LATEST BLOGS

Happy New Year from the Appella team! 🎉🌟 We're looking forward to another busy year working with lots of fantastic brands and wish you all success on your journey. If you'd like to find out how we can help with your next requirement, get in touch .

We are very pleased this year to be able to mark the 20 th anniversaries of two brand names created by Appella, Essentra plc and the Gibbs Aquada car. Essentra’s line of corporate ancestry goes all the way back to the Bunzl family and Pozsony in the Habsburg Empire, now Slovakia, where in 1854 Moritz Bunzl registered his haberdashery business. In 1883 his three sons changed the name to Bunzl & Biach AG and moved to Vienna, closer to the main European markets of the time. Here they bought a paper mill and manufactured paper, cigarette filters and cellulose wadding. Following Hitler’s Anschluss in 1938, by which Nazi Germany annexed Austria, the family left the country in order to avoid their company and assets being seized or destroyed as happened to all Jewish businesses. Some of the family moved to Switzerland, some to the United States and a small number moved to the UK to develop operations there. The 1950’s saw international expansion and a separate company, American Filtrona, incorporated in the USA in 1954 as a filter technology specialist, especially in cigarette filters. Filtrona demerged from Bunzl in 2005 and went on to buy Duraco an adhesives coated products business in 2007. They continued to diversify into a multi-sector, component parts and elements manufacturing and supply business, mainly through acquisition. They re-branded in 2013 with the aim of de-coupling from their historic association with the tobacco industry, Essentra being chosen in order, as their then CEO Colin Day declared, “to capture what each of Filtrona’s businesses manufacture and supply: small but essential key components that play critical roles for our customers”. We wish Essentra a very happy 20 th birthday. Please stay in touch for the Aquada blog to follow shortly.

As we approach the festive season, we want to express our gratitude for your continued support. Thank you for being a part of our journey, and we look forward to achieving even greater heights together in the coming year. If you have any new requirements to discuss, we look forward to hearing from you. Contact us today.

If you’re under 30 then you probably think it’s been there forever. If you’re over 50 you might think, on reading this, ‘ What! Has the Oyster Card really been around for 20 years? ’ Andrew McCrum and Appella are delighted to be associated with one of the Capital’s and the country’s most popular and familiar brand names. That the Oyster Card continues to feature so prominently on London Transport and London Train Station advertising and sign boards pays testament in the main to the dedication of Tfl (Transport for London) in championing the name and the brand. Its success is also in no small part owing to the enduring appeal of all those constituent elements which make up the brand meaning, most relevant perhaps: pearl ‘money loaded’, shell ‘smart card security’, circular shape ‘touch pad’ and ‘the world is your oyster’ travel reference. The continued health of the Oyster Card brand in the era of contactless payments may, perversely, owe something to the increasingly unhealthy and depleted marine medium in which the original mollusc lives and the heightened awareness we humans have not just for endangered species but for wildlife in general.

It’s 15 years since Al Foah launched Zadina, their fantastic luxury-nutrition-health dates brand and it’s still going strong thanks to some great business acumen, wise marketing and the power of the date superfood. We were delighted to play a part in the process, read more about it in our Zadina Case Study .