When the nation’s largest car dealer helping people with credit issues was gearing up to relocate its HQ into a new, 97,000 sf building in Tempe last year, they had BIG ideas for the space and needed the creative horsepower to make it happen.
That’s when DriveTime’s CEO, Ray Fidel, taped longtime creative partner, Blind Society, to tackle the job.
The vision for the space that would be home to 550 employees was anything but the corporate ordinary. No boring cubicles, uninspiring spaces or cheesy inspirational posters. Instead, it would be filled with bright colors, a co-ed gym, gardens, relax rooms, lounges, and 46 uniquely themed shared spaces to reinforce the company’s ideology and guiding principles.
And that’s where branding and creative agency Blind Society came in: to creatively bring these 46 ideas to life.
From Rainmaker, Colosseum and Coexist to Gravity, Avant Garde and Enigma, it was a highly conceptual environmental design project that required serious brainpower and creative exploration. After an immersive session with the CEO and marketing team, it was clear that the expected and obvious ideas wouldn’t cut it.
Beyond conceptualizing the theories, Blind Society’s creative team had to work with architectural elevations and be mindful about how the designs would translate in physical spaces and all work together to make the biggest impact.
We worked closely with DriveTime’s longtime production partner, bluemedia, who spent several days on-site, with six installers to bring the one-of-a-kind environment to life which included custom-fabricated clocks, made almost entirely out of acrylic.
Walking through the space, you most likely won’t feel like you’re touring the headquarters of a used car company, but, according to DriveTime spokesman, Chris Piper, that’s the point.
“We’ve never had any intention to not look like a used car company,” he told Slate Magazine in an email, “but that’s not who we are at our core. We are an organization deeply rooted in technology, human capital and analytics—and we just so happen to be serving the used car industry.”
Ready to bring your brand’s story to life through environmental design?