Resolving 30 Years of Marketing Debt for a Luxury Design Brand
A Strong Brand on Fragile Foundations
On the surface, this was a successful luxury design house: distinctive collections, loyal professional partners, and a portfolio that regularly appeared in high-end projects worldwide. Under the surface, however, the brand was running on a fragile stack of outdated tools, complacent agencies, and informal workflows that had simply accumulated over time. The market around it was moving faster than its marketing and business development infrastructure could reasonably support.
Marketing was treated largely as a support function – fairs, brochures, newsletters, some PR, and a bit of digital “because we have to” – which slowly built up heavy strategic, operational, and technical debt. Tools overlapped, data sat in silos, and key processes were manual and dependent on individual knowledge.
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The difficult truth was that it still sort of worked: orders were coming in, projects were happening, but growth was increasingly driven by legacy relationships rather than a clear marketing engine. We couldn’t tear everything down and rebuild from scratch; there were clients to serve and partners to support. So the first step wasn’t to rebuild, it was to understand.
From Gut Feeling to Clear Picture
As a new marketing owner, before implementing any substantial changes, I needed a clear picture of how things actually worked.
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I started with a full audit of the commercial and marketing setup: channels, content, campaigns, tools, agencies, responsibilities, reporting frameworks. I ran interviews and workshops with the internal team to understand how work really got done, where time was being lost and which tools were solving real problems. I spoke with B2B partners (architects, designers, dealers) to hear their perspective on the brand, what was easy about working with it, and where friction showed up.
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​On the customer side, I combined qualitative and quantitative research to understand why they were interested, how they found us, and what pushed them to convert. All of this fed into a set of service blueprints and journey maps for partners and customers: end-to-end views of how someone moved from first contact to completed project, and where the experience broke down or depended on manual heroics.
Fixing the Foundation Without Stopping the Show
Thanks to all the research, it was obvious this wasn’t a simple “better campaigns” problem. The foundations needed work, but we had to do it without disrupting day-to-day business.
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We started with a brand identity refresh and a new communication strategy, not as a cosmetic exercise, but to answer a practical question: what should our brand be doing to support the pipeline? Socials, newsletters, and print were no longer vanity nice-to-haves; each was given a clear role in driving awareness, educating the right audience, and ultimately supporting lead generation and partner relationships.
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In parallel, we rebuilt the digital front door. The existing website behaved like a static catalogue, which showed that the brand existed, but did little to convert interest. The new site was designed as a commercial tool: it helped professionals and private clients quickly understand what the brand could do for them, see relevant references, and move directly into contact.
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At the same time, I streamlined the external support network. A long list of loosely aligned agencies was replaced with a small group of strategic partners across web, performance, and communications, each with clear responsibilities and shared targets tied to business goals.
Traffic quality improved, and inbound enquiries started growing with digital activities showing up in the pipeline as a real contributor. That early proof of impact gave us the mandate to go further.
Keeping the Proven, Cutting the Noise
Once the foundations were more stable, we had a different question to focus on: which parts of our model were doing the heavy lifting, and which were just habit?
Some patterns were obvious: certain types of partners consistently brought in strong, well-scoped projects; certain geographies and segments responded better to our way of working; certain formats of fairs, events, and PR consistently paid off, while others delivered very little beyond vanity visibility.
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At the same time, it was clear that the market context had shifted. Traditional distribution routes that once carried most of the volume were no longer as reliable. Yet a full pivot to a direct, transactional online model would have been completely off-brand and operationally unrealistic (never go full Nike!). Our offer was still high-consideration, often bespoke, and dependent on human collaboration and white-glove service.
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So instead of chasing every possible channel, we made deliberate choices. We doubled down on what had historically driven real value – strong partner relationships, bespoke project work, curated visibility – and started phasing out or minimizing the rest.
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By keeping what was genuinely working and cutting the rest, we freed up the space and resources to build a modern, scalable commercial engine around a heritage brand, without asking it to become something it isn’t.
Heritage Brand, Modern Growth Machine
With a clearer focus and a leaner setup, results started to compound. Lead volume grew, and quality improved: better-fit clients, higher-quality briefs, more serious projects. Digital stopped being a side project and became a predictable contributor to the pipeline.
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That traction made it easier to go deeper. We introduced a new CRM, standardized how leads and projects were captured and followed up, and tightened workflows between marketing, sales, and the studio. Where it made sense, we added practical automation and AI tools to remove repetitive work and improve reporting, so the team could focus on the work that actually moved the business forward.
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In parallel, we shaped the team and partners more deliberately: clear ownership across the funnel, fewer do-everything roles, and external specialists used where they truly added leverage.
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Over time, that showed up not just in dashboards, but in momentum: stronger partnerships, better PR opportunities, more visible flagship projects, and a brand story that continuously fed back into the engine. The company kept its identity as a heritage design house – but now with a modern, scalable commercial system wrapped around it.