Richard Seymour and Dick Powell, from 1984.

Seymourpowell is named after its two founders, the British designers Richard Seymour and Dick Powell. Design Week gives 1984 as the year the consultancy was established, and describes it as a product design group based in west London. The trade magazine has spelt the name in two ways over the years: as two words, “Seymour Powell”, in its news reports of 2007 and 2009, and as the single word Seymourpowell in a 2014 interview with the founders, which is also the form the company uses on its own website.

The two met through teaching. In that interview, published by Design Week on 1 December 2014 to mark three decades of the business, Seymour said he had a vague memory of seeing Powell at the Royal College of Art, but that they met properly at St Albans College of Art, where both were teaching part-time. Powell said he had seen Seymour’s work before they met, when he returned to the RCA for the following year’s graduate show, and recalled that Seymour had first studied graphic design at Central before taking multidisciplinary design at the RCA.

The founders set themselves a target from the start. Powell told Design Week that he had described the aim this way: if the head of Sony were thinking of going to an outside design business, Seymourpowell should be one of the three names on the shortlist. He noted that Sony at the time relied on its own in-house designers, and said the consultancy did later work for Sony and for similar businesses. He also recalled that Apple shortlisted the studio at some point in the 1980s and visited its premises in Fulham, and that the work went to the London consultancy Tangerine.

The early studio had a distinctive home. A Design Week profile published on 7 July 1995 described the office as a converted chapel off North End Road in Fulham, with a row of motorcycles parked outside that visitors had to pass on the way in. The same profile said every project passed through one or both of the partners, and quoted Seymour saying that the two of them still did a great deal of pen-in-hand design and could point to most things leaving the studio and see a large share of their own work in it. He said the company had spent its first eleven years refining that way of working, with trains, motorcycles, aircraft, watches, razors and kitchen appliances moving through the studio at the same time.

A brand built on styling, and dated client work.

The consultancy treated its own name as a brand. The 1995 Design Week profile said that from the start the partners set out to build one, and that having the consultancy’s name moulded into a series of Casio watches was both a result of that effort and a way of extending it. The magazine said the brand was built through self-promotion, with styling at its centre, at a time when many designers regarded styling as superficial; Seymourpowell made styling its stated mission.

The same profile named clients that included Tefal, Clairol, Yamaha and Casio, and said that within its first year, with no major products yet in its portfolio, the consultancy had three or four well known clients. Powell told the magazine that the partners described their work through anecdotes and through how they and the client saw things, rather than by trying to define design, and Seymour said the first step with a new client was to work out what the client’s own vocabulary was.

The Tefal link lasted. In the 2014 interview Powell said the studio had worked with the SEB Group, which owns Tefal, for 29 years, through many changes of management and several re-pitches, on products from kettles to a steam generator for ironing. Asked for the project that stayed with him, Seymour named the Bioform bra for Charnos. The founders also recalled a motorcycle design handed over to the German maker MZ, which Seymour said was changed in a series of small modifications on its way to production.

The partners also took design onto television. Design Week referred in 2014 to Better by Design, the pair’s 2000 series for Channel 4, and Powell explained that the timescales of television production rarely matched those of industrial production. He said the two had tried to keep the series close to a documentary, with themselves as expert witnesses, and Seymour said it was made in an honest, camera-over-the-shoulder style.

Both founders spoke about the business as their main project. Powell said in 2014 that the aim had been to bring the company to a point where it could survive the eventual departure of its founders without giving up its creative values, and that about 200 past and present staff came to the thirtieth-anniversary party. Seymour described the firm as an innovation machine.

A studio name made from two surnames.

An industrial-design consultancy sells a way of working rather than a product, so its identity has to be built from things that usually belong to clients. That shapes the visual habits seen across the field. Many studios set their names in a plain lowercase or all-caps wordmark with no symbol, a quiet signature meant to sit beside a client’s logo without competing with it. The name itself tends to follow one of two routes: the founders’ surnames, joined or hyphenated, which put personal reputation at the front, or an invented short word that can outlast the people who started the firm and travel more easily after a merger or a sale.

The real brand surface is the case study. A project page with a clear brief, process sketches, prototypes and finished objects does the work that packaging does for a consumer brand, and clean product photography on neutral backgrounds becomes the house style. Studio spaces carry the identity too: workshops, model rooms and material libraries appear in press images and recruitment pages. For a designer studying these firms, the useful lesson is restraint in the mark and consistency in how the work is shown.

Loewy in 2007, packaging in 2009, Writtle in 2011.

Ownership changed in 2007. Design Week reported on 12 September 2007 that the independent marketing services group Loewy had acquired Seymour Powell for an undisclosed sum, and that Loewy’s chief executive, Charlie Hoult, described the move as a merger. Under the terms, the consultancy’s directors and a group of associates still to be appointed were to receive shares in Loewy and some cash. The magazine said Seymour Powell kept its name for the time being, and that the management team of Seymour, Powell, financial director Russell Lloyd and design directors Nick Talbot, David Fisher and Adrian Caroen would continue to run the business, while Hoult and three other Loewy executives joined its board.

The founders linked the deal to succession and to history. Seymour told Design Week that the move had assured the succession of the business. Both sides pointed to the symmetry of bringing product design back into a group whose name came from the industrial designer Raymond Loewy; the magazine noted that the Loewy Group had been set up in the United States in 1929 by Raymond Loewy. Loewy planned to bring Seymour Powell together with stablemates such as Williams Murray Hamm, Epoch Design and The Team.

The studio then widened its range. Design Week reported on 22 January 2009 that Seymour Powell had merged with its Loewy Group stablemate Loewy Brands & Packaging, extending its offer into graphic branding. The report said the Fulham-based consultancy had worked in structural packaging for six years and had been looking to move into two-dimensional packaging, with Neil Hirst becoming acting creative director for packaging and Jonathan Shaw director of the 2D packaging offer.

The parent group changed hands in 2011. The Drum reported on 19 July 2011 that the investment firm Writtle Holdings had acquired the Loewy Group in an all-share deal, and listed Seymour Powell among the group’s agencies alongside Epoch Design, Speed Communications, The Team and Williams Murray Hamm. Writtle’s chairman and chief executive, Robert Essex, said the businesses would combine with Writtle’s model of decentralised growth and equity involvement for key directors. On its own website today, Seymourpowell calls itself a global strategic design and innovation agency, and lists transport work across road, rail, air and space.

For a design guide, Seymourpowell shows how a consultancy can make its founders’ names into a single brand and keep it through changes of ownership, in a studio where the partners’ own drawing was part of the pitch. Compare IDEO and Layer, two other design consultancies in this collection. For this guide we use red, deep blue and ink black with a grotesque sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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