GF Smith, the historic British paper company, is known and loved for its premium papers. Earlier this year, it launched a full-scale rebrand with the help of TEMPLO – and received a passionate response from the creative community
The area around Lockwood Street in northern Hull looks like any other light-industrial district in England – full of grey warehouses and unloved red-brick buildings. That is, until the headquarters of paper company GF Smith hoves into view, its fluorescent turquoise and pink façade almost pulsating in the spring sunlight. It hasn’t always looked this way. In fact, it was repainted in January to coincide with the launch of a bold, full-company rebrand, which caused a storm in the creative industry that is still rumbling on.
The reason for the furore? GF Smith’s previous visual identity was beloved, at least within certain circles of the graphic-design community. Created by London-based studio Made Thought, it was launched in 2014 to much fanfare, winning a coveted D&AD Black Pencil. Back then, the identity brought GF Smith, a company that turns 140 this year, into the modern era of branding. “That identity no longer reflects who we are as a business,” says the company’s creative director, Ben Watkinson. The world has changed in the past decade – the creative industry and visual communications have become more digital, the place of paper less immediately obvious; it has also become younger. Meanwhile, GF Smith has become truly global, with partnerships in 30 countries.
Most troubling for Watkinson, however, was the way that the old branding positioned the company as part of ‘the establishment’ in the creative world, focusing on heritage. “We’d lost that challenger instinct,” he says. “And internally, we’d started to believe our own hype, to feel we were a luxury paper company. But that’s not who we are.” While he admits that GF Smith’s papers are at the ‘premium’ end of the spectrum, he wanted to remind his colleagues that they’re a “small company shouting for colourful creativity in a world of multi-billion-dollar PLCs”. The plan of action was clear. “We wanted to shake things up.”
To help deliver this, Watkinson approached cause-led branding agency TEMPLO, which is best known for its work in the charity sector. It was an intriguing choice. “We didn’t really understand why he wanted to meet us,” admits Pali Palavathanan, the studio’s co-founder and creative director. That first meeting, however, ended up being what Watkinson now calls “something of a love story”. For TEMPLO, it was refreshing. “We often get approached by clients who say they’re doing loads on sustainability, but when we dig deeper, there’s nothing there,” says Anoushka Rodda, TEMPLO’s other co-founder and managing director. “GF Smith had the opposite issue: all this stuff was hidden under the surface of the company’s visual identity.”
The rebrand process took 18 months, starting with three months of research, brand audits and interviews. From there, the teams agreed upon a new brand positioning, GF Smith: Feel Good Papers, which set the direction for the wider transformation. After months of exploration, TEMPLO presented three routes to the board, which opted for what Watkinson calls “the most extreme” one. “The other two were incremental steps, whereas the third was by far the most different from where we’d been,” he says. “We wanted to be brave.”
The chosen route for the rebranding, which launched in January after further refinement, is certainly that. The most striking element is the logo in the shape of a smiling face, which isn’t static but ‘omni-directional’, meaning that it has nine different variants that all ‘face’ in different directions. Palavathanan remembers exploring this element. “We put the logo on a sphere and it started to respond and interact with what was around it,” he says. “It galvanised the brand.” For Watkinson, it was a “living and breathing version of GF Smith”, bringing to life that Feel Good Papers positioning.
When the rebrand launched at the start of 2025, however, the public response wasn’t universally positive. Many in the design community felt that it was too huge a departure from GF Smith’s heritage roots; others felt that it didn’t match the company’s premium prices; one person commented that the team had “ripped down a church and replaced it with a bouncy castle” (a metaphor that Watkinson and the TEMPLO team actually quite like).
Nobody internally was particularly shocked at the public’s dramatic response to the change. “Even if we’d just taken the dot off the old logo, we would have had the same reaction,” says Rodda, smiling. Watkinson points out that the majority of the feedback was positive and that most people who saw it as too bold and different still voiced their thoughts considerately. But, he says, there were some other voices that were “certainly toxic”, which he sees as a problem throughout the creative sector.
Despite this, Watkinson is convinced that the new direction was the right choice. “We’ve reclaimed our identity,” he says. “We’ve restamped who we are, and it has started to permeate into the bloodstream of the business. We’re reinjecting that challenger mindset.”
Asked about his favourite element, Watkinson points to the HQ’s new, colourfully painted exterior. “I can’t put into words how different it feels walking into the building now,” he says. “In this postcode, which has been so underfunded, we’re trying to be a beacon of hope, positivity, difference, colour and creativity.
Photography by Tal Silverman / Taran Wilkhu / India Bharadwaj / Eric Aydin-Barberini / TEMPLO
This story was originally featured in OnOffice 171, Summer 2025. Discover similar stories by subscribing to our weekly newsletter here
