Tales of a Frankenbranch
- Branch Transformation
- Credit Union
- Portfolio
- Retail
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Nestled in a quaint, mist covered valley, far from the maddening crowd of the easterly metropolis, there was a branch.
It was the first branch. It was the flagship branch.
Then, it was an old branch, built and built again, cobbled together from disparate parts across several decades.
It was a Frankenbranch.
A stitch work job, it had different styles from different decades. It resembled a branch, but was something horrifyingly different.
It started off as the main branch in a proud paper mill town in the 1980’s. The branch’s street level floor carried much of the transactional load, while a small upstairs space acted as a meeting room. Eventually, it gave way to a series of expansions. While the expansion efforts successfully achieved the goal of expanding the overall square footage, they never took into consideration previous design elements. And don’t even start on the construction engineering side of the story…
One crew set out to do the job without any knowledge of the mechanics of the previous construction.
It wasn’t even really their fault. Plans were lost. People changed. Memories fade. Guesses were made. Lots of band-aids and looking the other way.
But what didn’t fade, or rather, what became increasingly obvious as the years turned to decades, was a patched together branch. It was undoubtedly historic, but also unabashedly stitched together to create a monster of a branch in which “good customer service” was a scary proposition.
It just wasn’t working anymore.
So…
Who you gonna call?
Enter the Branchbusters at LEVEL5, the nation’s leading Design-Build firm. They turn the country’s Frankenbranches into beautifully designed, expertly built revenue driving beacons on the hill that often times act as the prototype for high growth financial institutions.
Working with the existing infrastructure and maintaining the historical integrity of the building, the LEVEL5 design team crafted a modern branch that echoed the brand.
The construction crews never closed the branch to its members. Behind the scenes, however, on nights and weekends, they worked. They ripped out walls, re-established load bearing walls, refined the footprint for a better consumer experience, and reinvented a branch from the studs. The result delivered was a new, highly functioning branch. It was as if it had been built from the ground up.