Napoleon Celebrates 30 Years of Excellence with a New Brand, a New Facility and a New Website

NEW YORK - Jan. 26, 2015 - PRLog -- In 2015, Napoleon celebrates an unrivaled industry track record—30 years of excellence and evolution—with a new brand, a new facility and a new website (with a new URL: napoleongroup.com). The key to Napoleon’s continued success? The ability to adapt and evolve that’s been hard-coded into the company’s DNA from the start.

Long renowned as a previz powerhouse, Napoleon is using its previz prowess as a springboard to a full portfolio of products and services that includes art, audio, broadcast and digital/content. Founder Marty Napoleon, a firm believer in the adage that, in business as in life, change is the only constant, says it was time to forge ahead.

“If a company isn’t changing, it’s dying,” he says. “Ten years is a new generation. Thirty years is a new lifetime. Some might think that 30 years is a bad thing. But it isn’t. Thirty years just means you know what you’re doing. We’re confident. We feel like there isn’t anything we can’t do. Napoleon started out as a test commercial house but now we do just about anything. We’re really a brand new company. So we needed a new brand.”

Napoleon charged Brooklyn-based design and branding studio Makewell with the challenge of reimagining the Napoleon brand as well as the website and collateral.

“The task of redesigning the Napoleon identity was more than just refreshing the logo,” says Makewell Partner + Creative Director Jonathan Motzkin. “It also involved the larger goal of representing the evolution of the 30-year company history as something timeless within the ever-changing landscape of the industry. The solution was to craft an identity and mark that is simple, clear and enduring, that respects the legacy and values of Napoleon, giving a nod to the past while firmly planting itself in the future.”

Makewell reimagined the iconic red “N” that had long represented Napoleon, deconstructing it for a digital world into eight diagonal bars, streamlining “The Napoleon Group” to “Napoleon,” utilizing the spare but stylish sans-serif font Antenna for the logotype and proposing a smart new palette. Green is the new red, with a vibrant extended color scheme of teal, purple and dark gray.

Makewell extended the ideas embodied by the new brand to Napoleon’s new website (http://napoleongroup.com), a sleek, sophisticated showcase for the three attributes that set Napoleon apart: “Our work, our facility, our people,” says Napoleon President Doug Miller. “The new site instantly communicates why savvy agencies and brands trust Napoleon with their creative needs time and again.”

“The Napoleon website is designed to showcase the incredible art and video work in a state-of-the-art interface that makes their ever-changing content accessible to their users,” says Makewell Partner + Creative Director Melissa Motzkin. “The site has been built as responsive to the many screen sizes and devices being used in the modern world, resulting in an elegant and customized form that is backed by an easy-to-use content management system. The goal was to create a site that was easy to navigate and maintain while also so flexible it could grow and adapt to Napoleon’s needs well into the future.”

For Napoleon, the future began in 2013, when the company picked up shop and moved from the Graybar Building in midtown and headed downtown to a new custom-built 14,450-square-foot facility in the Flatiron District.



“Our new facility personifies what our old facility couldn’t,” says Napoleon Director of Business Development Paul Johnson. “The new space features a really well-conceived production floor plan that makes our capabilities clear. Clients instantly recognize that we’re a VFX company, a live-action company, an art studio, an editorial house. We do it all. Our clients are not just coming to Napoleon for previz. They’re coming to Napoleon for solutions.”

A significant number of those clients have been coming to Napoleon since Day 1.

“I’ve worked with Napoleon since their humble beginnings on 42nd Street,” says Publicis Kaplan Thaler Creative Director/Writer Alan Braunstein. “I’ve continued to work with them for the simple reason that they get it done the right way every time and with a smile. I think Napoleon is still in business because they have the same high creative standards as the agencies they work with. And their coffee and cappuccino just keep getting better!”

McCann SVP Group Creative Director Doug Welch echoes that sentiment.

“I have worked with Napoleon for over 20 years for one main reason,” he says. “They deliver. The work always looks fantastic (and the previz scores though the roof) and the technology is always cutting edge. But, ultimately, it's the people. Damn are they fun to hang with!”

High creative standards, fantastic work, cutting edge technology, fun people, good coffee—can it get any better?

“Absolutely!” says Marty Napoleon, pointing to the new brand. “We’ve been in business for 30 years but, in a way, we’re just getting started. It’s time for a new birth. It’s time for a new everything. I always say, ‘Everything old is new.’ I think we’re a perfect company at the perfect time to be doing all the things we’re doing.”

About Napoleon
A previz powerhouse since 1985, Napoleon has not only endured, we’ve expanded, using our previz prowess as a springboard to a full portfolio of products and services that now includes art, audio, broadcast and digital/content. Thanks to a trait programmed into our DNA from the very beginning—the ability to adapt to meet advertising’s ever-changing needs—our longevity is unrivaled, our talent untouchable, our client list unparalleled and our facility incomparable.

Nothing sets Napoleon apart more than our New York City headquarters. In 2013, at a time when much of the industry was downsizing, Napoleon seized an opportunity for growth and, after 15 years in midtown Manhattan, moved to a custom-built facility in the city’s new nexus of creativity and technology, the vibrant Flatiron District. Gutting Kate Spade’s former offices, Napoleon created a one-of-a-kind, bi-level 14,450-square-foot contemporary office and production studio that makes our diverse capabilities clear.

The new project-centric space features a 12-camera Vicon Bonita motion-capture system, a spacious green-screen stage, stylishly efficient edit and audio suites and a sleekly modern kitchen that allows our peerless client services to shine, all seamlessly tied together with a state-of-the-art infrastructure. The studio boasts an open-air workspace for 50-plus creative directors, animators, editors, designers, illustrators, modelers, compositors, scripters, character artists, motion-graphics artists and producers, expressly designed to foster creative collaboration among staff and clients alike.

Savvy agencies and brands seeking peerless experience and expertise know there’s only one place to turn: Napoleon.