Collins, a strategy and brand experience design company, has recently been announced as the agency of the year 2019 by AdAge. Brian Collins is the Founder and Chief Creative Officer of the agency that focuses on creating communications, products, and environments for transforming brands, drive business, and improve people’s lives. The 11-year-old agency, employing about 50 people in its New York and San Francisco offices, has built a name for itself by reimagining brands that need to be ahead of the curve, such as Spotify, Target and Microsoft.
Collins was once called a hybrid between Disney and McKinsey by one of its clients, said Brian Collins to AdAge about his eponymous brand experience design agency. “What that means is we’re able to solve really complex business opportunities at scale,” he said, “and able to do it with originality and creativity.” According to Collins, the shop is well situated in an industry where C-suite lines are obscuring and in-housing is on the rise.
In 2018, the agency won more than 20 new clients – including HBO, Equinox, Twitch, Nickelodeon, Instacart, Edgewell Brands and Robinhood – with projects ranging from $250,000 to $850,000 in incremental revenue. Moreover, the agency made sure of not losing a single client that time.
Collins deals with strategy and research, brand identity, communications, architectural & environmental product innovation, and packaging design. Last year, they worked for the San Francisco Exploratorium’s “Inflatable: Expanding Works of Art” exhibition, where they created a responsive, balloon-inspired typeface via a custom algorithm that could expand to fit whatever space the copy was placed on, such as a billboard or a bus. It heightened the museum membership, with a 20 percent increase in the attendance over the summer. Also, to illustrate that Mailchimp, an email marketing company, enables businesses to build their brands by maintaining unique voices, Collins made an approach to make its branding playful and more human with hand-drawn sketches and a banana-yellow backdrop, along with the reimagination of its monkey mascot, Freddie.
Collins also worked with its founder’s former agency, WPP-owned Ogilvy, for a project to rebrand and create a more updated, future-facing version of itself. Moreover, Collins worked with Target Creative to name and design some of the retail giant’s new products and lines – to revive sales.
Collins endeavors to bring “incredible craft at incredible scale” for each of its clients. According to a statement, they are finding ways to use design for building insane relevance.
