Through marketing and innovation training, coaching and consultancy, LockSmith unlocks potential in brands and the people behind them. Founded in March 2020 by Alex O’Rourke (nee Smith) and Chris Lock, LockSmith has built a burgeoning new business pipeline primarily using the founders’ networks. Chris and Alex have experience of working with multi-nationals and startups ranging from Diageo and Coca-Cola to Fever Tree. With almost 50 years’ brand marketing, innovation & leadership experience between them, Chris & Alex set up LockSmith to help clients grow their business by providing marketing consultancy, training and capability building, and coaching, mentoring & business partnering.

The brief was to improve the perception of the LockSmith offering, stimulate the new business pipeline, and to elevate the LockSmith brand to become more of an authority – but in a non-corporate way. The LockSmith brand needed to communicate their ability to ‘unlock the full potential of brands and marketeers’, and to be seen to be authentic, personable, intelligent and more sophisticated.

LockSmith brings people and ideas together in unique combinations to help create a better future for all. They want to allow brands and people to realise their full potential by removing any barriers to success.

Building on the founders’ ability to ‘unlock potential’ and their light-hearted approach, the visual identity was created using playful combinations of archive illustrations sourced from the British Library, and balancing vibrant colours with a more muted colour palette. These combinations highlighted the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ as well as how the founders worked together.

As much as LockSmith are light hearted, fun and personality driven, it needed to maintain the credibility and heavyweight experience. This steered the creative solution to have a structured design system and understated typography to balance the playful illustrations.

A suite of ‘combination’ illustrations were created for the key areas of training, coaching, consultancy and solving brand issues as well as for lower level comms. We then brought the brand to life by designing and building their website, marketing collateral and playful items such as the vintage key and personal message.