With the rise of home-reno DIYers that emerged out of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a new vigour behind the opportunity to sell things that were once only ever sold to contractors and professional builders to homeowners directly. The people behind this new brand were striking while the iron was hot, bringing a new way to buy windows and doors directly to their end-users without the need for a “professional“ middleman.
2025
Rony Mikhael
One of our greatest delights at Mined is when we have the opportunity to partner with other exceptional firms working in areas adjacent to ours; our combined skills help propel the brands we work with to even higher heights. We were approached by our friends at Syatt Media, who were contracted to build a thoughtful and robust e-commerce experience for a new company offering window and door purchasing direct to consumers.
This would prove to be no easy feat since windows literally come in all shapes and sizes, and even more variants, and not every homeowner buying windows online knows the ins and outs. But before this web experience would be developed, Syatt brought us in, connecting us with the folks at the company to help them bring this brand to life and set the foundation of how it would communicate visually and verbally.
As usual, we started by digging in deep to uncover who this company is, what made them the experts, and where they got the audacity to start a brand like this. This digging would help us find a way to uniquely bring them to the market. They were already filling a gap, but one clear opportunity lay in how they would be visually represented.
They were playing in a space where visual appeal is paramount, since what homeowners are after, at the end of the day, is a home that is not only functional, but beautiful as well. Why then would the brand follow suit with the rest of the industry, utilizing tropes that are common in construction and industrial settings? In an act of visual resistance, we figured this was the time to bring some light into that typically dingy and rugged space.
Bringing something like this into the market, direct to consumer, wasn’t exactly common at the moment, so we dug into ways to make this thing feel human, to find ways to connect with the end user, and show them the value without having to say too much or sell too hard.
To that end, we developed a messaging strategy, that led us into a process to continue honing the narrative into one distinct word: a name that would represent the company as not only a provider of windows, but a considered, tangible, human-centric brand.
The name Iris was inspired by the body's primary aperture —the eye's iris — which controls the flow of light, shaping how we see the world. Just as the iris expands and contracts to regulate brightness, windows and doors manage the entry of light, air, and movement, enhancing the comfort and atmosphere of a space. The name also nods to clarity and vision, reinforcing the idea of transparency in the company’s product, process, and pricing. Rooted in nature and function, Iris embodies the seamless balance between openness, control, and beauty-transforming spaces by letting in just the right amount of light.
We did, of course, explore a number of names throughout this process, but Iris ultimately won the client team over—it was the name they could imagine answering the phone and dropping confidently, the one they could stand behind both conceptually and audibly.
Jumping off the name, we designed a visual identity that echoed this concept. The symbol we created, the Iris Sunburst, represents the dual meaning found in the company name. It visualizes the idea of light entering a space while also representing a visual abstraction of the radial pattern found within the eye’s iris. We used this graphic motif throughout their materials (e.g. masking images, outlined and used subtly to add visual interest if necessary, etc).
The name also informed the palette, pulling inspiration from the colours of the iris flower—tones and tints of purples and yellows, organically offset by the green of the stem and leaves.
As we were working on the brand, the team at Syatt were busy building out the backend of the website, which they executed impressively, on a (very) technical level. But to see what they did with it once our work was complete had us beaming from ear to ear. It’s not every day that you see a brand roll out as you’d envisioned after changing hands, but this was certainly one of them.
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