Heirloom Agency

I am the Chief Marketing Officer of Bright MLS

At Bright MLS, we believe that home is a basic human need that should be accessible to all— so we provide an open, clear, and competitive housing marketplace with fair and equal access to information for ALL.

Referral

2-5 Employees

We are creating a foundational consumer-facing real estate portal for buying, renting, or selling homes. The new portal will replace Bright’s existing portal, Bright MLS Homes. By using this portal, consumers will be able to get access to the same listings as the pros, and find homes first, giving them an edge in a highly competitive real-estate market.

The name is great!

They were always on time, on budget and over-delivered

They were easy to work with and super smart.

No

I’m the global chief creative officer for Spiro, a global brand experience agency.

We wanted to evolve our agency and transform it into a new entity. Our team needed help doing that, so we engaged Heirloom. For context, we were formerly called GES. A lot of people had been with us for a long time, so it was difficult for us to decide on what the firm’s new name and market position should be. We brought in Heirloom to guide us as we figured out these things.

Heirloom did a month-long discovery process, where they interviewed stakeholders and held a series of workshops. Everybody in our company had an opinion about what the new entity should be. As a result, the Heirloom team had to bring us all together and find a common thread throughout our entire agency.

We work with Rob (Principal) and a strategic consultant. The strategist has helped us frame out all conversations within the workshops.

I met Heirloom through my previous company, where we used them to define our firm’s positioning. They also helped us through a series of workshops back then. I loved that they were inclusive and patient. That was the atmosphere that we needed in Spiro, so I recommended bringing them in to help us.

We’ve invested around $100,000.

We started working together in October 2021, and the engagement is ongoing.

We’ve launched our new entity and website, and we’re trending on social media channels. Overall, it’s exciting to finally launch, and I’m truly grateful to have them as a partner that guides us through the process — we couldn’t have asked for a better one.

For our workshops, we’ve used Miro boards as repositories of our ideas. To communicate, we send plenty of emails and use Teams for group chats. We’ve also been on Zoom calls almost every day.

The Heirloom resources are patient and can bring people together. They’re our guiding light, and they’ve dealt with our needs in such a short timeframe.

No, there aren’t any. No other agency can do branding better than Heirloom.

If your business is in a transformational stage and you need a partner to guide the process, you should pick Heirloom as your agency.

I run marketing for a division of a multinational technology company.

They helped us with brand strategy, which included positioning, naming, and messaging. They focused on brand consulting, messaging, and marketing services.

Heirloom has conducted primary research and interviews across team members, looking at competitive audits and analysis, and evaluating secondary market information. Then, they’ve come up with informed opinions for our positioning, which eventually leads to building out a narrative and messaging strategy by audience. In summary, the materials they create as a result of brand efforts become the foundational elements of our advertising and marketing.

Three people are involved. We have two consultants, and Rob (Principal) is our main point of contact.

Over the years, they’ve shown a high understanding of how brand strategy is conducted for technical brands. Rob has worked at many different companies, and Heirloom is one of the top brand firms in the world. Along with his intellect and point of view, they bring a lot of value to the table.

We started working with them in January 2021, and it’s an ongoing partnership.

Their work is setting the foundation for our brand efforts, which are represented across our marketing materials.

They’re on point. At the level we’re operating, they had to be malleable and work around our schedules. However, Heirloom always delivers on time.

They stand out for their understanding of their subject matter and expertise, as well as their timely delivery.

No, they have all the specific skills that we need.

Don’t get in their way. They’re good at what they do, and they have a solid point of view. You need to come with an objective stance around what will succeed from a company perspective, but Heirloom will come from a brand perspective with their expertise on the table.

I work for a global company that is worth $23 billion. It’s a design and manufacturing and supply chain company with over 100 sites in over 30 countries. I’m the VP of corporate marketing and my responsibilities involve everything from brand strategy and management to content marketing, sales enablement, digital social events, customer briefing centers, and so on.

I brought on Heirloom because we had a business that was growing within our organization around digital health. That business was becoming an important aspect of our businesses and we needed to start to build its presence and kickstart the entire go-to-market (GTM) strategy.

The team helps in building the business image for that brand because we knew at some point that we were looking at it to become a separate company. It was an organic business that was built within the company, so Heirloom came in to help with identifying and creating a logo, and brand identity system.

We only work with Rob (Principal) and he pulls in the people behind the scenes. He’s my main point of contact.

Heirloom was recommended by a colleague of mine a number of years ago. Rob was recommended and then Heirloom associated with that. When I talked to Rob, I looked at his previous portfolio, and then I decided to bring him on to work on an initial project. Since then, I’ve continued to work with them.

We started working together in January 2018, and it’s been a very successful partnership for a couple of years now.

Heirloom does very well because they really put together a very solid brief and understanding of business requirements. They’re extremely cost-effective and that’s the advantage of going with a boutique type of company to have this type of work done rather than by a large agency. Large agencies love to do that work, but they come at a premium price.

They have a structured and deliberate project management process, but it’s not rigid. They’re also flexible and agile in terms of meeting our business needs. If we feel like we need to go off internally and pause a little bit and revisit things for whatever reason, they’ve been very open to that too. Heirloom has been very supportive all throughout. On both sides, we’ve had a successful relationship and have met deadlines that we needed.

Their customer-focused approach and boutique-feel impress us. We have a very good partnership where I don’t feel like things are overly bureaucratic. Heirloom feels like a neighborhood shop that we can go to and trust. We have a win-win relationship.

I don’t think I have a comment on that because I’ve been completely satisfied with Heirloom’s services. If Rob was not the main point of contact, I would question how the company could make things work. However, since Rob is at the helm, I trust Rob and I trust that he has a system behind to make things work.

At the time, I was the VP of marketing or CMO for a Series-B-funded startup in the cloud tech space. We were a $25 million–$30 million-per-year company still in its early stages.

We were examining the opportunity to rebrand the entire company. What the company had been called in the beginning was good for how the product first hit the market. As it and the market evolved, the name became too limiting.

We went to Heirloom to ideate on different names. In addition to ideating on ones that we could actually use, they also did the research to see if the names were available.

Rob had a set of people helping him behind the scenes, which he’d known before starting his own agency.

We were looking for local people in the San Francisco Bay area so we could have face-to-face interviews. I went shopping for all of the usual companies —the big brand names in San Francisco that cost a ton of money.

We spent in the area of $40,000, distributed across a couple of people. We worked with them on a time and materials basis, and they were reasonably priced. Rob allowed us to pay the other people involved behind his letterhead, so to speak. We just paid him for the project, even though we worked with other people in the path.

We started working with Heirloom around January 2017, and the project ran for 5–6 weeks.

It turned out that my company didn’t use the name. We prepared to rebrand but while we never went through the actual change, the name we created was awesome. Later on, after I left the company, it was used in a lot of discussions around fundraising and acquisitions.

Rob excelled in terms of communication. We don’t expect that with smaller agencies, but I was delighted at how awesome that part was.

Rob’s ability to draw out words from executives and board members through interviews that got those individuals to expand their own views on what the company brand should be. I’m a marketer, so I have those thought exercises all the time but that’s not how most people think.

In the end, while it was awesome work, it was other company dynamics that led to us not using the name. Everything we did with Heirloom was great. I’ve done two prior company rebrandings, both with bigger agencies, and those didn’t run as smoothly as this one.

Even though some of the things that Heirloom will ask the client to do sound pretty simple, it’s amazing how many people are unwilling to even participate in the exercise in the right frame of mind. My advice would be to take advantage of the opportunity for Rob to use his methods to present the case to other execs and urge them to have an open mind. What’s interesting is that oftentimes we’ll get into one of these exercises and people will say that it’s not worth it and abandon it.