sculpture created for Waldron Wealth Management

Sculpting a New Brand Identity

To help us transform complex financial documents into something both beautiful and meaningful, we turned to design giant Stephen Doyle of Doyle Partners.

Our client, Waldron Private Wealth, services ultra high net worth individuals and family offices by providing the multiple skill sets needed to efficiently manage significant wealth, simplifying their clients’ lives. However, the way they organized their services as well as their messaging had become overly complex. We helped them refine both to fully embody their revised tagline, “Simplifying wealth. Simplifying life.”

We immediately thought of Stephen’s sculptures as a way to communicate the story we needed to tell: Waldron takes on all the complexity of wealth so you don’t have to. Our first step was to wade through the various tax, legal forms and contracts that comprise the financial world. Armed with thousands of jargon-laced documents, along with an array of news and market headlines, Stephen worked to create a purely chaotic form. The result: a truly uncomfortable visual experience showing how all of the messages, data and information—positive, negative, often conflicting and always confusing—play on investors’ psyches.

The answer to that emotional chaos, a second sculpture—representing Waldron’s clear and transparent processes—was created. The perfect summation of all that Waldron does, it shows the chaos of the first structure organized and simplified into a beautiful and pleasing polyhedron star. The form is balanced, symmetrical, open and simple, yet beautifully complex—the exact visualization of what Waldron provides.

Supporting image for the blog entry, Sculpting A New Brand Identity, shows a complex shape and an organized shape represented by abstract paper sculptures.

We also wanted to represent not just the end result of crystalline clarity, but the way Waldron experts, in so many disciplines, function as a truly integrated team.

We mused over mobius strips (does that say integration or infinity?) and even more complex-yet-organized polyhedron shapes that interconnect (will that be too similar to our star?). For a past project, Stephen had created a simple star-like shape out of intersecting Eames cards, which led us to think about a freestanding structure created out of interlocking planes. The final piece uses whole Waldron documents representing disparate disciplines, literally integrated with one another. This may be my favorite of the suite.

For the blog entry, Sculpting A New Brand Identity, this image shows the creative stages of brainstorming, the idea, and the final finished paper sculpture.

These intricate and painstakingly built sculptures transformed the way I think about wealth—I hope they’ll do the same for you. Check out the finished products (and more of Doyle’s sculptures) here.

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