Today, WMS Partners is getting a facelift, at least as far as our branding goes. We thought we'd take a minute to explain the thinking behind our new logo, tagline, website and the other elements of our brand. The discussion strikes to the heart of who we are, what we do, and why we do it.
Let's start with why we revisited WMS's branding at all. There were two main reasons. First, many people who don’t know WMS often ask us what we do—and our old branding wasn’t much help in that regard. Second, we think that WMS is a different kind of advisory firm. Our brand ought to convey that specialness—to our clients, to our employees and to the outside world.
Central to our new branding is the concept of “The Open Family Office”. From our founding in 1993, we have been an alternative for families to traditional financial-services firms—independent, transparent, and aligned with clients’ interests. The term that many people use to describe firms like us is "family office". (If you are not familiar with that term, here's the history of family offices). But there’s one important difference. Whereas many family offices are cloistered, exclusive and stuffy, we like to think of ourselves as accessible, inclusive and authentic. In a word, "open". So, we are and always have been The Open Family Office. As such, our mission has stayed the same: To bring the benefits of a family office—sophisticated advice on wealth planning, investing and leaving a family legacy—to a wider circle of families.
The idea of The Open Family Office is everywhere in our new logo. The tagline is there, of course. Beyond that, we chose typefaces and colors that convey that we are a modern and vibrant firm. We designed the iconography in the logo—what we call the open circles—to echo the coordinated planning, investing and family legacy advice that WMS provides our clients.
Finally, we've also given our website a facelift to match this new branding. We encourage you to explore it. Going forward, we'll be sharing with you our thoughts on planning, investing and family-legacy through more frequent blog posts. We encourage you to subscribe to our blog, so we can email you whenever we post new articles. Of course, you can control how often we email you.
What’s most important to remember is that our new branding is an attempt to better capture who we are, not to announce a change of direction for WMS. Our focus remains on serving our clients. Ultimately, that’s what the new branding is really all about.
As always, we are open to your ideas and your feedback. Please call me at 410-337-7575 or email me at TKTKTKT@wms-partners.com.
