Case study / Corporate identity and website
From a Clipart Logo to a Global Investigation Brand
A corporate investigation firm was pitching law firms, banks and insurers while running a clipart logo and a website that looked like a neighbourhood business. The work started in 2014 and has not stopped since.
At a glance
- Client
- GREVESGROUP, named here with their permission
- Industry
- Corporate investigation, risk and brand protection
- Region
- Global, with offices in India and a venture in Dubai
- Started
- 2014, and the engagement is still running
- Services
- Logo, corporate identity, enterprise website, SEO strategy, print collateral
- Our role
- Brand, design and digital lead, first in house and now as their agency
2014
When the rebrand started. The engagement has run continuously since, which is the number we would weigh most.
6x to 7x
The rise in enquiries Rajeev George reports after the rebuild, from a base of 40 to 50 a month. His figure, not our measurement.
350+
Websites built across the group and its ventures in the years since, by our own count.
10+ yrs
How long the identity has been in service without a redesign.
The enquiry figure is the client’s own, given to us rather than measured by us, and the section further down explains why we have not tried to verify it. The website count is ours. Treat the length of the relationship as the most reliable signal here, because it is the one neither of us can massage.
What the firm looked like in 2014
GREVESGROUP investigates corporate fraud, runs background screening and protects brands against counterfeiting. Its buyers are law firms, banks, insurers and corporate counsel. Those are people who check you before they call you, and who are professionally trained to notice when something does not add up.
The firm was selling that work behind a clipart logo and a website that looked like a small local business. The capability was real. Nothing about the presentation said so. By the client’s own count, enquiries were running at 40 to 50 a month.
The gap was not cosmetic. An investigation firm sells discretion and competence, and a buyer who cannot see either on your website assumes you do not have them. The brand was actively arguing against the pitch.
What the real problem was
A new logo was the obvious ask and the smallest part of the answer. Three things were doing the damage.
The logo was the symptom, not the cause
Clipart signals that nobody senior ever looked at the brand. That reading transfers straight onto the service, because a buyer has nothing else to judge you by before the first call.
The website contradicted the pitch
The copy claimed international reach and enterprise capability. The design said one office and a part time web person. When those two disagree, a buyer believes the design.
Nothing proved the firm worked across borders
Cross border investigation was a large part of the business and there was no structure on the site that showed it. A buyer with a matter in three countries could not tell whether the firm could take it.
What made it harder than a normal rebrand
The constraints on this one came from what the firm does rather than from budget.
- ▶No work could be shownAn investigation firm cannot publish clients, cases or outcomes. Everything most agencies use to build credibility was off the table, so the credibility had to come from how precisely the services were described.
- ▶The business could not pauseEnquiries were coming in at 40 to 50 a month and that had to keep happening. Nothing could go dark while the new identity was built.
- ▶Discretion and visibility pull opposite waysThe firm needed to be findable and simultaneously needed to look like somewhere secrets go to stay. Most brand language that signals one undermines the other.
- ▶Jurisdiction claims have to be exactSaying you operate in a country when you cannot serve process there is the kind of error that costs a law firm relationship permanently.
What we built
The 2014 scope was the identity and the website. The rest accumulated because the engagement never ended.
A logo, with rules for using it
A mark designed to work small, in one colour, and on a report cover as readily as on a website. It came with usage rules, because a logo without them drifts within a year.
A full corporate identity
Colour, type, document templates and the applications the firm actually uses day to day: report covers, letterheads, credentials documents and proposal formats.
An enterprise grade website
Structured so the firm’s range was visible rather than claimed, with services and jurisdictions laid out as pages a buyer could reach instead of as sentences in a paragraph.
An SEO strategy
Built around how corporate counsel actually search, which is by the specific problem and the country, rather than by the phrase corporate investigation.
Print collateral
Credentials documents, proposals and report formats, which in this industry are often the only artefact a client keeps.
The network that grew out of it
More than 350 websites across the group and its ventures over the years that followed, as divisions and country operations were added.
What the client received
- ✓Primary logo plus variants, with written usage rules
- ✓Colour palette and typography system
- ✓Report covers, letterheads and credentials document templates
- ✓Proposal and report formats for client delivery
- ✓A full website, designed, written and built
- ✓A keyword and content strategy aimed at corporate counsel
- ✓Print collateral for business development
- ✓Ongoing design and digital support, which is still running
What we decided not to do
Each of these was the easier or more billable route at the time.
- ✕We did not refresh the old logoTidying up clipart produces tidier clipart. The mark had no equity worth preserving, and keeping any part of it would have carried the original problem into the new identity.
- ✕We did not design a brand for a firm it was not yetIt would have been easy to build something that looked like a global corporation with a thousand staff. That reads as overreach to a law firm, and overreach is worse than modesty in a trust business.
- ✕We did not use a template for the websiteA template would have been faster and cheaper for us to deliver. The whole point was that the firm had been judged on looking generic, and a template is how you look generic.
What changed
The first three are observable. The fourth is the client’s own account and is treated as such.
- ✓The brand stopped arguing with the pitchWhat the site claimed and what it looked like finally agreed, which removed the reason a buyer had to discount everything else on the page.
- ✓The firm's range became visibleServices and jurisdictions became pages a buyer could find rather than claims inside a paragraph, which also gave the SEO work something to rank.
- ✓The identity lastedIt has been in service for more than a decade without a redesign. For a brand built in 2014 that is the strongest thing we can say about it.
- ✓Enquiries rose, on the client's accountRajeev George reports they went from 40 to 50 a month to roughly six or seven times that after the digital presence was rebuilt. We did not measure it and we explain why below.
“In our business, clients decide whether to trust you before they ever pick up the phone.”
Managing Director, GREVESGROUP
What we have not measured, and will not claim
This engagement started in 2014, which is long before we had any analytics access, so the honest position here is weaker than on our recent work.
- ⚠The six to seven times enquiry growth is Rajeev George's figure. We did not measure it, we have never seen the underlying records, and we are reporting it as his account rather than as a result we can stand behind.
- ⚠Even if the figure is exact, we cannot separate the rebrand's effect from everything else the firm did in the same period, including hiring, new service lines and ordinary market growth. Anyone attributing a multiple like that to design alone is guessing.
- ⚠No revenue, margin or client count figures appear here. Those are the client's and we have not asked to publish them.
- ⚠The 350 plus websites figure is our own count across the group and its ventures over roughly fifteen years. It is a count of work delivered, not a performance claim, and it includes small single purpose sites alongside large ones.
- ⚠We have no before and after of the brand's effect on win rate, which is the number that would actually matter to a buyer reading this.
How to check this yourself
More of this is checkable than you might expect for work that started in 2014.
01
Look up the old site on the Wayback Machine
Put the group’s domain into web.archive.org and move the slider back before 2014. You will see what the firm looked like when this started, which is the only before and after on this page that does not depend on us.
02
Look at the group's sites as they are now
The identity, the structure and the jurisdiction pages are all public. Judge whether they read as a firm a law firm would instruct.
03
Ask us to introduce you to the client
Rajeev George has agreed to be named on this page. Whether he takes a call is his decision rather than ours, but we will pass the request on.
What we would do differently
We should have recorded a proper baseline before touching anything, and we did not. That single omission is why the main result on this page has to be presented as the client’s word rather than as evidence, and it is the reason we now ask for analytics and enquiry data before quoting on any rebrand.
The identity was designed when mobile was an afterthought for a business to business firm in this sector. It has held up better than it had any right to, but if we drew it today the first drawing would be the one that works at 44 pixels on a phone, not the one that works on a report cover.
The services this engagement drew on
If your brand is the thing arguing against your pitch, these pages set out the method and the pricing.
Other case studies
The same client, ten years later
What the GREVESGROUP engagement became: structured data, content and AI discoverability across a network of ten websites.
An eight year white label partnership
A Dallas marketer sold, we delivered. More than 150 small business websites between 2013 and 2021.
A wildlife trust with nothing to show
Brand, website and an annual report for a conservation trust whose work happened entirely in the field.
Questions people ask about this one
Why is the main result presented as the client's claim rather than as your result?
Because that is what it is. The work began in 2014, we never had access to the analytics or the enquiry log, and the figure came to us from the client. We could have printed it as a bare fact, which is what most agencies would do and what our own earlier write up of this project did. Attributing it is more accurate and we would rather you trusted the rest of the page.
Does a logo really change whether a law firm instructs you?
Not on its own, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling logos. What changes the decision is whether everything a buyer can see before the first conversation agrees with what you claim. The logo is simply the most visible place that agreement breaks down, which is why it tends to be the thing clients ask about first.
How do you build credibility for a firm that cannot show its work?
By being specific about method and jurisdiction instead of about outcomes. A buyer in this sector is reassured by a page that describes exactly how a background screening is run in a particular country, and is not reassured by a page claiming excellence. Precision reads as competence, and precision does not require naming a single client.
Is a ten year old identity not due for a redesign?
Probably for the digital applications, and we would say so to the client before we would say it to you. A mark that has run for a decade in a trust driven industry has accumulated real recognition though, so the honest recommendation is usually to modernise the system around it rather than to replace the mark and throw that away.
You mention 350 plus websites. Across one client?
Across the group and the ventures that grew out of it over roughly fifteen years, as divisions, country operations and separate online ventures were added. It is our own count of work delivered rather than an independently verified figure, and it includes small single purpose sites alongside the larger ones.
What would a rebrand like this cost now?
The identity and website together sit in the range set out on the corporate branding and corporate website pages linked above, which carry indicative pricing in INR with USD equivalents. What moves the number most is the number of applications, not the logo. A mark is a few weeks of work. A full system of templates, collateral and a structured website is the bulk of it.
Who did the work?
Swaranjit Singh, who now runs PIXELS TRAIL. He was the group’s brand, design and digital lead for roughly fifteen years before moving to the agency full time in 2026, with GREVESGROUP retained as a client. That is why this engagement reaches further than a normal agency relationship would.
Is your brand arguing against your own pitch?
It is a specific and common problem: the capability is real, the presentation says otherwise, and the buyers who would pay most are the ones most likely to notice. Send us your site and we will tell you plainly where the two disagree.