It’s hard to believe our work with Bland Landscaping Co. began back in 2012. Much can change in the span of 14 years—our business certainly did. Our current team regrouped as HALO 22 in 2021, and BLC came along with us for the ride.
For BLC, though, even more has changed in that time. One of the biggest shifts? Their audiences. Bland got its start with a blend of residential and commercial customers, and later tightened their focus to larger, commercial and HOA/multifamily projects. That change led to growth and a number of acquisitions, expanding Bland’s reach beyond the North Carolina’s Triangle region into other areas of the state. The growth didn’t stop. Their reach now extends into South Carolina and Florida. They’ve also added an aquatic division to tackle lake and pond maintenance, further cultivating their position as a single-source landscaping provider.
And they’re still growing.
When an organization is in a constant state of transition, you need reliability and flexibility—which is exactly the approach we’ve taken to our work together. We understand and value multidisciplinary services as much as they do, despite the differences in our industries. We approach all our work with curiosity and adaptability, an eye for detail, and the belief that strong strategy and content lead to strong design—and that combination leads to connecting with an audience. Those qualities are exactly what makes us the right partner. Together, we keep their marketing materials up-to-date while leveraging existing equity and staying true to BLC’s roots.
So, how have we supported more than a decade of Bland’s business evolution? Strong, consistent branding, engaging online content, and clear branding.
Strategic, modular branding supports consistency and makes room for evolution.
While we worked through Bland’s 40th anniversary identity, we were simultaneously deep into a brand extension. Bland’s brand look and feel had gone largely unchanged since the company’s foundation in 1976, and nothing makes you evaluate a historical brand like a big anniversary. Their increasingly-important online presence needed more brand kit support to match their landscaping professionalism, and so we got to work.
Bland’s local, home-grown roots are a core element of their identity. Rather than toss the baby out with the bathwater in a total refresh, we hung onto their brand equity by refining the existing logo and adding a secondary palette onto their iconic green and yellow primaries. We also included abbreviated, seal-style logo alternatives that would fit the space of social media avatars better than the wide, rectangular full logo. We chose new fonts built to perform well on print and screen.
BLC’s historic logo, before the extension.
BLC’s logo after the extension.
The brand extension included various seals. This one is the most complex, to be displayed at sizes that allow the text to remain readable.
Alternatively, this seal is for social media avatars and other marketing pieces that require a very small size logo, like the website favicon.
Adding a DBA Into the Brand Fold
In 2024, Bland acquired Foster Lake & Pond Management to become their new aquatic division. Foster’s company history is equally rich, and Bland chose to visually position Foster as a partner brand.
Foster’s original brand kit didn’t have many styles in common with Bland’s, but we had to devise a way for their marketing materials to look integrated. When we designed conference banners, we kept Foster’s color palette, used the font styles we developed for Bland, and gave them matching layouts. These simple, strategic design choices established a sense of visual parity while allowing each brand to remain distinguishable.
Wielding multiple brands isn’t easy, but we’ve been intentional about choices every step of the way. That intentionality results in stronger marketing materials that make it easy on Bland’s team to introduce and talk about their aquatic division without confusing their audience.
Celebrating Another Big Milestone: BLC’s 50th
Time flies when you’re maintaining a brand. Our robust brand kit laid a solid foundation for designing Bland’s 50th anniversary identity and marketing materials. With a little creativity and a lot of experience working with their brand, we quickly created a 50th kit that balances nostalgia and sophistication.
The 40th anniversary logo reflected BLC’s original brand styles.
The 50th anniversary logo reflected the brand changes since the last celebration—without reinventing the wheel. (Or, the seal, in this case.)
Extending the Brand Guide
Guidelines matter for a number of reasons, but primarily because they support consistent and recognizable marking materials. They’re also a great way for a brand’s leadership to save time: Sending a link to a well-crafted brand guide is easier and faster than explaining everything anew with every hire or role shift.
In 2026, we reworked Bland’s brand guidelines: We documented their anniversary assets, and provided color code refinements to make on-screen deployment a better match to print. We also added a section with photography guidance for Bland’s production managers who photograph work in the field. Not everyone has experience in photography or professional tools—and that’s ok! Clear, focused guides can do much of the heavy lifting and result in more useful marketing assets.
BLC in the Real World
When we first completed the brand extension, we showed the BLC team how to make good use of it by developing a starter exhibit kit and brochures.
That initial brand and print work was a starting point we could quickly iterate upon for future print materials. For example, we created a backdrop for Foster, where both brands are present on the same pane—and, later, a much larger, co-branded modular kit.
Bland now has a robust variety of consistently-branded, standout print materials that offer their marketing teams flexibility in presentation.
Bland On Screen
You can’t operate a successful commercial business without a strong online presence. Immediately following the brand extension, we were excited to provide a fully custom Wordpress website refresh.
The BLC homepage in 2026.
Since then, Bland has become one of our longest-running, active website support relationships. Working together for more than a decade fosters long-term familiarity. And that allows us to quickly find and implement the right solutions across a variety of projects—everything from information architecture to content development to design and more. (Of course, our working process plays a key role in efficiency, no matter how long we’ve worked together.)
With Bland’s recent expansion into Jacksonville and Charleston—and with more acquisitions in the works across the southeast—their on-screen presence becomes even more critical to reaching (and retaining) their audiences.
Repurposing Social Media for Major Website Improvements
We owe a lot of thanks to social media content scrapes. Bland’s team had enough room in their schedules to quickly share their work and other news on social accounts—but not enough time to develop coordinating blog posts to share on the website. Our weekly routine includes grabbing what they’ve shared on social media, reworking it into a post draft with more detail, categorizing and tagging it, and publishing it on the website. This process keeps the website just as fresh as their social media and it meant BLC account managers could start sharing recent work and updates from a fully owned, credible source.
The BLC website News page, now sectioned by topic thanks to our social media content scrapes.
Once we’d reached a critical mass of posts, we could leverage that content to improve the user experience and information delivery on specific areas of the website. We started by redesigning the News page to be sectioned by topic. As you can imagine, different markets and customer types come with their own, unique interests. The new jump menu at the top of the page makes it easier for the user to find exactly what they’re looking for. It’s much faster than scrolling through a traditional, single-stream news feed. Later, we were able to apply the same approach to their portfolio page.
Those regular content scrapes also resulted in a Resources page, where BLC shares thoughts and tips on a variety of topics—useful to both customer and internal audiences.
To make sure content stays fresh, we perform a quarterly audit to make note of any aging page content—or opportunities to build new topical pages, like Resources.
It’s proof that regularly publishing leads to valuable outcomes. These changes and additions can have a major impact for a company expanding as rapidly as BLC. Working with HALO 22, meant this was built with minimal added effort for the client. For busy teams this makes the ROI even stronger.
Keeping an Eye on User Experience and Discoverability
In today’s short attention span world, users benefit from anything that increases the speed at which they can find, read, and act upon information. We recently applied design changes to the homepage to reduce overall scroll time by ~10%, for example. Our support work for BLC means that we have the chance to identify and improve key points of user experience that can lead to increased engagement.
We’ve also worked through a number of SEO changes to increase discoverability and improve overall content quality—from updating keywords and excerpts in Yoast to completely redrafting page copy.
As Bland and their website grow and evolve, we must keep an eye on the details to make sure the site continues to meet their marketing needs. Design refinements and content updates are just a couple ways we do that. Learn more in the Refine section of How We Work.
What’s Next
We’re thrilled that our work with Bland remains ongoing. Keep an eye on our News page to learn more when our latest work goes live, or get an update delivered to your inbox by signing up for Dispatches.
Project Showcase
Want to learn more? Check out some of our BLC projects from over the years.
