Last week a Minneapolis industrial metals company underwent a long-planned rebranding, as Discount Steel got retired as a name and the company became known as Coremark Metals.
This wasn't an overnight task, of course, as there were apparently 452 items to redo.
There's something to learn here: not how the owners did this but why, as it seems to reflect a lot of good thinking about how to build a successful firm. Once being called Discount Steel made a lot of sense. Now Coremark Metals marks a big step forward.
It might be helpful to start by defining what's meant by a "brand." One way to define it is as a name or image that identifies a distinct business and says something to customers about what they can expect.
To understand where Discount Steel came from, you have to go back to its beginning in the summer of 1992.
Founder John Dormanen started working in the steel distribution business in Minneapolis as a high schooler and became a sales rep when he graduated. When his boss later died unexpectedly, Dormanen, with encouragement from his wife, Diane, decided to launch a business of his own.
Dormanen, with lots of contacts among steel suppliers as well as customers, had a business plan based on buying the steel business equivalent of scratch-and-dents, the steel that for some reason did not meet the specifications. His customers would be happy with the lower prices.
He called it Discount Steel, and the logo was a drawing of a worker who carried so many steel bars and pipes that all you could see were his legs and two hands. The two colors of the company's look seem to pretty closely match the home uniform colors of the Green Bay Packers.