Welbilt, Manitowoc Foodservice at the time, was struggling to balance its drastic organizational transformation and ambitious growth and innovation objectives. Vivaldi partnered with Welbilt to define this new exciting chapter and empower Welbilt to achieve its full potential in the foodservice equipment industry.
To solidify its reputation as the premier choice for foodservice equipment, Welbilt had to create a strong corporate brand and a robust portfolio that truly communicates its value to consumers. This brand refresh would allow Welbilt to capitalize on new business opportunities and achieve exponential growth.
Through this strategic partnership, Vivaldi launched the extremely well-received Welbilt brand and brought the brand to life across all critical communication channels to position Welbilt up for success. By restructuring Welbilt’s product portfolio to reflect its commitment to its customers and solving their unmet needs, Vivaldi ensured the organization’s long-lasting relevancy.
In March of 2016, Welbilt, then called Manitowoc Foodservice, spun off from The Manitowoc Company to become a fully independent publicly traded company. The new era posed an exciting opportunity for the new entity to chart its own path towards growth and innovation, but it also raised a number of critical questions.
Shortly after the spin-off event, Manitowoc Foodservice partnered with Vivaldi Group to help re-establish the corporate brand strategy and identity, ground them in the more focused industry of foodservice equipment, and support the organizational transformation underway. We were excited to work with one the most robust end-to-end product-portfolios in the foodservice equipment industry and to have the opportunity to help build a portfolio and corporate brand that was more valuable than the sum of its individual parts.
Working hand-in-hand with the team at Manitowoc Foodservice, Vivaldi interviewed customers and rolled out a global survey to understand the product-brands’ existing equities and to identify relevant opportunities for the corporate brand. One opportunity stood out: making end-customers and restaurant-operators’, lives easier and simpler by bringing a solutions approach to commercial kitchens, while drawing on the corporate brand’s rich legacy history in foodservice.
The Vivaldi team didn’t stop at the corporate repositioning. We extended this new simplified, solution systems approach and renewed customer-centricity to develop a new product portfolio structure based on the customer’s kitchen workflow.
Lastly, to create further separation from the former holding company, a new corporate brand name was required to match the new brand positioning. The Welbilt name is both a nod to the company’s rich history and a clear signal to an exciting new future. Vivaldi helped the Welbilt team bring the new brand to life through a new visual identity system, and supported its rollout less than 9 months after kicking off the initial work. The new Welbilt brand was extremely well received, with a special mention for the icon color coding which reinforces the customer kitchen workflow and, for the first time, creates a strong linkage between the global product brands and the corporate brand.
Less than 9 months after starting the initial corporate brand strategy engagement, the new Welbilt brand was launched to the world at the 2017 NAFEM tradeshow, one of the industry’s largest shows. Since the spin-off, the Welbilt stock price has risen over 55% (as of May 9th, 2017).
