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A look back at the Miller brand with its creator, Alan Hutchinson
As many agree, a brand is a company’s biggest asset. It’s so much more than just a logo, the firm’s values, and its mission statement.
A brand is ultimately how your customers, employees, and stakeholders perceive your company. Evolution of brands is essential, allowing businesses to update its image and messaging to continually align with its values and goals to remain competitive, attract new customers and stand out in an ever-changing market environment.
Following on from Miller – a major global earthmoving attachment manufacturer, headquartered in the North East - celebrating 46 years in business, the company has recently refreshed its brand to ally with its global customer base. As such, it has taken the opportunity to catch up with the creator of its logo, Alan Hutchinson.
With a commendable career in design spanning over 45 years, Alan developed Miller’s current logo in 1982. To this day, it has very much retained its core identity despite the brand evolving over the years. It is this logo that was a linchpin in carving the foundation of the firm’s brand identity, remaining a strong representation of its business and culture.
What are you?
As Alan recalls fondly, upon seeing Miller’s original logo, his immediate thoughts were: What is Miller? Are you Miller butchers? Are you Miller bakers?
Alan says: “The logo at the time really didn’t represent what the business did. When meeting Keith (founder and chairman at Miller), I shared these views with him, and together we worked on creating a logo that was reflective of the company’s values and the heavy industries it operates in.”
How it began
It’s a real skill to develop a logo that embodies the company and Alan recalls: “I wanted something bold, strong, and recognisable.” He experimented with several different typefaces and shapes and added a personal and memorable touch to the logo – distinctive to the Miller brand – which is the ‘I’ within Miller as a welding man. What’s more, this was modelled on Keith’s brother, Gary, who was an engineer within the business, adding a personal touch to the family led business.
“I wanted to embrace the people-focused aspect of Miller, which continues to be very representative of the company’s culture – both with its employees and customers - and I believe through adding the welding man, we achieved this.”
The results
A strong logo was developed which Alan attributes its success down to its versatility and adaptability across different mediums.
Evolution of Miller’s identity
Throughout the years, Miller has retained its identity as it has continued to modernise its look and feel.
Alan says: “At the time, I designed the logo for a local business. I could not have imagined the global success the company has had to date, and I take great pride in knowing that the logo is recognised worldwide. This is true testament to the strong identity that we created early in the company’s beginnings.”
As Miller quickly evolved to being more than just welders, with a strong design, engineering and manufacturing team with support services, Keith and the team did look to rebrand the company. However, as Keith, founder and chairman at Miller explains, “We did some market testing of the Miller brand by simply sending out small cut outs of the Miller logo to our global customer base. The results were that customers instantly recognised Miller, and what’s more, they recognised the value in the brand that we have created.”
As such, Keith says: “We chose to retain the integrity of the Miller logo, slightly re-tuning this over the years to modernise our brand, following best practice of all major global companies, including the likes of Shell, Apple, Google and Microsoft to name a few.”
Miller today
As Miller has solidified its position as a true major global player in designing and manufacturing earthmoving attachments, most recently the company has chosen to have specific colours to represent the different regions that its has manufacturing and support teams in, to help its global customers to easily identify which branch can best support its needs.
With special thanks
Miller would like to thank Alan for his contributions for being the driving force behind the stepping stones of the Miller brand. It was fantastic for the company to recently welcome Alan to Miller HQ to visit their facilities, which he commented have definitely grown since he very first met with Keith all those years ago!
