28TEN GROUP
BUILDING A BRAND FROM ZERO
ROLE
Brand Strategy, Creative Direction, Identity Design, Environmental Direction
TYPE
Brand Identity, 2026
THE DESIGN TEAM WAS BOOKED.
THE DEADLINE WASN’T MOVING.
GOOD.
I love a challenge.
28TEN needed a brand in weeks, and there wasn't room in the schedule for our usual collaborative process. So I took this one myself, from discovery through identity design, putting my own hands into the kind of work I usually lead.
THE SITUATION
They had a few weeks to become a company that didn't exist yet.
After eight years in an established partnership, the founders were starting over. The old brand was staying behind, the new company had a launch date, and 28TEN needed to feel credible from the moment the doors opened.
Speed was non-negotiable and my editorial design background came rushing back to me. When the deadline can’t move, you don’t lower the bar. You innovate.
THE TENSION
The more we talked, the less interested I became in making them look like a faith based financial firm. I wanted them to feel like home.
Faith mattered. So did professionalism. They loved local history and things with a past, but they were building something new. They wanted warmth, masculinity, hospitality, authority, and a sense of place.
None of those ideas were the problem.
The problem was giving them enough structure to become recognizable without deciding too early what 28TEN was allowed to become.
THE EXPLORATION
How do you get four numbers to
tell a story without a tagline?
There was no language system yet. Just four numbers staring back at me and a brand that needed to communicate something before it had the words to do it.
I spent hours trying to decide whether 28TEN should be written out or spelled out.
Strategy? Let the brand personality decide.
Underneath everything from discovery, I knew what they were trying to build: safety, community, and world-class financial planning that still felt like home.
So I pushed the identity in two directions. One soft. One bold.
Home sprinkled throughout both.
THE DIRECTION
The bold direction won. And it flowed.
The structure gave 28TEN the confidence and credibility it needed to launch.
Then something new entered the system: “Make it Generational.”
The tagline gave us another piece of the brand to build around, and we folded the softer elements back in: warmth in the typography, history in the details, character in the materials, and enough flexibility for the identity to keep becoming itself.
It didn't need to look like home. It needed to leave room for them to make it their own.
THEN THEY STARTED CALLING ME FROM THE HARDWARE STORE.
And I loved it.
They were excited. They were sending photos, asking about materials, signage, framing, furniture, and how the brand could live in the space. The collaboration had moved beyond presenting a creative direction and asking for approval. They were actively participating in building it.
As a creative director, I want to foster that kind of creative ownership in clients just as much as I do in designers. My job wasn't to make every decision for them. It was to give them enough strategy, context, and confidence to make thoughtful creative decisions themselves.
Design wasn't simply something being delivered to their business. They were using design as a business competency.
BEYOND THE BRAND BOOK
The best part wasn't that they followed the brand. It was that they started playing with it.
Somewhere along the way, people who had described themselves as analytical and “not creative” stopped asking what they were allowed to do and started asking what was possible.
That became one of my favorite outcomes of the project. 28TEN didn't just leave with a new identity. The people building it left with a different relationship to creativity.
And to me, that's creative leadership: not owning all the creativity in the room, but creating the conditions for more of it.
CLIENT FEEDBACK · FOLLOWING ENVIRONMENTAL IMPLEMENTATION