Gold award winning identity in the industrial sector.

Challenge

Small welding shops represent a fundamental industry where little has changed. The work is harsh and routine actions such as changing gas cylinders are time-consuming, tiresome and injurious. Qlixbi removes these by providing a family of digital and physical product solutions that make life easy for the welder and productive for the boss. The challenge was positioning the innovation. Welding is traditional with ingrained characteristics. Qlixbi, however, is revolutionary. The challenge was changing the game, particularly for the new generation of welders including many women, who live in digital worlds but who entered a time capsule whenever they went to work.

Action

We visited Air Liquide’s Innovation campus to study the prototypes and talk to a trial group of welders. A feature they loved is the removal of hassle so you can get on with doing good work and not destroying a great weld halfway through because you have run out of gas. Equally, because Qlixbi is digitally-enabled, it reads gas flow data, which it converts into a suite of smart productivity-enhancing tools. We recommended that Air Liquide position their innovation directly towards the welder using a platform based on ease. We recommended that the name should reflect the click-on and off-ability of the connector (which makes an amazingly satisfying sound) and be a ‘startup’-style name with a human quality (the welding world tends to adopt the names of predators). We proposed “Qlixbi” and an identity to reflect its promise of next gen welding.

Impact

Qlixbi is now a major sub-brand in Air Liquide and a game changer, it was launched in the UK. Feedback has been really positive enabling us to create further marketing materials to promote “Qlixbi Auto Restock” which digitally reads gas stocks and provides refills automatically.

Recently, Qlixbi was the recipient of a Gold Transform Awards Europe for the best visual identity in the Industrial category.