The Landor Boat Story

Somehow I've stumbled across the story of Walter Landor, one of the earliest proponents of the brand and its impact in the age of media and advertising. Landor created his eponymous agency in San Francisco decades ago and later sold to one of those big old advertising holding companies.

I mostly know landor because his firm designed the crazy 1970's logo for the San Francisco Muni, still in use.

Check out the Landor Firm's website, which has a great profile of the man and his vision for what a brand can mean, as told in the way he somewhat controversially turned a down and out steamboat into his company's signature offices at San Francisco's Pier 5....

Above all, it fit Walter's brand. The Klamath was the very embodiment of everything he had built over the last 20 years, and what he hoped to build during the next 20. It would stand as a clear reminder to everyone, inside and outside the company, that branding is a business of passion. That after the customer surveys, design research, and market analysis – rigor he had introduced to the industry – successful branding requires an equal measure of guts, surprise, and delight.

...he bet his future on two things. One was the way he ran the company. Standard practice at the time was to build a small office around a giant personality – usually the personality whose name was on the front door. That leader was the company, controlling every project and taking credit for every idea. Walter was a leader who did neither. He believed in finding the best people, motivating them to do their best work, and then getting out of the way. He knew how to build teams people loved to join, including people who couldn't stand each other unless they were working for him. As a result, his company kept growing. And what would be treason at his competitors was commonplace at Landor: the staff were encouraged to compete with their boss, and each other. That's why Walter gathered all of them together – his entire, ungainly company – and presented them with their biggest creative challenge to date: designing their new floating home in San Francisco.

...As the fame of the floating agency spread, people came to understand the deeper significance of Walter's move. It was about freedom, and expression, and freedom of expression. It was about recognizing value that no one else could perceive, and then convincing the world to see things the same way. And for an increasingly international company, it was about transcending a single fixed address.