A brief history

Five years ago, alternative meat was having a moment. Beyond Meat went public in 2019 with one of the most successful IPOs of the decade, followed by a two-year run as a stock market darling. A wave of companies promised a more sustainable future, and the pitch made sense on paper: less environmental harm, less land use, less water.

But the category had a taste problem and a trust problem. Sales of plant-based meat in the US declined for three consecutive years through 2023, and funding to alternative protein startups fell from over $2 billion in 2019 to roughly $250 million in 2023. Consumers who tried the products once didn't necessarily come back; taste, texture, and price all worked against repeat purchases.

A cosmetic refresh yields superficial results.

The company that would become Evergreen started in that wave, under a different name. By the time they came to us, the industry’s first chapter had already played out, and the business itself had changed. The plan was no longer to sell a packaged consumer product positioned as an alternative to beef. It was to become something more fundamental: infrastructure for the existing meat supply chain, blending cultivated and traditional beef to help producers manage cost and consistency without changing how the product tastes or where it ends up.

Evergreen didn’t need a cosmetic refresh. They needed to reintroduce themselves: a rebrand to better represent the business that had already changed underneath it.

A rebrand isn’t reinvention; it’s revelation.

The instinct with anything new is to sell the new-ness. But the audience that mattered most here (meat processors, distributors, ranchers) had already watched one generation of “the future of meat” promises underdeliver. Novelty was a liability, not an asset, in that room.

What they needed wasn’t a more convincing pitch for disruption. They needed evidence that this was something they could build a business on without risk. And cultivated meat had the potential to do more than just disrupt: unlike plant-based meat alternatives, it could eradicate major players in the beef industry entirely.

They needed a clear story that hinged on what they already knew to be true. Industry fears amid an uncertain future was the backdrop, and Evergreen the solution. A new product not just playing nice and not just assimilating. It was here to enhance, giving strength and longevity, to what already existed.

A visual system is a start. The verbal identity is the finish.

The work centered on strategy and verbal identity more than the visual system. The name and message had to do the heavy lifting of repositioning the company entirely: not a challenger to beef, but a partner to it.

The tagline “the future of beef is beef” carries that reframe in six words. It refuses the disruption narrative outright. Internally, the brand needed to be science-forward and rigorous: credible to investors and meat-industry partners evaluating real infrastructure risk. Externally, the message simplified to what actually matters to the market: the burger on the plate, not the process behind it.

Build for the pitch room, and the boardroom.

The brand had to hold up in a boardroom of investors and in a meeting room of meat processors: two audiences with very different thresholds for what "credible" looks like. The design system reflects that split: rigorous, infographic-driven communication where precision mattered for investors evaluating risk, paired with warmer, food-forward photography and language everywhere the message reached an external audience.

Nowhere does it borrow the visual vocabulary of biotech: no sterile labs, no clinical detachment. The goal was for it to feel like food first. Credible enough to win a round of funding. Appetizing enough to belong on a plate, not just in a pitch deck.

A rebrand isn’t a reset button.

The market is full of brands that change their name and identity hoping a new look will resolve a trust problem, a stalled pitch, or a category that’s lost its shine. Most of the time, it doesn’t, because the rebrand isn’t attached to anything that’s actually different. It’s chasing style instead of change.

Evergreen’s rebrand worked because the business had already changed first. The name didn’t try to manufacture a new story; it gave language to one that was already true. That’s the real principle: a rebrand isn’t a chance to reinvent who you are. It’s a chance to finally say, clearly, who you’ve already become.

That’s not false modesty, it’s just the truth. We started in the middle of a pandemic, which meant the typical uncertainty of starting something new was felt tenfold. We made it up as we went. And now five years later, as far as we can tell, that’s still the only honest way to operate.

A lot of the five-year reflections you read are written backwards: here’s where we started, here’s what we learned, here’s who we are now. And sure, we have some of that to say. But what we’re more interested in is the forward part. Not a roadmap. Not a manifesto. Just the things we want more of, after five years of doing this. The ideas that excite us. The practices we’re leaning toward. The kind of work and people we’re looking for.

Call it a signal. An honest one.

More making. Less screen.

There’s something we keep coming back to. PlayLab, Inc. built an installation for the Venice Biennale: a forest of handcrafted wood structures commissioned for Golden Goose. It was so far from what most people think of as branding. And it was, without question, one of the most brand-expressive things we’d seen in years.

That tension is something we’ve been sitting with. So much of what we do lives on screens. It gets sent as a file, compressed, uploaded, resized. The physicality of it, if there ever was any, gets lost in transit. But with the ultra-saturation of digital technology and rise of AI, we are seeing a shift: a return to our roots. A desire for something more tangible.

We want more work that we can feel with our hands. Activations. Storefronts. Installations. Things that require a set designer or a fabricator. It doesn’t have to be large. It just has to exist in the world rather than on it.

There’s nothing wrong with digital work: that’s here to stay. But as people shift their behaviors off-screen, we must follow. There’s a window of opportunity for brands to meet audiences where they’re at, in physical spaces. And this is the most impactful work we’re seeing lately.

We’ve had the chance to do some of this work lately and we want more.

More cultural moments. Fewer deliverables.

Our dream project, if we’re being completely honest about it, is the Olympics.

Not because it’s big. Because it’s one of the few briefs on earth where the design has to hold up across every culture simultaneously, and where, if you get it right, it lives forever. The branding for the Mexico City 1968 Olympic Games lives beyond its moment as one of the most iconic design systems to date.

The geometric line patterns showed up everywhere: painted on stadium walls, applied to city sidewalks, printed on clothing, and even adopted into protest art. The branding also had a lasting effect on national infrastructure: it laid the visual foundation for the Mexico City Subway system. A beautifully designed event identity became the grammar that other designers borrowed for decades.

That’s what we’re drawn to: work that’s designed for a shared moment and ends up meaning something longer than the moment itself.

It doesn’t have to be the Olympics. It could be a sports campaign, a cultural institution, a city identity, or a festival. What we’re really saying is: we want to work on things that bring people together, and where the design is part of why that works.

More changing lanes.

One of the things that makes Company Policy unusual, we think, is that we’ve never really organized ourselves by discipline. Designers write. Strategists concept. The person who handles words sometimes ends up shaping the visual direction. We don’t love the phrase “multidisciplinary” because it sounds like a credential, but the spirit of it is real.

The traditional structure: the writer writes, the designer designs, the strategist thinks and the designer executes, made sense when the tools were separate and the work took place in sequence. It doesn’t really map onto how ideas actually develop. The best thinking we’ve ever done as a team has happened in the overlaps.

Going forward, we want more of that. We want to hire people who don’t stay neatly in their categories. Designers who write. Writers who have strong visual instincts. Strategists who can get into execution. And we want to work with clients who trust that this kind of multi-faceted approach produces better outcomes.

We’d rather be the dumbest people in a room full of curious generalists than the obvious experts in a room full of lanes.

More distinction. Less sea of sameness.

There’s a pattern we’ve watched repeat itself for years: a brand needs a new identity, so they find an agency whose portfolio looks like the thing they want to become. They reference three competitors. They ask for something “fresh” that still feels familiar. The agency delivers. The brand launches, and the industry gets more uniform than it was before.

We understand the logic, but it’s also how you end up with a market full of brands that look like they were designed by the same person. Because in a lot of cases, they were.

What we’ve found is that our best work tends to happen when we come in without a template. When we’re working in an industry we haven’t touched before, we can’t rely on what we’ve seen done. We have to actually think. That unfamiliarity, which can feel like a liability going in, usually turns out to be the point. It forces a perspective that insiders have stopped being able to see.

Going forward, we want more of that friction. More briefs where we have no obvious precedent to lean on. More clients who are less interested in what we’ve done for someone like them, and more interested in what we might do if we approached them like no one else has.

Distinction isn’t a style. It’s a decision to stop looking sideways.

More belief in writing.

Here’s something we’ve started to notice, and we think it matters: people do read.

We hear all the time that attention is dead, that long-form is finished, that nobody has time for words. We don’t believe it. We think people don’t read bad writing, or writing that doesn’t give them a reason to care. But when you make someone care, when the first sentence earns the second, they will follow you for a long time.

Substack itself is some evidence of this. So is the response we’re getting to this publication. There’s a quiet hunger for something more sustained than a caption or a headline. We want to be part of feeding that.

For us, writing isn’t a deliverable we hand off. It’s part of the thinking. The brands we’re most proud of are the ones where we spent real time on voice, on language, on what this company actually sounds like when it opens its mouth. That work is invisible when it’s done well. But when it’s missing, everything else feels thin.

We want to do more of it, and with clients who understand why it matters.

A last thing about the ever-changing future.

Five years ago, when we were starting, a lot of people assumed things would return to normal eventually. They didn’t, really. They just became a different kind of normal, with a different set of pressures and a different horizon of uncertainty.

The next five years will probably be the same. AI is doing to our industry something like what Photoshop did, except faster and louder. Nobody knows exactly what it means. The people who pretend otherwise are either selling something or afraid.

What we do know is this: the tools will keep changing. The “why” behind making things won’t.

We’re not afraid of what’s coming. We’re more interested in staying useful, staying curious, and making things that are worth making. Whether that’s an Olympic identity, a handbuilt installation, or a brand story that someone actually reads start to finish.

We still don’t have a plan. We have a direction. And that, five years in, feels like enough.

Normal Computing builds hardware to solve AI’s computing crisis: the ballooning cost and energy demands of running large-scale AI systems. Their founders came from Google Brain and Google X. Their technology was genuinely novel. And yet when they came to us, they had no clear story and an identity that looked like everything else in the space.

So naturally, we stopped looking at the AI industry entirely.

Normal Is Not a Dirty Word

Before aesthetics, we had to get to language. And there was a tension sitting right inside the company’s name.

In art, music, culture: abnormal is great. Being weird is the point. But open your phone and find it behaving abnormally? That’s a crisis. In technology, “normal” doesn’t mean ordinary. It means working correctly. When things are normal in a semiconductor plant or an AI pipeline, that’s not a failure of ambition. That’s the entire goal.

Once we landed on that reframe, the brand story followed: Predictable is Powerful. The tagline: Today’s innovations are tomorrow’s Normal. A mission statement and a provocation that turned the company’s name from a liability into a philosophy.

The Invisible Physics of Normal

With the verbal identity set, we started asking a different kind of question: what does “normal” actually look like in the physical world?

When you walk outside, there’s wind, air, sunlight. Forces you can’t see, but when they’re working, you don’t think about them. They just are. That’s exactly what Normal Computing’s technology does for AI infrastructure: it makes the invisible, the expensive, the unstable work the way it’s supposed to. Quietly. Reliably. Naturally.

That became the visual brief. Not AI. Not tech. The physics of the world around us.

Don’t Look at Your Category

Our rule when we impose on ourselves before we start building a brand is: don’t look at the category. Don’t look at finance if you’re in finance. Don’t look at AI if you’re in AI. Look at nature. Look at art. Look at things that exist outside the space entirely, because that’s the only way to make something that doesn’t look like everything else in it.

For Normal, that meant deliberately setting aside the default AI visual language: the gradients, the glowing meshes, the flashy motion. Instead, we grounded the identity in classicism: research, invisible forces, humanist typography with history in its bones, rooted in the hand rather than the machine.

And we looked at fashion. Not as decoration, but as design philosophy. A good garment doesn’t announce its construction. It announces the person inside it. We kept asking: why couldn’t this brand feel like something you could put on?

Paired with a strict red, white, and black palette and a visual system built around geometric precision and natural physical forms, the result felt unlike anything else in the space. Precise without being cold. Confident without being loud. And an identity that clearly told Normal’s unique story and approach to building the future of AI.

What Happened

Normal Computing raised $50 million from Samsung Catalyst. Their CEO appeared in Fortune. The brand ran on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

We still work with them, expanding the brand system, and helping them continue to tell their story as they grow and mature.

The AI industry has a sameness problem. It’s not a technology problem; it’s a communication one. Too many companies are so focused on their own category that they’ve forgotten to look at the world around it.

Differentiation requires departure. An obvious example: Apple we hear clients reference again and again, but why? They rooted themselves in simplicity and humanity, a departure from the cold corporate image of 1970s tech companies. They didn’t compete in their category; they made the category, as it was, feel obsolete.

The most interesting decisions we made for Normal didn’t come from studying AI. They came from the world around us: from the physics of things that work without being noticed, to the extension of self that wants to be noticed.