What Makes an Architect?

Written by
Melissa Lohrer

What Makes an Architect? Visualizing New Realities and Making it Happen

We are brand architects. We partner with brands to visualize a reality and make it happen. It’s a term we’ve defined clearly and a role we’ve carved for ourselves with intention, because the stakes are high.

Brands have the ability to shape culture, influence how we go about our day, and affect how we feel. As a small, nimble team who has the potential to make a big impact in our partnerships, we don’t take our responsibility lightly.

So what makes a brand architect? In a broad sense, we find the job requires intelligence and imagination to come together. Brand architects have the ability to imagine what’s there and the rigor to make it happen.

“Architects follow logic but they also take intuitive leaps,” says our founding partner Paul McDowall. “The things they create can be beautiful, but they have to accomplish a goal as well.”

Done effectively, architecture builds experiences for audiences but also changes perceptions internally. Here’s how we define our work of architecting brands.

To architect is to integrate.

Equipping brands to shape the future requires individuals with specific expertise to come together. While everyone in our team has their speciality, there’s no room for siloed thinking here.

“Our creatives don’t have a monopoly on creativity and our strategists don’t own thinking,” says Paul. “Imagination and intelligence are common traits among our team.”

Our work philosophy has served us well as our agency—and the world at large—has moved to more virtual collaboration. While remote working has the potential to accentuate silos, we’ve been able to collaborate even from afar because coming together is the way we’ve always worked. It’s even motivated us to innovate a hybrid work model.

It’s this spirit of total integration that helps us forge deep relationships with our clients. We build partnerships for the long haul, based on total trust and a commitment to understanding organizational idiosyncrasies. It’s necessary to do the work we specialize in: partnering with clients at pivotal moments to accelerate their evolution. Our value is bringing together the right people, constituents, and teams together to make change happen.

To architect is to improvise.

Improvisation is a distinct skillset, never a replacement for preparation. Helping brands solve specific challenges requires the type of openness that an improvisational approach provides. We bring fresh eyes to each project, find the opportunities in the constraints and don’t follow any set templates so that creativity can flow.

In order to improvise, our team must come to every project with thoughtfulness, attentiveness, and respect for those they’re working with. Adopting “yes, and” thinking allows us to riff and build together to arrive at fully formed ideas and solutions.

That goes for our interactions with our clients as well. Through an improvisational approach, we actively engage clients in the process. We don’t dictate solutions based on past projects, but rather listen fully and build off of what we’re hearing.

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To architect is to inspire.

Believing that brands can impact culture in profoundly meaningful ways is the first step to creating a new reality. We’re optimistic to our core about the power brands have to make change. We look at challenges and know we’ll be able to make something great from them—for the brand, but also for everyone the brand touches.

“We aim to be the breath of fresh air, or the light in the room,” says our founding partner Catherine Clark. “A successful meeting means the client walks away with new ideas or the ability to think about a challenge in a new way.”

Our job as an agency is to empower clients rather than fostering dependency. We don’t believe in binders on shelves. Our work is to take real, complex problems and transform them into eloquent answers. Then we provide the tools that allow brands to carry that work into the future.

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To architect is to be fiercely independent.

Our agency began two decades ago in an East Village apartment. We weren’t a spinoff. We didn’t have funding. And while this presented its own series of challenges, it more importantly laid the roots for who we are today, forcing us to be prudent but also allowed us to cultivate the work we love—brand architecting—without being beholden to growth and domination.
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This spirit of independence flows through our agency at large. We get satisfaction out of offering our team opportunities to grow upwards and define their own reality within the organization. As a result, they have skin in the game: they become independently invested in client work and view it as their own. A success for the agency is a success for every team member.

We also aim to inspire independence in the clients we work with. Our goal is not to won the brand but to leave a client more effortlessly autonomous than they were when we began the project. We don’t worry about where that leaves us, because we know that there will always be a chance for us to get involved in the next step of our partners’ evolutions.

To architect is to embrace the future.

The end goal of a brand architect is to take companies further. We go beyond the initial ask to actively identify what’s needed to make a brand future-ready, whether or not that work is ours to complete.

It’s our job to be a trusted set of eyes—to spot the opportunities that brands have to move into a better place for their business and for culture at large. That’s why we build our team with thinkers and creators who are full of genuine curiosity.

“We often hear our team members tell us they love their job because it allows them to connect the dots,” says Catherine. “It’s important for our whole agency to be able to use our human brains, not just perpetuate the data and algorithm domination.”

Our work is never derivative because each challenge is completely unique. Every project uncovers new possibilities. Every project gives us a new understanding of what we can achieve with our partners. In that way, every time we help take our clients further, we take our own leap into the future.

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