Fondu opens in Canada.

Fondu is a brand and design studio in Canada, and as of this month it is open for work. We help businesses work out what their brand should be before deciding what it should look like, and then we build the identity, the language and the experiences that make it real. This first journal entry covers the two questions people ask us most: why Canada, and what it means to be powered by Brandinc.

Why we started a studio in Canada

The short answer is that Canada is home. Our co-founder grew up here, spent the better part of a decade building brands in the Gulf, and came back with a clear sense of what he wanted to bring with him.

The longer answer is that Canada is full of businesses at the exact moment where a brand matters most. Founders across Alberta, in Calgary and Edmonton, are building companies that have outgrown the logo they made at the start. Hospitality and food groups in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal are opening new concepts in markets where the competition is sharp and the customer has seen it all. Developers, institutions and public bodies are shaping new places and need them to mean something to the people who live there. All of them need the same thing: someone who will think hard about what the business stands for, and then design it properly.

We work with clients across Canada and the US, in person where it helps and remotely where it doesn't. A project in Montreal gets the same team and the same attention as one down the road in Calgary, and for clients in Quebec we think about both English and French from the very first conversation rather than translating at the end.

What it means to be powered by Brandinc

Fondu is new. The record behind it is not.

Fondu is powered by Brandinc., an independent brand consultancy based in Dubai that has been building brands since 2012 for developers, hotel groups, government bodies and founders. Over fourteen years, Brandinc. has built and evolved more than 85 brands across hospitality, tourism, food and beverage, wellness, finance, real estate and consumer products, in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Libya, Turkey and now Canada. The developments those brands belong to are worth more than three billion dollars.

That work includes repositioning Address Hotels + Resorts for its next chapter, bringing the seven Emirates together under one destination brand for the UAE Grand Tour, and translating Armani Hotel Dubai into locally relevant experiences without losing what makes it Armani. It also includes the brand for a new international financial district in Benghazi and a midscale hotel concept in Saudi Arabia built for curious travellers.

Being powered by Brandinc. means a Canadian business working with Fondu gets that depth of experience directly. Fondu is not a satellite office or a reseller. It is a studio in its own right, run by the same people who did that work, and it can draw on Brandinc.'s team, partners and fourteen years of process whenever a project calls for it.

What the Gulf has to do with a Canadian brand

It is a fair question, and the answer is pace. In the Gulf, a hotel brand, a city district or an entire category can go from nothing to open in the time most markets take to agree on a name. That speed rewards studios that can settle the strategy and draw it in the same weeks, without a long handover in between. It is a habit we brought with us, and it is just as useful to a Canadian founder with a launch date as it was to a developer with a skyline to fill.

The other thing that travels well is range. We have built brands for a ministry and for a cold brew, for an equestrian destination and for a financial centre. Canadian businesses rarely fit neatly into one category, and we would rather understand what makes a business worth noticing than apply a formula that worked for someone else.

What we do

We create concepts and build brands. From the first conversation to the final detail, we get involved in the thinking, the making and everything in between. In practice, that covers:

• Brand strategy and positioning
• Concepts and experiences
• Creative and art direction
• Naming and verbal identity
• Campaign and social strategy
• Film concepts and storytelling
• Editorial and presentation design

You can see how that comes together in our work, from Veo, a wellness club we built from strategy to signage, to Acacia, a hotel concept we named and designed around art, music and culture.

Who we work with

We work with established businesses, ambitious founders and organisations building something new, in whatever industry they happen to be in. The people you meet are the people who do the work, and there is nobody behind them to hand it to. We work as part of the team responsible for where the brand ends up, which means caring about the outcome well beyond the part we were brought in to do.

There is a better brand behind every business, and a business behind every great idea. Finding them is why we are here. If you are building something in Canada or the US and want to talk it through, write to us at info@fondu.studio.