When the leadership at Pirate Sound (then Pirate Group) were informed that they would have to relocate from what had been their base of operation for more than 30 years, they decided to take the opportunity to reinvent much more than just the space they’d be working in.

“We decided Pirate had been around for a long time and this was an opportunity to take a complete, top-down look at what we were now, and what our position and perception in the industry were,” Tom Eymundson, CEO of the sound production shop, tells strategy. “Having never really done this in our history, we said from the beginning that we didn’t want to assume anything. We wanted to get back to our namesake roots, which were the pirate radio stations of the ’60s.”

The company was founded as Pirate Radio in 1990, when the industry didn’t have a radio-dedicated creative house, Eymundson explains. As the shop added other mediums to its purview, it also updated its name – to Pirate Radio and Television, and then Pirate Toronto and New York after the markets in which it operated. With the advent of digital audio – for podcasts, audiobooks, and other such mediums – the company took on the name Pirate Group.

“But that didn’t encapsulate our rebellious namesake,” Eymundson says.

To help it develop a brand that drew upon its roots while also representing what it does now, Pirate hired creative agency Broken Heart Love Affair (BHLA). Working directly with senior VP of strategy Kristy Pleckaitis and creative design director Rasna Jaswal, the company settled on a new name that reinforced its pirate radio ethos, while also adopting an entirely new visual identity that better embodies it.

Accompanying the visual identity is an original mnemonic – a form of sonic branding unique to Pirate Sound – that is based on Morse code, which was the earliest form of sound broadcast. Pirate invented some of its own sounds using the Morse code framework, an idea Eymundson attributes to Jaswal, and BHLA produced an animated video to which Pirate has attached the mnemonic, in order to introduce the new branding.

“We’ve spent our entire careers helping other brands, brand. Now we’ve done that for ourselves, even creating our logo as a mnemonic,” Eymundson says. “We’re not just selling people on sonic branding, we’re doing it for ourselves.”

The new look was launched May 25, and already “there’s a lot of hat-tipping to the redesign and look in particular,” says Eymundson.

The company has also adopted the design ethos and applied it straight through not only its digital branding and communications, but also its physical workspace, and in the form of style guides that have been distributed to all employees so that they can better immerse themselves in the new brand.

“We strived to be consistent with our brand across all opportunities,” Eymundson explains. “Rather than just say it and carry on, our staff have been schooled in it. They all have a copy of the style guide and are schooled in it. They’re sharing the branding across their own social feeds. It has really recharged everyone who works here, the people who have been here a long time and the new folks. This is the next chapter for us, and all of that enthusiasm will result in even better output.”

“You feel it around our space,” he adds it. “Even our studios have been named after pirate radio stations: Caroline, Monique and Veronica.”