215 years ago Heal’s established the British homeware retail category, and has been dressing generations of British homes ever since. There is no business that understands more about creating great spaces than Heal’s. But in recent years Heal’s has been quiet, during what has become a critical moment for British interiors culture. With the retail landscape becoming increasingly homogenised and derivative – dominated by repetitive algorithm-fueled inspiration and cheap designer-copycat ‘fast furniture’. It was time for Heal’s to stand up for real design, and real designers. 

Good design doesn’t just make a space ‘look nice’. It changes the way we feel, think, and live in a space.

Our brand repositioning and brand world evolution reestablishes Heal’s as a British design institution. Next we built a dynamic multi-platform brand campaign – Where Design Lives – to encourage a new generation of design-conscious British shoppers to see Heal’s as a cultural authority. The largest brand-building investment the business has ever made, the campaign champions the life-changing power of good design as an antidote to the great flattening of British interiors, by celebrating the creating of authentic, personal spaces.

Brand Repositioning: Elevating Heal’s from nice retailer to essential design institution – the definitive voice on what good design is, and why it matters right now. Brand Design: Refreshing the whole brand world with a characterful, confident modern wordmark, more distinctive typography, a refined colour palette, and a sharper, more opinionated tone of voice. Audience mapping and sizing: Analysing and identifying design-literate British audiences, moving beyond traditional demographics to create a robust approach to targeting with greater depth and cultural fluency. Multi-platform brand campaign strategy, creative and production, casting and distribution: Visually-striking and culturally-provocative ongoing creative campaign that runs across OOH, print, windows, digital and social, establishing Heal’s as a brand with a strong point of view. Documentary series: Instead of traditional influencer home tours, we opened the doors to the unseen private spaces of a cast of cultural authorities: filmmaker Reg Yates, Net-a-Porter’s chief stylist Harriet Haskell Thomas, multi-award-winning British tailor Charlie Casely-Hayford, the fashion industry’s (and also, royalty’s) favourite baker baker, Claire Ptak of Violet Cakes, and long-time design afficionado Pearl Lowe. Directed by Stella Scott, this film series is a set of engaging stories about how good design changes and elevates lives, in big and small ways, every day. Brand tracking: We established new tools, and new company-wide skills and culture, around monitoring brand health and charting brand growth.