About Finch Brands

about ﬁnch brands ABOUT US ABOUT

ﬁnch brands is a real-world branding agency.

Like the ﬁnches whose beaks inspired Darwin’s theory of evolution, brands that adapt to the ever-changing environment not only survive, they thrive. We draw our name and inspiration from the forces that shape the natural world to help our clients succeed in the real world.

Finch Brands was founded in 1998 by executives instrumental in the ascent of IKEA and David’s Bridal. Their original vision was to create the ﬁrm they were never able to ﬁnd when they were in our clients’ shoes – an end-to-end brand development and management powerhouse that seamlessly delivers breakthrough brand strategy and irrepressibly creative brand design.

To accomplish this, we have brought together a team of leaders from brand- ﬁrst organizations like Campbell Soup Company, NPR, and Urban Outﬁtters. These experiences make us a better, more instinctive partner – and we put this hard-earned experience to work for clients across categories and all along the growth track. SERVICES

pricing brand extension / elasticity web design and digital strategy brand tracking and brand health product/service innovation funnel strategic counsel and growth planning marketing planning / demand generation BRAND MANAGEMENT BRAND social media strategy / program management advertising campaign development and launch advertising campaign development ethnography focus groups in-home research virtual communities quantitative surveys digital bulletin boards custom methodologies in-depth interviews (IDI) store visits and mystery shopping MARKET RESEARCH

brand strategy vision and mission brand architecture

packaging design and POP

identity (naming, logo, tagline) internal brand rollout / training launch planning and execution brand standards/design systems

will ever engage. will ever with whom our clients whom our with consequential partner consequential our goal is to be the most the most be is to goal our BRAND DEVELOPMENT BRAND EXECUTIVE TEAM

DANIEL ERLBAUM CEO

A retailer and business builder, Daniel co-founded Finch Brands after serving as an original investor and Vice President at David’s Bridal. As CEO of Finch Brands, Daniel focuses on bringing together a group of superlative professionals to provide outstanding service and value to our clients, who face many of the same growth challenges Daniel managed at David’s Bridal. Additionally, Daniel leverages an extensive network of inﬂuential contacts within the corporate and investor communities to beneﬁt growth-oriented companies of all sizes.

BILL GULLAN PRESIDENT

Bill is Finch Brands’ lead strategist and one of the premier brand developers in the marketplace. He has been the prime mover in the development of breakthrough strategies for Afﬂiction, American Express, AT&T, Daffy’s, Everlast, General Mills, Herman Miller, IBM, Joseph Abboud, Kraft, Microsoft, Volkswagen, and World Wrestling Entertainment. To bring Finch Brands’ strategies to life, he frequently serves in adjunct executive positions for our clients.

JORDAN GOLDENBERG CREATIVE DIRECTOR

Jordan has been the driving creative force behind Finch Brands since the meteoric rise of his creative agency, fabGORGON, led to its acquisition and roll-up as the Finch Brands Brand Design function in 2003. Along the way, he has built a reputation as one of the industry’s leading creative minds. Jordan delivers on the promise of Finch Brands’ holistic approach to building brands and businesses through inspired design and ﬂawless execution of strategically informed and creatively surprising marketing concepts.

JOHN FERREIRA VP, BRAND STRATEGY

John actively leads brand strategy engagements for Finch Brands. Prior to joining Finch, he spent 11 years at Campbell Soup Company in leadership roles spanning Brand Management, Consumer & Customer Insights and New Product Commercialization. John is a graduate of the top ranked Wharton Executive MBA program at the University of Pennsylvania — his towering strength is his talent for uncovering and connecting powerful insights that drive a deeper understanding of consumers, customers and end users. SELECTED CLIENTS got this got this got this got this representative success stories

Faced with changing consumer tastes, distribution and licensing challenges, Everlast needed to revitalize its brand to grow the business. Finch Brands guided the company through a strategic and creative renaissance, evolving Everlast from a boxing leader into a broadly relevant athletic lifestyle brand based on the spirit – not just the physicality – of boxing. Everlast’s market cap at commencement was $50 M and the company was acquired for $168 M in the year following the brand relaunch. The acquiring company attributed the brand’s momentum as a central reason for the sale and price.

As its business has grown to include over 100 million square feet of workspace, Liberty Property Trust decided to update brand identity to better reflect its scale and corporate values. Finch Brands’ process included in-depth market research, messaging, and creative development. The new logo and tagline (‘Accomplish More’) reflects the company itself: strong, iconic, and progressive, yet fueled by traditional values like trust and commitment. We also delivered a comprehensive style guide for use by the company’s corporate resources and its team around the world. To support the brand launch and reflect its new look, the company changed its ticker symbol to “LPT.”

Fathead approached Finch Brands with a series of key questions central to its brand and business strategy. Our brand research discovered that Fathead had strong awareness of its life-size sports wall decals, but this association was obscuring many facets of the product offering, including broader licenses, different sizes, and its custom options. Finch Brands leveraged the data to help transform Fathead’s positioning from ‘big’ to ‘real’ as well as craft initiatives that have helped to grow the business. Fathead emerged from this process with its strength intact, but a clear messaging and creative direction to contemporize the brand’s appeal.

ThinkGeek was founded to provide products to a niche audience of technology-obsessed fellow geeks. Over time, geekdom has become a mainstream phenomenon – and Finch Brands supported ThinkGeek in advancing a brand and creative strategy to enable the company to better serve its core customer while enlarging the opportunity. The core idea is that geekdom is about passion and connection, not just smart things or interesting people. We developed a new corporate identity, brand strategy and tagline – ‘Join In. Geek Out.’ to reﬂect this shift. Since then, Finch Brands has conducted research into product concepts and is a go-to partner for ThinkGeek when it comes to brand communication. With a long-term plan in place to build an elite team, the Sixers sought a way to enroll fans and business partners in the journey. Finch Brands created a campaign entitled ‘Together We Build’ to connect the franchise’s moment with the workmanlike ethic of our city. Driven by insight into the team and market, the integrated campaign inﬂuenced everything from the look of tickets and sales packages, social media and all manner of external communications while providing an internal rallying cry to keep the intensity level high as the future takes shape. The campaign won multiple awards and galvanized the city.

Finch Brands’ relationship with WWE traces back to 2003, when the company challenged us to use audience research to determine WWE’s next suite of priorities coming out of WrestleMania XX. Since then, we have provided brand and concept research services across the business – as the company approaches major decisions, Finch Brands is often called upon to weigh in via market insights and strategic development. Topics of study have included branded apparel, storytelling, corporate sponsorship sales, the live event experience, audience segmentation, PPV events and much more. Such a unique company and model demands illuminating data and breakthrough thinking, which Finch Brands has provided for over a decade.

Leveraging our deep experience in retail, Finch Brands worked with Saxbys Coffee – one of the fastest growing café concepts in the nation – to perfect their brand strategy and deliver a unique message through all touchpoints. The work has included deep consumer research, messaging development, a grand opening marketing playbook, in-café experience elements and much more. Saxbys Coffee’s tagline, “For You,” was developed to express the company’s personality and difference – Saxbys is not in the coffee business, but the people business.

KenCrest is one of the region’s leading human services agencies, helping people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and autism live their best lives. Finch Brands was engaged to assess KenCrest’s brand identity, and it quickly became clear through our research and site visits that the organization’s team members share a core set of values. Thus, the task was to use messaging and design to reﬂect what staff already model each day. The new logo and tagline provide a contemporary and dynamic yet human representation of the KenCrest brand. Finch Brands also built and executed a brand activation plan that included in depth brand education for all 2,000 KenCrest team members.

finchbrands.com | 215.413.2686