Charney
Companies
Brand identity, strategy, architecture, naming and implementation for the company founded by New York City based real estate developer Sam Charney.
Earlier this year I was brought in by the team at Charney Companies to rebuild their brand identity—from initial strategy, through architecture, to visualization and implementation.
As a developer, brokerage and management company with a builder-first mindset devoted to craft and art, the goal was to imbue the identity with a creative soul anchored by a sturdy and forceful graphic language informed by the confidence of the leadership of Sam Charney—the founder and principal whose namesake carries the brand and sets the tone for the work.
The goal was to assess and rebuild the brand architecture, strategy, tone of voice, and later the visualization that distilled the teams expertise into a simple yet dynamic and expressive brand system. Alongside my partner Dudley Versaci, we kept the crew tight, the two of us working directly with the Charney team collaborating and executing all of the work so we could move quickly and with clarity over the span of about three months.
We started with an exercise in teasing out first the baseline strategy and brand architecture followed by a naming exercise. Are we a house of brands, a branded house, or something else entirely? In the end we landed on using founder Sam Charney’s name as the foundation on which to build the three pillars of CHARNEY. We built a strong, confident visual identity to match.
This above represents the family of core brand marks, which lays the base for the more dynamic, expressive and flexible brand identity.
One of the major unlocks in the project was our new brand platform and consumer facing tagline: “Let’s Build Something Beautiful.” They see the built environment as a creative arena. They are cultivators and place-makers. They are builders-first, constructing a city that they believe has an equitable place for everyone. We all deserve beauty and the proposition of beauty means something different for each of the three pillars of what Charney offers as a business and to the city and world around them.
Many thanks to Sam and the whole Charney team for the trust and your collaborative spirit to make sure the work turned out as great and unique in category as it could.
© Justin Thomas Kay 2024