McCarthy & Stone (Now McCarthyStone) is a large, national company providing housing for the retired, in the form on privately owned retirement apartments.
After the closure of their in-house design department, they needed support producing various kinds of literature for their national sales & marketing activities.
McCarthy & Stone is divided into a about 8 regional offices from the south west of England all the way up to Scotland. In addition, they also have subsidiary companies working within their head office such as their 'Resale' division, and their property management divisions 'Yourlife' and 'MSMS'. All of which needed design support as well.
Amadoo have provided design support of varying degrees for many years, both remotely and at their offices.
Over the years, for varying periods of time, Amadoo has been responsible for every piece of artwork to come out of numerous regions and divisions, and has worked on behalf of all but 3 of them.
The work consisted of a mixture of brand new creative work, artworking existing templates, contributing to planning and creative meetings, producing brand guidelines, drawing up user-friendly development plans, and much more. Whilst the majority of developments followed the company brand style, some unique developments required their own branding to reflect their prestigious location of build specification. Many of which were devised and created by Amadoo.
Amadoo supported staff buy covering the only in-house designer during sickness or holiday leave, and on occasion shared the large regional workloads with other local agencies.
The list of types of collateral are too many to mention, but in addition to printed literature Amadoo also worked on digital graphics, exhibition stands, signage, vehicle livery, greetings cards, photography, market research... the list goes on.
It is hard to measure the effectiveness of the contribution Amadoo has made to the success of McCarthy & Stone. In part this is due to the wide ranging degree of influence we actually had. At times we were merely reproducing somebody else's designs for different applications. Other times we provided a template for others to use, and many times the direction and style was dectated to us in advance. What we can say for certain, is that Amadoo produced more than 1000 pieces of artwork across the many regions and departments of McCarthy & Stone, and without that support they would not have been about to reach the audience they have. This is undeniably a factor in their success over the last 3-5 years and our support has allowed them to restructure and stay flexible, as they reduced their fixed staffing resources and relied in external support instead.
