The Refinery is London’s premier one-stop grooming emporium for men. Barbering, skincare and treatments are available in its two retreats in Mayfair and in Harrods in Knightsbridge. Combining the comfort and atmosphere of a gentleman’s club with the vitality and sense of well being of a health spa, The Refinery provides an environment for relaxing, unwinding and revitalising.

Minale Tattersfield created the name and the identity and designed the interior for the original premises in Mayfair. The materials used were natural and traditional but given a contemporary twist. Dark oak doors, marble floors, granite tiling and stone coloured grey or deep blue walls work together to create a space which is stylish and luxurious.

The Museum has the difficult task of shedding light on the grim art of war while avoiding being seen to celebrate it. Minale Tattersfield was commissioned to create a new identity for the Museum which would convey its purpose while taking account of the wider considerations.

Minale Tattersfield designed the visual identity and the signage for the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds. The identity is based on the horned helmet , the remains of a suit of armour belonging to Henry VIII.

I bought a pack of canned draught Guinness in a supermarket this week. Not, I grant you, earth-shattering information usually worthy of sharing with the world. Except when I tell you that the supermarket was a Marks and Spencer food store. M&S is one of the most interesting brand case studies around because, almost uniquely amongst retailers, they only ever in the past sold products under their own brand names. So until recently had I bought a Guinness-type beverage in an M&S shop it would have been rebranded something like “M&S Irish Stout” and there would have been no mention of Guinness (or Murphy’s etc.) anywhere on the bottle or can.


Marks and Spencer built up their market position with a clear and uncomplicated approach to branding – everything in their shops carried the “Marks and Spencer” parent brand and the “St Michael” sub-brand. It was a slightly curious and certainly individualistic brand positioning, but for a hundred years or more it worked well. Things began to change when designer clothing brands became so popular in the High Street and M&S and St Michael started to lose out – notwithstanding the quality of their products. For clothing Marks and Spencer introduced their own proprietary brand names (like “Blue Harbour” and “Per Una”), dropped the outdated “St Michael” completely and tried with some success to compete with the distinctive high street brands like Next. But for their increasingly important food shops everything stayed M&S branded – until now.


Marks and Spencer food stores are gradually introducing famous name food products in these products normal packaging and without any attempt to distinguish (for example) the Marmite in M&S from the Marmite in Tesco just down the road. The logic is clear. If Marmite, or Kellogg’s or Guinness have spent decades building up brand value in their products, and if they support these brands with extensive adverting and promotion, then Marks, as another retailer, can surely have a share of the cake. Why not? And there are good consumer-driven reasons, as well as cost advantages, for this policy as well. As a consumer I know what I will get with Marmite – whereas “Marks and Spencer’s Yeast Extract” would be an unknown quantity! And surely M&S can source the real Marmite rather more cost effectively than if they had to commission a manufacturer to make a similar product for them.



For Roadside Retail there are some talking points arising out of M&S’s new strategy. One of the most interesting is to speculate whether the current imperative by which an Oil company (BP in the M&S case) will continue to be the parent brand on a petrol station with the M&S food store being the franchise brand on a BP site. Why not the other way round? Under this different model Marks and Spencer would own the sites and it would be the M&S brand that would be dominant throughout the site and of course in the roadside signalisation and branding. Then M&S, just as they now do with Marmite and Guinness in the shop, would retail BP branded products (mainly fuel and lubricants) on their forecourts – with appropriate branding and signage. The attraction of this approach is that as income streams are increasingly from the shop rather than the forecourt the M&S brand would confer on the site a quality retail endorsement. But instead of selling their own branded petrol (as Tesco and Sainsbury’s do) they would sell BP petrol – a perceived premium product with a whole serious of potential reasons to believe in it attached. And, just as they do in a food store with a branded food product, M&S would benefit from whatever advertising and promotion BP does for its own branded network and product range as well as from BP’s proud history.

Paddy Briggs April 2010
© Minale Tattersfield

In the following major exhibition for Mysteriers of Ancient China, Graham Simpson, Minale Tattersfiled's senior exhibition designer created and designed the layout, the interior architecture, the showcases and the displays. This was The British Museum’s largest and most successful exhibition since Tutankhamen and achieved critical acclaim and a Design Week Award.

The unique collection of recent tomb discoveries, ranging from small pieces of jewellery to large bronze and terracotta castings, were being shown outside China for the first time. The exhibition covered the period from about 5000BC to the end of the Han Dynasty in 200AD.

The region of Trentino has to compete with other regions of Italy for its share of the tourist market and its share of inward commercial investment. It also needs to promote the sale of its produce and manufactured goods. Trentino felt that in order to increase their market share they needed to make the brand work harder. The existing identity had a rather cold feel to it and did not adapt well to different media.

The brief from Trentino Spa, the development organisation was to evolve the existing identity to support a more powerful brand proposition.

The design solution was to maintain the typography of the previous identity in order to give it a more lively appearance. Thus the letters are placed at different levels to give it a more lively appearance and to mirror the mountainous landscape. New colours are introduced to convey the greens of the pastures, the blue of the lakes and the brightness of the skies. The butterfly motif which was a feature of earlier logo was retained but placed comfortably within the Trentino name. The outline shape of the butterfly mirrors that of the region itself and in the new identity the butterfly is more stylised and lends a sense of harmony and movement.


The new identity has been extremely well received and we have also been selected to work on other branding projects within the Trentino region to promote its wines (Trentodoc), tourist hotspots (Lake Garda) and its agricultural produce (Melinda).

We continue to work with Trentino Spa to design their brand communication material. We are also working with the organisation to develop a guide to assist businesses in the region to work together and to promote themselves under the new brand umbrella.

April 2010 © Minale Tattersfield

When I was the project manager for Shell’s global petrol station re-imaging project in the 1990s one of my key tasks was to work with Shell Brazil where we had nearly four thousand Retail outlets. The Brazilians ran one of the most creative and energetic of Shell’s marketing businesses and they were always keen to embrace new opportunities to enhance their already strong competitive position. So when after a couple of year’s work we had codified the design standards in a comprehensive manual it was with eager anticipation that I flew to Rio de Janeiro to see how the company’s first re-imaged site looked.

I was not disappointed - it was a superb upgrade of a fine station situated in the lee of Corcovado hill in one
of the city’s most prestigious districts. The opening was carried out with typical Brazilian style – it was carnival time and wonderfully well done. The following day I had a meeting with Shell Brazil’s retail management and top of my agenda was the implementation programme for their huge network. It transpired that so much energy had been put into the first site that no time at all had been allocated to creating a project management plan for the remaining nearly four thousand! We had to start from scratch to get something in place!

The point of this anecdote is that whereas it is a necessary condition for companies to be creative and have a sensitive feel for new design this right hand side of the brain activity has to be combined with left hand side of the brain organisation and planning – especially when the overall task is complex and extensive. Art and science need to be combined you might say. As we shall see big companies like Shell have a built-in advantage when implementing huge programmes – above all they can get economies of scale from bulk purchasing. But smaller companies can also achieve excellent results because they can be much more hands on a site by site basis and be more flexible in respect of materials and implementation methods. One of the best realisations of petrol station design projects I have seen was in the United Arab Emirates where the two main players across Dubai and the Northern Emirates, Emarat and Eppco, have only around 250 sites between them but they are all sites which are elegant and customer-focused manifestations of the two companies brands. Similarly one of the best implementations of the Shell “Retail Visual Identity” design I saw was in Hong Kong where even though Shell had less than one hundred sites, they not only adhered to the design standards authentically but also by using some innovative materials ideas – mostly locally sourced – kept their costs under control with a site by site approach.

The essential difference is between projects where size demands that they are carried out with a sophisticated project plan and hard-nosed bulk purchasing (like Brazil or Europe for Shell) and smaller scale operations where far greater flexibility in the practical aspects of implementation, like materials choice and sourcing and installation methodology, is desirable. Where these projects co-exist for one brand, usually an international brand with businesses in dozens of countries, then this aspect needs to be understood at any early stage in the design development. There is little point in a designer creating a design element that has to be mass produced in modern factories if some of the implementation areas will have to rely on lower tech and more labour-intensive fabrication methods. Similarly a design element that requires a high degree of hand manufacture or finishing would clearly be unsuitable in projects where tens of thousands of units have to be upgraded.

Even a company as large as Shell can permit and even encourage small scale signage (etc) production in certain markets. I remember seeing exceptionally high quality elements being made in, for example, The Philippines using local materials and highly labour-intensive fabrication methods. Compare this with say Japan and you realise that the challenge is to get the right balance between capital costs and labour costs. In sophisticated markets with a tradition of high tech manufacturing and relatively high labour costs, like Japan, then an upfront investment in scale production equipment is preferable. In less sophisticated economies with lower labour costs, like The Philippines, then a more “craft” based approach is desirable. So long as the end result meets the design standards, is durable and cost efficient then how you actually get there doesn’t matter that much.

The adage that “All Markets are Local” applies to most things in a marketing business – including to some extent procurement - the challenge is to make the right judgment about the “extent”. There is little point in exporting factory-built components around the world if some countries can achieve the same quality, at lower cost, using local suppliers and methods. On the other hand concentrating production to a relatively small number of suppliers in Europe proved, for Shell at any rate, to be advantageous both in respect of consistency of quality and cost – the economies of scale were considerable. A small and highly skilled team was set up by Shell in the mid 1990s to manage procurement across twenty-five countries in Europe and for more than 12,000 petrol stations. The key to the success of this project, which achieved cost savings of around 40% compared with original estimates and delivered exceptional quality components, was commitment from the top. Not only did the senior Shell management in Europe support the project but they also allocated very senior and experienced executives to run it. That decision ensured both highly competent management and, crucially, that the exercise would in the end have credibility with the top brass in the European operating companies. This did not come easily as there was then a tradition of local autonomy in Shell and in some cases country managers took delight in doing their own thing – even if the end results cost more and were of inferior quality. A strong dose of dirigisme from the centre was necessary to achieve “buy in”! One of the key early decisions in Europe was to divide the elements of the re-imaging programme into separate parts and to use industrial manufacturing methods, not necessarily by traditional signage companies, where appropriate. It was also decided not to allocate any of the components to just one supplier – the size of the project required this for both security of supply and logistical reasons.

A roadside retail re-imaging programme is one of the most significant strategic investments that any brand can make – but it is not to be undertaken lightly. As we have seen it is essential that elegant and customer-driven design solutions are, as far as possible, “future-proofed” in visual terms – we are not talking “fashion” here! But it is also essential that the implementational and economic aspects of the project are considered from the start. Prototyping should reveal design flaws which can be both aesthetic and practical – a design solution might be rejected in consumer research or it may turn out that a particular element just cannot be built at an acceptable price. Whether the project is on the huge scale of a multinational brand or is much smaller in scope, perhaps only in one country, communication between those who create the design and those who will have to build and install it should start almost on day one of the project.


Paddy Briggs
April 2010 © Minale Tattersfield

Trentino cannot rely on one source of income either so with them we are looking at activity in the summer and how to promote different attractions to tourism such as light commercial industry, cultural and agricultural aspects to appeal to a different audience and/or spread the audience. The aim is to promote today and add value in the medium - to longer - term. It’s about creating a sustainable, well managed brand for future generations to enjoy as well.

Similarly with products like wine, if a brand owner is solely focused on sales and talking to one consumer, the consumer will only be interested in having a good product for less. But it is not just about pleasing the consumer through price, there are other means. In the wine sector, competitions and critiques are important.

Provenance and people play a critical role too - the history of the production of the products. These are the stories and emotions that give a simple product perceived and real value. Which leads back to territories such as Trentino and the aim of branding the region as a pristine, natural environment, which is respected and protected by the people in the communities who live there. That branding transfers back into products from the territory, which are consumed; stories are shared, the value is enhanced and the circle continues.
This symbiotic relationship is expressed in Trentodoc, the new brand name for Italy’s oldest Classic Method sparkling wine, created by Minale Tattersfield in 2007. The brand represents more than 35 producers from the region of Trentino, including Ferrari, Rotari and Cesarini Sforza. Ferrari (not to be confused with the racing cars of Enzo Ferrari) was the founder of the production of Classic Method sparkling wine in Italy in the early 1900s. Guilo Ferrari set up a winery in the Trentino region at the beginning of the last century after studying viticulture in France and working in the Champagne region. Ferrari, along with other established brands, has adopted the Trentodoc brand, which was created by joining the existing words Trento and Doc in order to capture the brand’s heritage, provenance and terroir and be easy to pronounce in English and Italian.



Whether a small, large or co-operative business, it is the stories behind the brands that matter and it is our job to help organisations tell them. An organisation that invests in telling its brand story well is an organisation that is investing in its future. This adds value and translates not only into sales but also provides reassurance and continuity for the brand, thus maintaining and increasing shareholder value.

VinItaly 2010 is billed as ‘Another love story in Verona’ - I will look forward to hearing more of your stories at the event.

Marcello Mario Minale
April 2010 © Minale Tattersfield

Owning the premium sector in prosperous times has been good business for Shell whose branded fuel ‘V-power’ is the fuel of choice for drivers who aspire to the F1 Ferrari dream. In times of austerity however real world realities set in and have resulted in the new ‘Fuel Save’ 95 petrol grade.

Will we see the rebirth of the failed Save brand of petrol stations and Price Watch initiatives?
Ask any of the petrol retailers at the March 2010 PetroForum in Kuala Lumpur you would find that achieving lower running costs was no 1 on their agenda. General Abd el Salam chairman of Watania Petroleum in Egypt for example explained that any incremental improvements to a petrol station design could not exceed his existing budget. SeaOil too in the Philippines were preoccupied by the impossible task of how to apply their canopy decoration to galvanised steel sheet as opposed to the silky finish that can be achieved with an Aluminium Composite Material.

It’s not just the fuel and grocery market where we are seeing the save mentality, for example KFC’s budget $9.99 meal deals for four proves ‘Food to go’ is very much in line.

This is not to say that the premium sector is dead. Mid to premium grocer Waitrose in the UK is bucking the downmarket trend but perhaps it’s a market reversal that sees the saver sector grow to become the overwhelming market segment and mid to premium shrink to a niche….and as a significant footnote, not all markets are creating austerity brands as its the more mature markets that have been most hit by the current recession.