
Naming: The temporary name that the client had when they came onboard was 'Repster', which sounded like a digital service - something they were not. To validate our assumption, we conducted a survey (both, telephonic and online) with 30 people, 22 of whom said their first impression when they heard 'Repster' was that it was a digital app of some kind. 10 said they felt it was a music app in particular owing to the '-ster'.
This perspective helped us convince the client that they needed a better name for their brand. Out of all the names explored, we settled on Sefast - the SE standing for the founders' names, Sundblad and Eklund, as well as for Sweden. 'Fast' also means housing in Swedish.
Discovery:
Now that we had a name, it was time to move to the discovery phase. This would consist of first continuing with research and getting a more thorough understanding of the market and the players, and subsequently leverage Sefast's vision and mission to discover brand attributes that would become our north stars, paving the way for the look, feel and tone of voice we would adopt in our designs.
Strategy & Execution: After gathering necessary insights and having clarity about the tone of voice, the next step in the long process of finding the necessary visual elements for effective branding was to create broad directions we could take and finalizing one that we can take forward and work off. We created several stylescapes based on the attributes we had narrowed down on. We wanted to tell a story that speaks of trust and amicability and adds colours or progress and vision to an otherwise conventional market. Out of 5 directions proposed, one was finalized.
Identity: After a lot of back and forth, an identity was crafted. Inspiration was taken from beehives for their quality of having collective conciousness as Sefast aimed to operate within the market as a brand that saw its customers as a collective of tenant-owner associations, property owners and contractors (and even itself) that it could provide humane real-estate solutions to.
Brandbook & Applications: A
detailed styleguide was made for the client so the brand can grow in the direction we envisioned. A range of applications were also designed.