A new name, a new look, and a more accurate description of the work we’ve been doing for some time.

We want to be clear from the outset about what that does and does not mean. A change of name in the middle of live schemes is exactly the sort of thing clients are right to ask questions about, so it is worth answering them properly.

There is a new look as well, and we will come to it, but the design work follows the thinking rather than standing in for it, which is the part worth explaining first.

This is a repositioning before it is anything else. A rebrand changes how a company looks. A repositioning changes what a company says it is responsible for. Our engineering has not changed, our team has not changed, and our standards have not moved. What has changed is that the front of the business now describes the work accurately.

Why the old name no longer fitted

Electro Design Lab was an accurate name when we started. It said electrical, and electrical is what we did.

It stopped being a complete description fairly quickly. On a treatment works, electrical decisions cannot sensibly be made in isolation. The mechanical arrangement, the process assumptions and the constraints of the site all determine what is possible, so we found ourselves reviewing those areas as a matter of course: flagging clashes, questioning assumptions, and looking at the scheme as a system rather than as a discipline.

“You cannot design the electrical side of a treatment works properly without understanding the mechanical and the process around it. So the conversation always widens. ‘Have you considered this?’ ‘If we do that there, it affects this over here’. We have worked that way from the start. Our previous name simply did not say so.”

Alan Thomas, Co-founder

The practical consequence was straightforward. Unless a client already knew Alan or Tom personally, they had no reason to ask about anything beyond the electrical package, and no way of knowing we could help. A name that discourages the questions you are best placed to answer is a name worth evolving.

What MEDL is

MEDL is a multidisciplinary engineering consultancy for water, wastewater and industrial infrastructure. In practice that means mechanical and electrical design brought together under one accountable team, with project management and digital running throughout our work.

The industry has always bought M&E as a single package, and for good reason. On a treatment works the two are closely enough related that separating them across two consultants does not remove the coordination problem. It moves it, usually to the client, and often to the point in the programme where it is most expensive to resolve. Bringing the two together under one team is a fairly ordinary idea. It simply requires being structured to take that responsibility on.

“Most of the value in a design review is spotting the thing that would not otherwise become obvious until construction. That is easier when one team is looking at the whole scheme rather than one slice of it. It is not a complicated idea, but it does need the right people looking at it early enough.”

Tom Moore, Co-founder

The other change is scope. Water and wastewater is our home ground and will remain the majority of our work. The disciplines, standards and regulatory rigour that treatment works demand transfer directly to industrial infrastructure, so that work is now formally part of what we take on rather than something we occasionally said yes to.

What we have written down

Repositioning is easy to claim and harder to be held to, so we have set out what MEDL is for in plain terms. These are not slogans. They are the standard we would like to be measured against.

Our purpose

To turn complex engineering challenges into clear, practical designs that work in the real world.

The word doing the work in that sentence is practical. A design can be technically correct and still cause problems on site if it cannot be built in the available sequence, or maintained sensibly once it is commissioned.

Our positioning

A modern, multidisciplinary engineering consultancy for water, wastewater and industrial infrastructure.

Multidisciplinary is the operative word, and the reason for the change of name.

Our promise

We bring mechanical and electrical design together with honest communication and dependable delivery.

Honest communication includes the less comfortable version of it: saying when a scheme will not work as specified, when an assumption made upstream is wrong, or when the most viable solution is not the one already agreed. We think that is more useful than being agreeable, and considerably cheaper to act on in design than in construction.

Our personality

Knowledgeable, approachable, collaborative, practical and quietly confident.

The word quietly is deliberate. We would rather the drawings did the talking.

The new look

The visual identity is being refreshed alongside the repositioning.

The old one was put together quickly, in the way most start-up identities are. An existing logo was adapted to fit, then adapted again as the business grew past it. It did its job at the time, but it was never designed to represent a multidisciplinary consultancy, and it had started to look like what it was.

The new identity has been developed to reflect what the repositioning sets out, and to sit comfortably in the environments our work actually appears in: drawings, technical documents, tender submissions and site offices, rather than brochures. Clearer, more considered, and quieter than the sort of thing our sector often reaches for.

The rollout will be gradual, across drawings, documents, proposals, correspondence and the website. If you receive something from us in the old format during that period, it is not an error and it has no bearing on the status of the document.

A new look on its own would not have been worth your attention. It is worth mentioning because the thinking behind it changed first.

What this means if you are specifying design work

– One team accountable for the design across disciplines, which means fewer interfaces to manage and fewer parties to chase.

– Issues identified during design rather than on site, while they are still comparatively inexpensive to resolve.

– Direct access to the people whose names are on the work. At our size, the principals are the ones doing it.

– Pricing and response times that reflect a small business with low overheads rather than a large one.

What has not changed

The name, our positioning and the look. In practical terms, that is the extent of it.

Same two founders, same standards, same phone numbers. Every scheme currently in progress continues exactly as it is, with the same people on it, to the same programme.

Alan has a line he has been repeating for fifteen years, which is that “you are only as good as your last job”. It is why almost all of our work has come through reputation and word of mouth, and why, when something does go wrong, we do what we can to put it right quickly. None of that is affected by a change of name, and nor should it be.

What comes next

We are growing carefully. That means adding experienced hires who are already known to and tested by the water industry, rather than headcount for its own sake, and it means taking on additional capability only when we can deliver it properly.

The ambition is modest enough to state plainly. We would like a client writing a specification to put MEDL in it without feeling the need to check with anyone first, because they already have a good idea of what they will get.

If you have a scheme coming up, mechanical, electrical or both, we would be glad to talk it through. Welcome to the next phase of MEDL.