Merus: A rebrand for the future that honors the past
- Services
- Brand Positioning
- Visual Expression
- Verbal Expression
- Guidelines
- Campaigns
- Website Design & Development
One Design helped the commercial real estate design-build firm Al. Neyer become Merus with a celebrated rebrand, website, and brand launch strategy and campaign, winning over heritage-minded stakeholders, and successfully navigating change management inside and outside the company.
The challenge
Over its 130 years in commercial real estate, Al. Neyer had evolved from a local, family-owned construction business into a national, employee-owned, vertically-integrated development company. But their name, brand, and website were stuck in the past. They needed a new identity and messaging that matched the progressive, multifaceted major player they had become in order to continue to attract the best talent, clients, and partners … all while honoring their 130 years of experience and brand equity.
Together, we developed a new brand positioning, visual and verbal identity, content strategy, website, and brand launch strategy and campaign to tell the right story and set their teams up for success in using and rolling out their new brand.

The insight: Discovery reveals a disconnect
During a brand positioning workshop, we learned that what Al. Neyer’s clients like best about working with them is that in addition to being collaborative and extremely detail-oriented, they are deeply empathetic: they embrace their clients needs as their own, get to know them as people, and proactively think about solutions without ever pushing. These are really smart and driven people, but they’re also kind and warm. In contrast, the look and tone of their brand and website felt templated, cold, and overly-industrial.


We created a new brand positioning and personality that captured their true character, and delivered simple instructions on tonal shifts that the Al. Neyer team was immediately able to put into action.

The solution: The magic happens in the middle
As an employee-owned company that works in multi-disciplinary teams, everything Al. Neyer does is defined by collaboration and partnership. Their new name, Merus, (created by Lexicon) is a combination of “merit” and “us” that intuitively communicates the company’s heart, soul, and work ethic. And we created an “M” monogram out of two solid shapes that build something stronger together; a symbol of intersection and integration.
130 years of experience and reputation is not something the team wanted to leave behind. So we embraced the color red for continuity, brought architetctural linework into the new brand expression, and created a heritage logo to let even new audiences know that the company has been around since 1894.





A modern website that works as hard as Merus
Keeping with the empathetic brand positioning strategy, the new Merus website needed an overhaul to serve its audiences better. It needed to tell a clearer story about Merus’ business structure and offerings, create an inroad for subcontractors, and make it easy for the comms team to update the site and create case studies with less content.
We developed a new site powered by the user-friendly Craft CMS, and updated the information architecture, content strategy, and page nomenclature to help audiences find what they’re looking for. New CTAs and a contact form specifically for subcontractors work with—and explain Merus’—subcontractor workflow. We also designed a flexible case study template to accommodate different photo sizes and scale up or down for quick or in-depth case studies.
If you’re launching a rebrand you need a plan
A rebrand is a big change. You need to bring leadership along for the journey to ensure you have buy-in. Employees need to understand why it’s happening and be equipped with language and rationale to explain the change to others. Important clients and partners need to know what’s happening before the brand goes live to the public. You have to inform, reassure, and excite every critical audience, and you have to be very thoughtful in how you go about it.
We worked with the Merus team to develop a brand launch strategy and campaign, creating messaging, talking points, brand artifacts, touch points, and timelines for leadership, employees, key external stakeholders, and the public.


Two of the most impactful touchpoints of the pre-launch campaign included a suite of stakeholder gifts featuring the new branding along with a letter announcing and explaining the name change; and an internal brand launch event that featured a brand reveal video, new swag, and brand positioning collateral to introduce, document, and make actionable the new Merus personality.










“It was a special experience working with entire team at One Design. You perfectly captured who we are in words and in visual depiction. It has beat my very highest expectation and no doubt will mark one of the most formative changes we’ve made in our company. Certainly, the name and our brand will fuel us for many years ahead.”
—
Molly North, CEO Merus