The brief
Nova had eleven years of engineering and three product lines still carrying their internal build codes. Every person we interviewed described the company differently, and all of them were right. The sales team was opening meetings by explaining what the company was not.
How it went
- 01
Interrogate
Nineteen interviews across engineering, sales and two customer floors. We asked everyone to describe Nova in one sentence and wrote down all nineteen answers. Only one of them mentioned robots — the rest described a night shift that finally ran without heroics.
- 02
Position
We stopped selling the machine and started selling the shift. "Nova runs the hours nobody wants." One sentence, defensible on the floor, and it survived a room of engineers who had rejected four previous attempts in the same room.
- 03
Design
A wordmark cut to survive being etched into powder-coated steel at 40mm and lit from one side. Three product lines renamed off their build codes. A type system with one display face and one working face, because a factory does not need six.
- 04
Ignite
A four-minute film shot on a live floor at 02:40, no voiceover, no stock cues — the only sound is the building. It ran as the site hero, as the trade-show loop, and uncut in the investor deck.
What we made
- Positioning platform and messaging house
- Wordmark, monogram and steel-etch variants
- Product naming across three lines
- Type system, colour and motion guidelines (62pp)
- Site design and front-end build, 14 templates
- Four-minute floor film plus six social cuts
What it moved
- 3.4×
- qualified inbound, first two quarters
- 11
- weeks, brief to launch
- 01
- sentence, agreed by all nineteen
“We had spent four years explaining ourselves. Now we say one sentence and the room leans in.”
Head of Marketing, Nova Robotics
Credits
- Strategy
- Ilse Brandt
- Design direction
- Marek Voss
- Film
- Adaeze Kuti
- Front-end
- Tomas Reál