A Powerful Organization Hidden Behind the Wrong Identity
Women in Construction (WINC) had built something genuinely valuable: a national non-profit charitable organization of professional women dedicated to transforming environments, serving communities, and bettering the lives of those in crisis. Their work was meaningful. Their membership was committed. Their impact was real.
But in the Canadian construction industry, WINC had a problem they couldn't solve with programming alone. They were consistently confused with CAWIC — the Canadian Association of Women in Construction — a regulatory body with a fundamentally different mandate. Two organizations. Similar names. Overlapping audiences. The confusion was eroding WINC's ability to communicate its distinct purpose, attract the right members, and grow with confidence.
The brand they had built at start-up stage — a simple wordmark with a stick-figure icon — had served its purpose. But it no longer reflected the organization's ambitions, its culture, or the boldness of the women it represented. WINC needed to differentiate, elevate, and scale. In that order.
WINCWomen in Construction
Start-up Identity
WINCWomen in Construction
Scale-up Identity
The old logo told you what WINC was. The new logo tells you who WINC is — bold, connected, and impossible to overlook.
Finding the Story That Was Already There
I led my team through our structured Discovery process — engaging WINC leadership, members, and key stakeholders to understand the organization from the inside before attempting to present it to the world. What we found was an organization with a clear and compelling identity that its external brand had simply failed to capture.
WINC members were passionate, purposeful, and deeply community-oriented. They weren't just networking — they were transforming environments and responding to crisis. The existing brand communicated neither the scale of that ambition nor the boldness of the women behind it. The stick-figure icon — while friendly — projected a start-up sensibility at a moment when WINC needed to project sector leadership.
Three strategic priorities emerged from the research. First, create unmistakable visual and verbal differentiation from CAWIC. Second, rebuild the foundational brand architecture — mission, vision, values, and tagline — to reflect the organization's actual purpose and culture. Third, design a brand system bold enough to travel globally and strong enough to activate a membership base that spans the full breadth of the Canadian construction industry.
A Cultural Development Plan — Not Just a Visual Refresh
A lesser intervention would have been a logo update. I recommended something more comprehensive: a full cultural development plan that treated the brand not as a visual layer but as an expression of organizational identity. The logo would change. But so would the mission statement, the vision, the articulated values, and the tagline.
This distinction mattered enormously for a membership organization. For WINC, the brand isn't just what the world sees — it's what members feel when they walk into an event, open a newsletter, or introduce themselves as part of the community. A new diamond-shaped logo on a business card would be cosmetic without the internal architecture to back it up.
Mission & Vision Rebuild
Rewritten from the ground up to clearly articulate WINC's distinct charitable mandate — eliminating confusion with CAWIC and giving members language to describe their community with pride and precision.
Values Architecture
Updated organizational values that reflected the lived experience of WINC members — moving beyond generic nonprofit language toward statements specific to professional women in a traditionally male-dominated industry.
Logo Evolution
The existing WINC figures were retained and evolved — honouring organizational continuity — but redrawn inside a bold magenta diamond mark that commands attention and projects confidence at any scale.
Tagline Development
A new tagline built to capture WINC's core belief in the power of collective action — three words that function as both a rally call and a brand promise: Connect. Collaborate. Create.
A Brand System Built for Bold Women and a Global Stage
The new brand system was anchored by the evolved logo — the two connected figures redrawn inside a bold, rotated diamond shape in WINC's signature magenta. The diamond form was chosen deliberately: it reads as a road sign, a construction reference, and a symbol of value simultaneously. The magenta palette — confident, warm, and distinctly feminine without being delicate — created instant visual separation from every other organization operating in the Canadian construction space.
The "Designing Women" campaign visual captured the brand's dual identity: professional competence and human warmth. A woman in a hard hat leading a team of colleagues — unapologetically in charge, visibly confident. It was the brand promise made visible.
Designing Women.
A campaign visual that puts professional women in construction exactly where they belong — front and centre, in command, and impossible to overlook. The brand made visible.
The digital platform was built to give the WINC team full content ownership — enabling them to maintain a consistent web and social presence for the new brand without external dependency. This was a deliberate strategic choice: a non-profit's brand lives or dies by the consistency of how members and volunteers show up with it. Empowering the team to own the brand was as important as designing it.
An AGM Activation the Industry Won't Forget.
Activation in Industry
by WINC Team
Built for Global Reach
The brand activation at the Annual General Meeting was the proof point the strategy had been designed to create. WINC members experienced the new identity — the evolved logo, the rebuilt mission and vision, the "Connect. Collaborate. Create." tagline — together, in a room filled with the women who had built the organization. The response was immediate and sustained. The activation was ranked one of the best ever done in the Canadian construction industry.
The new digital platform gave the WINC team complete content autonomy — a web and social presence they could manage themselves and a brand system consistent enough to carry across platforms, geographies, and the next chapter of the organization's growth. The brand that had been built for a start-up was replaced by one engineered for scale.
Strategic Lead — Cultural Development to Brand Activation
As the lead strategist through North 44 Consulting, I directed every phase of the engagement — from the Discovery process and stakeholder research, through the full cultural development plan including mission, vision, values, and tagline, to creative direction of the evolved logo, the digital platform build, and the AGM activation strategy.
Discovery facilitation and qualitative stakeholder research · Brand differentiation strategy (WINC vs. CAWIC positioning) · Cultural development plan authorship · Mission, vision, and values rebuild · Tagline development ("Connect. Collaborate. Create.") · Logo evolution and creative direction · Digital platform strategy and CMS enablement · AGM brand activation design and execution · Global brand diffusion framework
The WINC engagement is one I return to often when thinking about what brand work is really for. The logo change was visible. But the cultural development plan — the rebuilt mission, the new values, the tagline members could actually feel — was the work that made the logo mean something. A brand is only as bold as the story it's built to tell.