In 1979, our founders launched History Factory with a simple but refreshingly unique goal: to help organizations capture and use their corporate memories to address current challenges and achieve future goals. Today, our vision—“to empower the world’s best enterprises to make history infinitely useful in pursuit of their missions”—can be directly tied back to that founding premise.
History Factory has come a long way in more than 40 years, and we’ve only become more passionate about creating results for our clients. That’s why our new brand is focused on transforming your experience into better performance and results.
Why “experience”? Experience is about learning, adapting, maturing and improving. Experience leverages memory to improve performance. History chronicles “the events that make up the conscious past.” It is the basis of knowledge. Your history—past and present—represents your unique experience.
Our philosophy, Start with the Future and Work Back™, is informed by our deep understanding of an organization’s history and experience. It drives how we work on our clients’ business and our own. In keeping with our philosophy, we embarked on a thorough exploration of our current identity, future aspirations and the collective experiences that have shaped us.
What stood out? First, our unwavering commitment to creating value for clients has always been at the core of our ethos. In today’s landscape, where delivering measurable results is more scrutinized than ever, we’ve consistently measured up, with the highest levels of client satisfaction and retention in our history. Second, we’ve always attracted high achievers who are drawn to our work at the intersection of business and history. Our clients are market leaders, and the kind of people who succeed at History Factory are uniquely dedicated, passionate, and inspired by that performance. Today, we have the most talented and experientially diverse team in our history.
Those valuable insights culminated in a rebrand that truly embodies our mission as a trusted partner with extraordinary people delivering exceptional results for appreciative clients. The new identity we unveiled last year has now evolved into History Factory’s new brand, which is firmly rooted in our rich heritage and future aspirations.
Learn more about how we are excited to embark on this next chapter and continue our journey of transforming History Factory’s and our clients’ experience into performance.
On the HF rebrand:
Spanning an era of far-reaching operational and cultural changes within the organization, the rebrand went through a few phases before landing where it is now. I think that we reached an authentic and representative conclusion of where the organization has been, where we are and where we’d like to go. As the person who manages our digital properties, I’m ecstatic with what this website can do for us: provide a streamlined experience for visitors that is informative and shows off the results that our clients have achieved in a visually stimulating way.
— Sam Grabel, Sales Operations Analyst and Marketing Manager
One important thing to me when starting as director of marketing and communications was to go on a “listening tour” with the staff and hear about what they believed would help improve the culture and brand of the organization. After several months, it was clear that activating the rebrand around our driven, high-performing HF team members was the only approach that made sense to ensure a successful rebrand launch.
— Adrian Gianforti, Director of Marketing and Communications
On our clients:
With the onset of the pandemic in 2020, we faced the prospect of trying to execute on extensive video projects without being able to travel. A strong team can always turn a challenge into an opportunity. Sure enough, our team identified new remote capture video tools, and we quickly pivoted to various tools that allowed us to capture footage from around the world. The best thing? Even with the world opened up again, our remote capture programs continue to be a highly effective tool in our toolbox.
— Dario Sarlo, Group Creative Director
After working at a client site for multiple years, the time came to move the largest collection History Factory has ever had nearly 1,000 miles back to its original city of origin. Having never coordinated a move that large before, despite having a detailed plan in place, this was a challenge I took on with great trepidation. Working across both client and History Factory departments, as well as orchestrating work plans with numerous vendors, the move was completed without any breakage or loss of material and was hugely successful. Through this experience, I gained valuable insight into the fact that new challenges should be approached with the notion that just because you haven’t done something before doesn’t mean you can’t execute the task (hair flip).
— Jennifer Andreola, Lead Archivist, Description and Metadata Services
On our team:
When I joined History Factory earlier this year, I was keen on identifying and developing opportunities for increased collaboration among teams, including between our archives and creative sides of History Factory. Highlighting instances where we can partner on process improvement, knowledge sharing and exposure to a wide variety of expertise (think: project management acumen to subject matter experts) results in better outcomes for our clients and our colleagues.
— Erin Narloch, Senior Director Business Insight & Performance