Inspiration

How One Creative Agency is Helping Brands Refresh with Power and Authority

by The Luupe

Creative agency The Working Assembly is dramatically redefining how brands show the world what they do best.

Brand refreshes are rewarding yet challenging. They can dramatically change the impact of your messaging, vision, and what you bring to the world, and they need to get it right. When selecting an agency for our new identity, it was important to us that they live and breathe our mission to amplify underrepresented creators. It had to be their truth as much as it was ours.

On the heels of this new milestone, we speak with Jolene Delisle, founder of The Working Assembly, an agency known for taking brands to the next level by bringing multiple pieces of an identity into a single, holistic view. We get into Jolene's creative philosophy with some key takeaways any brand looking to step it up needs to know.

The Luupe: Beyond being ever-inspired by your portfolio, working with a culturally diverse, women-founded agency on The Luupe's redesign was important to us – to communicating our values and mission. How important is being woman-founded to your own creative philosophies and the clients you take on?

Jolene Delisle: The creative agency business is still very white and male dominated, and being a minority founded, woman owned agency is still a rarity these days. As much as it shouldn’t be a differentiator, it has become one for us. It affects everything from the clients we attract to the team internally we’ve built - over half our team identifies as a woman and over half our team identifies as a person of color.

We feel incredibly fortunate to surround ourselves with diverse talent but also responsible to ensure that we continually align our work to our values and what inspired us to start this company in the first place.

The Luupe: If you could describe your design and creative philosophy in a few words, what would it be?

Jolene Delisle: Historically, brand development in many ways has been very siloed and challenging for early stage companies. Brand strategy, visual identity, etc. would be built by a branding agency, then handed off to a digital agency who may build out the marketing website and external communications, and then yet another agency who may build awareness with a campaign and social assets.

The Luupe: Your biggest focus is "shaping" brand identity. What does this mean to you?

Jolene Delisle: We pride ourselves in offering a holistic offering and very intentionally think of ourselves as brand builders - we can approach helping create, elevate and refine brands at all stages and house talent that intersects advertising, branding and product design seamlessly.

Additionally, we think of ourselves as style agnostic. We don’t adhere to a certain visual aesthetic that we then apply across clients. We truly try to embed ourselves into the brand and build a DNA that feels unique and specific to that brand.

We take a lot of learnings we have from our product design days, applying empathy and user centered design into our brand building and take a decidedly digital first approach in developing brands.

The Luupe: What do you think is one of the biggest challenges brands face today when conceptualizing and finalizing their brand and visual identity?

Jolene Delisle: It’s easy to get caught up in trends and caught up in a bit of visual homogeneity. It’s why we see so many brands that feel like a remixed version of another. I think it was really just as important to Keren and team as it was to us that we create a brand that felt very singular to The Luupe, that encompassed the empowering, dynamic and bold aspect of the brand personality.

It was fun to play with this idea of community, art and tech and how we could blend and jumble visual cues from each of those worlds to make something really new.

Look familiar? The Luupe's new homepage, part of our brand refresh designed in collaboration with The Working Assembly.

The Luupe: Much of your work revolves around working with establishing brands and taking them to the next level. What excites you most about this?

Jolene Delisle: There’s nothing greater than the privilege of collaborating with an emerging brand to create their visual identity and set the stage for all that is to come at the exciting start of a company’s life. Similarly, there’s nothing quite like the honor of helping a brand that is storied and within the cultural zeitgeist to evolve and reestablish themselves firmly for the times.

The Luupe: In your opinion, when is a key time or signal that a brand needs to consider rethinking or expanding its identity?

Jolene Delisle: Whenever a client comes to us, regardless of the stage they are at, we try to dig deep into what is signaling the need for a refresh or brand exercise. Often it’s time with either a shift in positioning, a new product or engaging or widening an audience.

The Luupe: Aside from The Luupe (obviously – haha,) what's a recent design/identity project that you were especially excited about and why?

Jolene Delisle: We’re thankful to be a go-to partner for women founders - and we’re always particularly proud of our collaboration with these amazing, smart, inspiring and hardworking founding women some recently such as Betches, Haven’s Kitchen, Sweet Nothings, Havenly, Partake, Aavia, and Oula.

The Luupe: Lastly, a question that comes up constantly in Luupe conversations as the world turns: what's keeping you inspired, optimistic and fired up, right now?

Jolene Delisle: I’m inspired by our clients and team, and genuinely feel grateful to be able to work within the creative industry, employing talented women and supporting amazing women founders. There’s nothing greater than being able to align your passions, values and time in a way that feels fulfilling and fun.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The Luupe

The Luupe is a one-stop production company that is raising the bar for professional brand imagery on a global scale. With a highly curated and diverse network of professional women and non-binary photo and video creators across 80+ countries around the world, we are reinventing how brands produce original, local, and authentic visual stories that connect with a global audience. Our mission is to champion and amplify diverse perspectives from around the world — in front of and behind the lens.