Culligan has been helping people enjoy life’s most essential resource since 1936. Today, they are a world leader in better water with products and services that serve more than 150 million customers every year. They approached AKQA with the goal of modernizing their brand and building a new home for their many acquired brands.

The Challenge

Culligan is a legacy brand with global scale. Over time, too many teams, regions, and channels had turned the brand into a patchwork of looks, messages, and standards. With new leadership in place and a broader push to modernize the business, Culligan needed more than a nicer logo. They needed a unified platform, a new identity system, and the governance to keep quality consistent across all channels.

Photo & Video Production

We didn’t want the new brand to feel like an off-the-shelf corporate refresh, we wanted it to feel like an intentional and bespoke upgrade. We ran a multi-day production in order to create a manifesto film and a cinematic photo library, built to carry the “joy of water” story across launch moments and digital.

Interactive brand guidelines

A static PDF brand book wasn’t going to survive this many stakeholders. I discovered and championed a new tool that turned the guidelines into an interactive, usable system. It saved weeks of production time and gave teams something they could actually navigate, search, and follow.

Interactive design

Finally, we brought everything together to build them a brand new corporate site. This new digital home had to become the “One Culligan” front door and the standard of governance for everything downstream. We redesigned it to modern standards using the new identity system as the rulebook, then built scalable components and page patterns that could flex across the broader ecosystem without fragmenting again.