A powerful partnership for recruitment brands
Stuff and TIMESTWO Investments: a powerful new growth partnership for people and recruitment brands.
Brand and marketing agency Stuff has long been a specialist within the recruitment industry sector. Over the years we have helped many people-based companies start, evolve and transform their brand to enable growth.
In 2019, this specialism took on extra significance when we were commissioned by two of the industry’s most respected entrepreneurs, Mike Beesley and Keith Dawe.
Mike and Keith founded Sanderson, one of the UK’s most successful recruitment brands, more than 40 years ago. They approached us with an exciting new idea – a start-up investment programme focused at finding the next big names in people resourcing and bringing together powerful specialist consultants to take these new names to market.
We were appointed as the Bristol-based organisation’s marketing partner and our first piece of work was to create a completely new brand for the venture.
Using Stuff’s proven brand iteration process, we recommended a new name, TIMESTWO, and its associated new identity. TIMESTWO because this was the venture of two proven entrepreneurs, TIMESTWO because of the single-minded objective to accelerate and multiply growth, and TIMESTWO because partnership powers business success. All-in-all a very strong brand DNA.
As TIMESTWO’s marketing partner, we then set to work on some of the new businesses coming into the TIMESTWO stable, helping to bring these start-up and scaleup businesses to life.
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But one of the most high-profile piece of work has been for Surya Recruitment, which has recently launched during lockdown – no mean feat!
Surya’s journey began in January this year when founder Alka Graham walked through our doors practically on the first day of being on the TIMESTWO programme.
We quickly understood this was to be a new, progressive energy recruitment specialist, committed to challenging the status quo and finding new ways of solving resourcing problems. But there were several challenges to solve:
- Fully define the use of the name Surya
- Bring sense of this to create a cohesive brand
- Understand the exact space in the energy market Surya was to operate in
- Prepare for a quick launch
Our brand development came from strong insights:
- The name Surya is the Sanskrit word for the sun, something we used to form the basis for our brand
- The logo could be created with the ‘A’ being replaced with the ^ symbol, providing direct reference to the Surya Namaste, also known as the ‘salute to the sun’
- The above would provide for bright, energetic colours to be combined with bold typography to complete a look that reflects a new dawn in energy sector recruitment
Click here or on the image above to see more work on Surya’s brand.
On completion and launch, Mike Beesley, co-founder of TIMESTWO Investments had this to say:
“All of us at TIMESTWO are delighted to see this fantastic brand come to life and are proud to work alongside Stuff Advertising as our brand partner.
“The team were able to see the Surya vision and translate this into ‘finding new ways of resourcing a changing world’ for the energy sector. So, in early 2020 they had already created a brand that was prescient in its message, and which has allowed us in many ways to deliver on its promise now. This is the power of working in partnership.”
Jonnie Galvin-Wright, Managing Director at Stuff says, “We are proud to be brand partners to TIMESTWO Investments and get this brand up and running; especially during lockdown which is testament to our colleagues and the wider team at Surya. We have always believed that creating brands should be an inclusive process, with agency and client strongly teamed. That vision has once again been realised with this modern and timely brand”.
You can also read Alka’s story about launch in her blog here.
