Client Kurt Listug, CEO of Taylor Guitars, proclaims to have a thing or two in common with design firm Mires: “We’re both real anal and very detail-oriented about what we do.” In the case of Taylor, the ‘what we do’ is craft high-end guitars for those ranging from weekend enthusiasts to seriously-famous musicians.

In the case of Mires, it’s supplying strategic thinking and design solutions for clients ranging from roof tiles and video games to coffee beans and theater. Also travel, dining out, surfing, telephones, trading cards, golf and toys. And that’s just a partial list. Jose Serrano, principal/creative director, says, “We’ve had a wide reach of different types of accounts—we haven’t been in one certain category, like medical. We can learn what the clients’ needs are and tell a story that fits that particular need. That’s where the storytelling comes into play. It gives us the freedom to attract any type of client.”

So that’s the thread that ties these disparate areas together: story. At Mires, they believe there’s a story behind every brand that has its own unique voice. That belief has catapulted the San Diego, California, firm into a realm of success they never dreamed of. And one they don’t take for granted. Serrano says, “We never want to get comfortable. We’re always looking for new things we can be doing.”

Located in a picturesque, charming enclave of antique shops, printers, car repair shops and palm trees, the firm’s beach-town locale belies a bustling enterprise with an impressive client list. As the business grew, they offered more and more services. And over time, the former moniker of Mires Design—and the sole act of design itself—didn’t fit.

Imagine their surprise when it turned out they were in need of a story of their own. Principal/creative director Scott Mires, founder, says, “We’d been wrestling with it for a few years.We were offering a lot more than just design—design was limiting for us. We had become a strategic partner to our clients. We helped to build their brands. There’s this stigma to design as just being esthetic; we wanted to position ourselves as being more strategic. A lot of times it’s your oldtime clients who are pigeonholing you and sometimes you’re not good at promoting yourself to existing clients and talking about your new capabilities. We never really had a tagline— a descriptor for what we do.”

As they grappled for a new identity, their tagline ‘design for brands’ transformed into Mires>design for brands. It’s a subtle name that came with much discernment. Principal/ creative director John Ball says, “It was a great transition thing where it kept design up there pretty high, but it also introduced the strategic part of what we do: design ‘for brands’.” Mires adds, “We didn’t want to totally walk away from the esthetic, because that’s how we’ve gotten where we are—doing really incredible work—along with this other great component. At times, it’s been intuitively strategic but now it’s become more process-oriented strategy.”

“So in a way,” Ball says, “it was like taking a dose of our own medicine, stepping back and saying, OK we’re different now, how are we going to be positioned in our world, with our clients and potential clients? We looked at the name and the identity, redid the portfolio and the Web site.” Serrano continues, “The one thing that we did differently from most people is that we had actually done the work we were talking about. It wasn’t: Oh, we’re going to change our name and we’re going to refocus ourselves to say we’re doing strategy now, or, now we do brand work. We actually have a body of work that shows that we do those things. So now that we do have a new name, we already have work to back it up.” Mires adds, “It’s like doing a package for a product that doesn’t exist yet. It just makes people race to it and say, hey that’s really not any good.”

One key client, Neill Archer Roan, CEO of The Roan Group, a strategic business development company, has watched the firm grow. Mires has worked on Roan’s Arena Stage and California Center for the Arts client projects for years. He says, “It’s one thing to get a really great project the first time around, and another to get it for ten years. Their differentiating point is the quality of thinking and execution. Miguel [Perez, design director] is basically the Leonardo di Vinci of execution, creating an incredibly juicy execution of the idea and making it absolutely perfect. Things fail in execution. Mires is bulletproof in terms of executing strong concepts.”

Bob Schonfisch, director of creative services, Sega America, remembers his first encounter with Mires. “I was doing research for a corporate identity project. By the time I met John Ball, I was pretty well down the road of assigning another agency.” But it turns out, that was just for one assignment. Mires kept in front of Schonfisch by sending him spiral-bound books of recent work— books he’s kept to this day. Schonfisch, whose in-house marketing group does extensive work on the front end of assigning projects, brings a lot to the table in terms of market research and strategic thinking.

He references his company’s mission words, displayed in his office: Defiant, Passionate, Fearless, Unexpected, Irreverent and Independent. “Every piece of work we put out there has to have at least several of these properties,” he says. Once he began working with Mires, he found like minds, especially because they were able to grasp and appreciate his up-front strategic planning, not just deliver creative. “By the time I did give them their first assignment,” he remembers, “it was a huge project—redesigning hardware packaging and all the peripherals.”

He continues, “The good thing is that they listen. They’re able to take direction and elaborate on it. It’s seamless in terms of communication. During the process, it doesn’t matter who I’m talking to; we’re all on the same page. You don’t get mistakes out of them.”

That’s where that attention-to-detail claim comes in. Serrano says, “When we get a project, I tell clients, you’re welcome to go to the back and go through our archives. See some of the work we’re really proud of. Whether it’s 1-color, 2-color, 4-color, or whatever, the detail that goes into it is going to be amazing. We’re not going to give you ‘choice A’ or ‘choice B’ design. When we commit to a project, whether it’s one dollar or ten dollars, you’re going to get that level of detail.”

Each principal/creative director, Mires, Ball and Serrano, handles his own accounts, working with teams of designers and outside writers, illustrators and photographers. In 2001, Tom Carroll joined the firm as marketing director. “It was a missing piece that fit perfectly,” Mires says. “We also added project managers that added a whole level of getting things done. Before, the three of us would run around doing all that and now we have people who actually keep track of every last detail.”

Scott Mires has steered the Taylor Guitars account since the mid-1990s. Listug says, “My concept of branding is not to come up with something clever or advertising-y. Sometimes when you talk to [design] people, they want to do something pretty but haven’t thought much about strategy. Scott is long on strategy and he can create a beautiful, impactful piece. He’s enthusiastic about it.”

Scott is one of those designers who still does tiny pencil\ thumbnails. Serrano and Ball encourage their teams to do marker layouts before turning on the computer. At first-round internal creative meetings, they’ll have a plentiful, rough bounty of work, much of which is shown to the client. This way, they tend to over-deliver in the number of concepts they come up with—one more component to their own corporate strategy. This idea of over-delivering seems to have propelled them to the next level.

Roan offers, “The biggest challenge with branding as it relates to design is continuing to have the butterfly evolve. If you look at Mires work over a period of time, what you see is an arc that is very subtle. There’s a process of revealing and unfolding that is really organic. There has to be an unfolding of the story.”