The Challenge

Biome Renewables is a renewable energy-focused industrial design studio that came to us in very early days, as part of our Minimum Viable Brand (MVB) program. MVB serves as an incubator for promising startups — and Biome was very promising and very much starting out, still working its way through the Creative Destruction Lab. They had a single product — a wind turbine modification that promised big gains in efficiency — and they were looking for help with both positioning in the market and developing a brand that could grow with the company.

Which way the wind is blowing

Through deep industry research and workshops with Biome’s team, we discovered a key hurdle they would have to clear — and found a way to turn it into a stepping stone. Though wind power is thought of as the way of the future, as an energy-generation industry, it is actually fairly conservative and business-minded. Biome promised big results, but they did so through relatively radical means: both their technology and their process of design are heavily inspired by biomimicry, a deep, forward-thinking method that takes inspiration from nature.

Evolved Design

We helped Biome embrace uniqueness as their strength, positioning them as capable of shaking up an industry that had grown accustomed to incremental gains at best. We helped them foreground their practice of biomimicry at the core of the brand in a manner that has been readily embraced by the industry.

We gave them a brand promise and tagline that underlined both their natural roots and their significant potential, capable of explaining their current products and setting up their next steps.

We also delivered a dramatic visual identity that was able to suggest the process of biomimicry to the uninitiated in direct but deep ways, and was easily portable across the presentation decks and promotional materials they were producing for their first potential clients.

Gale forces

Armed with a confident vision that gave them a solid view of the path ahead, Biome secured a pilot project for their product for late 2018. They’re currently exploring ways to apply five more patents they’ve developed to help change what people expect out of renewable energy.