Private View(s)

Branding is about feeling out the terrain, not planting a flag, according to Nikita Walia, who joins us to talk about getting brand strategy out of the PDF and into the real world.

The startup world moves fast, thinks different, and breaks things. But when it comes to creativity, the old agency playbook doesn't always apply, says our latest podcast guest Brian Wakabayashi, Head of Brand at WestCap’s internal creative studio CōLab.

Hard truths about building brand community: it’s difficult, it’s time-consuming, and it requires enormous commitment. But the brands that get it right will flourish. For the latest episode of our podcast, we chatted with Culture Defined founder Viktoria Wyckman about what community actually means, and embracing a slower approach to creative work.

Albert Hill, consultant and co-founder of much-admired estate agency The Modern House, discusses why a more instinctive, experimental kind of branding could be key to beating the algorithm.

Victoire Cogevina Reynal, co-CEO at club ownership group Mercury/13, sets out her mission for the business (no less than the emancipation of women’s football teams around the world), and discusses why branding and creativity are at the absolute core of Mercury/13’s big ambitions.

Jono Holt, founder of creative agency Otherway, discusses whether anyone still loves the 60-second ad format, and how short-form can be a shortcut for brands that want to get to the heart of culture.

Tim Huelskamp, co-founder and CEO of knowledge company 1440, on using a very old format to build a very modern media brand – and how customer stories helped grow the business from 78 subscribers to millions.

Arin Delaney, co-founder of copywriting studio Fonzie, discusses the magical potential of a great name, including its far-reaching power as a marketing tool and the studio’s ‘spiritual’ and ‘ethereal’ approach to naming brands and products.

Karen Meddour, Global Head of Fondation Chanel, joins design studio Accept & Proceed to discuss what it takes to build a change-making brand, as well as an agency partnership that goes beyond creative collaboration.

Alex Center, founder of Brooklyn-based brand studio Center, shares what he learned from leading the design team of a blue chip business, and his thoughts on building culture and community inside the studio.

Margaret Kerr-Jarrett and Emunah Winer from branding agency Nihilo chat frankly about using creativity as a refuge from everyday life, and the close-knit partnership that underpins everything they do.

“The problem with science is how it’s communicated.” SEED co-founder, Ara Katz, on making next gen probiotics more digestible with carefully considered, approachable design.

Introducing: Merchery co-founder, Simon Polet – on how selling less equals success when it comes to making the corporate customisation market more sustainable.

In this episode, we meet the co-founders of Montreal-based creative studio Wedge: Justin Lortie and Sarah Di Domenico. Though they already boasted a robust list of international clients, the pandemic has had a silver lining. Being in Montreal, many potential clients previously gave preference to agencies with a presence in major hubs like New York or San Francisco. But, no longer – remote working has opened new doors. Yet alongside remote work, they have also invested in a new bricks-and-mortar office – this one in the form of a house. A flexible space that will marry the best of their current, loft-style office, with the benefits of working from home — and they also imagine it as a space to show off client collaborations to the public.

In this episode, we meet Emmett Shine, ​​Chief Creative Officer and Co-Founder of Pattern, a family of simple, stylish homeware brands that hopes to help us find greater joy in our domestic spaces. Pattern span out of era-defining creative agency Gin Lane, which helped to shepherd in a generation of digital-ready, Millennial-geared brands such as Harry’s, Hims and Sweetgreen.

In this episode, we meet Trevor Hubbard, the founder and Global CEO of Butchershop Creative. Headquartered in San Francisco, their reach is far beyond the Bay Area: their expansion as a business has turned to the acquisition of complementary agencies to broaden their capabilities – recently acquiring Maniak, a digital-first design and technology firm in Guadalajara, and next looking to acquire another agency in the Asia Pacific region. They therefore can now operate as a near-enough full service creative team, delivering needle moving work for Clients as far ranging as Nike, Oculus, Tonal, Good Egg and Resident Home. They also double down hard on self initiated products and programs, not least the amazing WGI (Worlds Greatest Internship), a talent network that and global internship program like no other. AUFI had the pleasure of curating the initial route of agencies that the freshman year attended, and we've been proudly supporting it ever since.

In this episode, we meet Umar ElBably, co-founder and co-CEO of Faculty, a brand centred on the premise that masculine grooming needed its walls torn down. Launching with a line of nail polishes, it was quick to attract attention, raising $3million in seed funding in 2021, led by Estee Lauder. Also remarkable is Umar himself: Faculty is his first venture since graduating from the Ivey Business School at Western University in 2019, he embodies a host of the traits one looks for in disruptive founders - crystal clear vision - founder-market-fit - endless energy for graft and problem solving - and a nothings going to stop me attitude. Faculty has collaborated with some top creatives from the AUFI network, including agencies Some Days and Playlab Inc., producing a fresh, multidimensional brand that matches its game-changing proposition.

Back for a rolling series of Private View(s). In this episode, we meet Will Esparza and Kelli Robertson, co-founders of creative agency Hyphenated. Founded just before the pandemic, they're already bagging major clients, such as Nike, Therabody, and 2k Games, producing energised and exciting work that speaks to Hyphenated’s mission of “shared progress”.

Episode 10 of private views dives into the creative practice and studio of NY's Mythology, featuring founding partner Fernando Music.

Manuel Dilone, Creative Director of studio Character, one of the largest and heavy-hitting branding agencies on the west coast of America, discusses with Private View(s) how branding often lacks identity, and so they lean towards projects where they can add flexible meanings to a concept.