What Have We Done? 20 Years of Building Brands

If I could have done anything better, maybe I would be two inches taller and a shade faster on my jump shot. But no. Deep down, I am a designer whose brand building instincts were shaped long before the first pixel. My portfolio was hand-drawn when I left school. Everybody wanted digital chops and I was wearing my analog swagger. The creativity I built with those old-school instruments took me to solid companies with solid mentors. After ten years in the business, I jumped in 2002, a decade after the .com collapse, to go out on my own. I merged with Jonathan Fisher and we launched the company in 2005. Less than a year later, we brought in BravoZulu and made Malcolm Wolter, Donovan Buck, and Greg Weir our strategic partners. We have been nurturing brands ever since, surviving every kind of storm: market crashes, energy slumps, pandemics, real hurricanes, and the drizzle days when a company just fights to stay alive. More than 150 people have walked through our doors. Interns with good hair. Seasoned leaders with better stories. We have built, contracted, expanded, regrouped, and studied all of it, and the best we can do now is take a graceful bow (or at least avoid full-blown panic).

The company started with a simple mission: help companies tell the truth about themselves through brand strategy consulting and make it stick. We did not want to be the biggest. We wanted to be the most trusted, woven into our clients' vision, not just another vendor. That meant walking clients through changes as big as family business transitions and as tangled as IPOs, mergers, and divestitures, providing full-service brand and technology support at every step. As Harvard Business Review has long argued, brand building is not a single campaign but a sustained commitment to a coherent strategy. Some days we were the calm voice in the chaos. Other days we were the creative spark during reinvention. The value, every time, came back to the client, the team, and the truth of their story.

No more percentages and statistics. Just a few stories, the good ones, that explain it all.

Transocean

We helped Transocean articulate a new CEO's strategy through strategic brand consulting and guided the business through a turning point. Beyond steering the company out of a tough spot, we helped a friend define his vision for the future of the company and the industry.

Chemstations

Cracking open a niche engineering software company with custom software for niche markets and broadening its brand to reach the full chemical industry was a rush. We repositioned Chemstations as approachable, human, and a little witty, which is rare territory for process engineers. Making software feel like something people actually want to use in a world of gray boxes and spreadsheets? That counts as a win.

Skyward Specialty

When the Houston International Insurance Group wanted a fresh start, the answer was not a new logo. It was a new name, a new vision, and a new industry story. We led a full comprehensive brand reengineering with Skyward Specialty, launching the rebrand internally and externally in a way that gave them a clear market position and a foundation for sustained growth. That kind of top-down, bottom-up transformation is the work we live for.

Oxy

Oxy was becoming a leader in carbon management, and the rebrand demanded bold thinking. We transformed their brand identity from traditional energy giant to proactive carbon innovation partner, zeroing in on Oxy's narrative and spotlighting their vision, values, and commitment to operating across the energy spectrum. The case study drilled one lesson home: brand is not what you say but what people think.

Millar

Our work with Millar started at a crossroads: new leadership, ambitious growth targets, and a need to rediscover the brand's heritage and innovation for a new era. We refreshed their positioning, rebuilt custom product architecture and UX, and introduced Millar to both legacy and new markets with a clear strategy. Branding their new 56,000-square-foot headquarters in Pearland, Texas was one of the most ambitious phases. We designed environmental signage and interactive spaces so that Millar's history of life-saving technology came alive for every visitor and every employee. The result: Millar went from a catheter company to a global OEM enterprise, generating new revenue streams and internal pride, and proving, one branded brick at a time, that real change starts inside and radiates outward.

WillScot

WillScot needed visible leadership in the modular space, and a good product alone was not going to cut it. We fueled their rise by scaling creative and digital teams across multiple platforms: digital campaigns, environmental graphics, and messaging that projected innovation and reliability into a crowded market. We supported their IPO, the acquisition of three major competitors, and made sure customers saw a company ready to deliver. The result? WillScot did not just stand out. They stood alone, earning industry recognition while their client base grew organically.

It is not all high-fives and awards. Two decades in, here is what stuck:

• Risky decisions required prayer, belief, teamwork, and a lot of pep talks
• You cannot make everyone happy. The sooner you accept that, the easier leadership gets
• I tried, failed, and learned that total respect beats temporary approval and warm honesty beats vague kindness every time
• Some days, you are not proud. Bad communication and awkward silences grow from fear and indecision
• The best leaders tell the truth, own their mistakes, and fight to rebuild trust even when it is uncomfortable
• "Think small" feels safe. "Think big" feels dangerous. We pushed clients to go bigger, yet sometimes hesitated to do the same for ourselves
• Your people are the story. Some stayed, some moved on, but every teammate left a mark
• Brand strength depends more on talent and commitment than any campaign or slogan. The more we took care of each other, the better we performed
• Partners, not vendors. The real magic happens when clients sit shoulder-to-shoulder with us, solving problems together

Today, we are as comfortable measuring KPIs as we are writing taglines. Our brand process reaches well past design into leadership, culture, and the quantifiable value of strategy expression. Rankings like Interbrand's Best Global Brands back up what we have seen with our own eyes: companies that treat brand as a strategic asset consistently outperform those that file it under cost center. The full-scale launch of Skyward, the reinvented customer experience at Chemstations, the radical reinvention of Oxy: all of it proves that brand is performance, not gloss. We dig into these themes on our podcast "Solving for Bdeg," exploring how strategy, AI, voice, and empathy will shape the future of branding. Real conversations, real lessons, zero hype. It is a blast to produce, and it pulls together our history and the sharp people who made it.

Trends rotate. Platforms rise and fall. Algorithms shift overnight. But after twenty years and hundreds of engagements, a handful of principles held steady through every cycle.

Truth Beats Polish

The brands that last are rooted in something real. A slick identity layered over an empty promise collapses the moment customers look behind the curtain. We learned early that helping clients articulate their actual story, messy parts included, produces far more durable results than manufacturing an aspirational fantasy. Authenticity is not a buzzword; it is structural integrity for a brand.

Consistency Compounds

One brilliant campaign does not build a brand. Repeated, disciplined expression of the same core idea across every touchpoint is what carves a permanent space in the customer's mind. The compounding effect of brand consistency across strategy and execution over years is massive, but it demands patience most organizations underestimate. We dig deeper into this dynamic in our guide on turning vision into reality through brand strategy.

People Before Pixels

Every rebrand, every product launch, every market expansion comes back to human beings making decisions about other human beings. Culture eats strategy for breakfast. No amount of design sophistication compensates for a team that does not believe in what they are selling. The work we are most proud of always began by getting the internal culture right before turning the spotlight outward.

Measure What Matters, Then Adapt

Intuition got us into the game. Data keeps us honest. The shift from gut-feel branding to measurable brand performance through advanced analytics has been one of the biggest changes in our two decades. But measurement without action is just reporting. The principle is a loop: define success, measure it, learn from it, evolve.

Relationships Outlast Transactions

Our longest client relationships span more than a decade. They outlasted market crashes, leadership changes, and complete business pivots. The reason is simple: we showed up as partners, not vendors. When the scope ended, the relationship did not. That mindset, treating every engagement as a long-term partnership, is the single principle we would bet the next twenty years on.

We did not just build brands. We built community. Our team has volunteered time to nonprofits across Houston for years. We have taught at universities and poured real effort into the thousands of interns who came through our doors. Those alumni now lead creative teams, run private companies, and manage government organizations. We are proud of the difference we have made and the lives we helped shape. None of this would have happened without family: my wife, who pushed me to make the leap after she saw I was unhappy; my kids, who tagged along on late-night press checks and early-morning client meetings; and my parents, whose entrepreneurial grit and creative energy set the whole thing in motion. The impact matters to us. So do the lives we have worked to make better.

If one theme defines the next twenty years, it is brand building through performance. For a practical playbook on how to develop and grow your brand strategically, start with honest diagnosis before reaching for tactical fixes. Technology, AI, and data powered by advanced AI and data technologies will keep rewriting the rules, but real storytelling will always win. With the right tools, dedicated scaling and support teams, and talented people in every seat, we are built to help our clients measure what actually counts:

• Customer loyalty
• Culture
• Investor confidence
• Sales effectiveness