VES
A corporate identity for an enamelware maker, rooted in the Saxon craft heritage of its home city, Sighișoara.
VES — Vase Emailate Sighișoara — had been making enameled cookware in the Transylvanian citadel city of Sighișoara since 1978. By the late 2000s it was Romania’s number-two producer of enameled vessels and its leader in stoves, convectors, fireplaces and cookers. Then the 2009 crisis hit the factory hard: months of technical unemployment, restructuring, and a decisive turn toward export. The company decided the recovery could not stop at the balance sheet — the brand itself had to be rebuilt.
The problem was the meaning of the product. At home, enamelware and stoves read as categories of another era — old-economy goods, bought on price and replaceable by imports. In Western Europe the same vessels were prized for exactly what they were: durable and authentic, made the traditional way. The company was sitting on an asset the domestic market had stopped seeing, and a price race against imports was one an old factory could not win. A provenance race, however, was one nobody else could enter.
Brandient reconstructed the brand around origin. The strategy reached back to Sighișoara’s Saxon craft heritage — the world of guild, smith and maker — and proposed a mark of origin, Email de Sighișoara ("Enamel of Sighișoara"), turning the factory’s address into its commercial argument: in this category, the premium follows provenance, not specification. The corporate name was compressed to VES, preserving the equity of the old denomination while shedding its industrial-era weight; the new symbol, a centaur drawn from the mythology of fire, gave a maker whose vessels are born in kilns — and whose second business is heat itself — a mark it could own outright.
Beneath the corporate brand, the architecture separated two conversations: Ives, the premium cookware line for a modern buyer in search of authenticity and aesthetics, and Caldi, carrying the heating business — stoves, fireplaces, convectors — for the functional buyer. One identity could serve the home market and export without forcing a single story on very different customers.
The new brand launched in 2010, announced together with the company’s return-to-growth plan. The more telling proof came a decade later: when the factory’s enameled cookware was relaunched to consumers in 2020, it carried one name — Email de Sighișoara. The corporate vehicle changed; the idea of origin held. The strategy had placed the equity where it could outlast everything else.
Client:
VES (Vase Emailate Sighișoara)
Industry:
Non food and CPG
Project type:
Rebranding — Brand Reconstruction
Date:
2010
Services:
Brand Positioning, Brand and Portfolio Architecture, Logo and Visual Identity Program, Corporate ID Program, Packaging Design
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