The story of Comunal is the story of a living brand. It’s also part of our own story because Sed was born in Comunal. With them, we put our own vision of what it means to do branding to the test.

When Comunal was born, the concept of coworking was still not widely known in Lima. But the clear vision, solid experience, and demands of its three founding partners were crucial to steer us in the right direction and push us to create a powerful identity, which remains relevant today.

This is a cross-story. We were their clients and their branding studio at the same time. We became friends, and that coworking experience was a great advantage. It made us feel the brand from the inside with its daily life and ambitions. With its changes and discoveries. And of course, it created the most ideal and least common conditions – because you can’t always or want to live with your client – to develop a branding process by the book.

When we did the first branding of Comunal in 2013, the brand hypothesized that its target audience was freelancers and independent professionals looking for a more creative space to work and make connections. The keywords we had in mind from the beginning were: community, flexibility, dynamism, and growth. We gave it a meaningful name and designed a logo that responded to those qualities: squares that move, grow, or regroup through animation, demonstrating that movement and adaptation are essential parts of the brand.

From Souls to Free to a New Era of the Corporate World

But along the way, Comunal’s clients marked a different route, and the founders expanded their business vision to respond to new needs. It turned out that those free souls who were already starting to rent more spaces in the coworking space were budding entrepreneurs and future directors of their own brands – just like us.

What started as a space for independents ended up being “Offices for companies with plans to grow.” A mental click that became a slogan and sought to redefine the corporate world with new codes, freshness, flexibility, and with the necessary dose of creativity that this universe so urgently needed.

Between 2016 and 2017, we took on the rebranding of the brand with this new direction. Comunal went from being colorful, playful, and pop to being a more solid brand, where yellow would be the predominant color. We redesigned the logo to make it more elegant but retained its flexibility and movement.

We also accompanied them on various fronts, helping them bring that identity to their spaces in a replicable and scalable way. We generated new ideas on the fly to design an increasingly unique experience for their clients. All this, working hand in hand with their founders in an enriching process that has become a great teacher for us.

Comunal was able to create a community of “communeros” with a sense of belonging and pride. We created the famous yellow welcome notebooks, black mugs (that invite you to share your ideas, but not your coffee), and lanyards that still hang on many necks today. An easy-to-identify and memorable visual system. Merchandising items that don’t end up stored in a drawer because people really want to use them. Little by little, the Comunal brand gained affection and coolness. For us, this is part of branding: making design become everyday, tangible; part of people’s daily lives. Developing brands that are alive.

A Great and Challenging Purpose

In 2020, they called us again, this time to help them write their purpose and values. By then, they had a more solid leadership, more people, more opinions, and also more investors involved. It was a long process of discovery and iteration, hand in hand, to reach a final result that everyone felt was theirs.

Our role in this process was – and will always be – to question and facilitate, to unsettle them to help and guide them to avoid falling into common places. On the other hand, we must manage to agree on different people, intelligent and capable, who have different views on the same brand. And finally, what follows is to consolidate those ideas into a proposal with which everyone feels represented and of which they can be proud.

“Making the work experience as inspiring and human as possible,” this is Comunal’s purpose. It sounds big. That’s how a purpose has to be. Challenging, important, difficult to achieve, but achievable. And besides, leaving the world better than we found it.

A Coherent Brand Over Time

Until today, Comunal still has the same branding, demonstrating its relevance and adaptability over time and becoming a beloved and respected brand that has known how to always carry its vision forward.

This branding was a very peculiar case because we had a level of trust and understanding that is unusual. What we take from here is the task of turning a process as integral as the one we carried out with Comunal into a less lengthy, more concise process, where trust and understanding continue to be the keys to achieving extraordinary results.