Halden Rye · 2024
The Long Wait
A distillery that had spent forty years apologising for how slowly it works, taught to charge for it instead.
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Practice 01
Most of the work we are asked to fix is not a creative problem. It is a company that has never agreed, out loud, what it is better at than anyone else. Positioning is where we settle that — with the people who can actually authorise it — and write it down in a form that survives contact with a sales deck, a job advert and a shelf edge.
Two teams describe the company two different ways. A category you invented is filling with competitors who describe it more clearly than you do. Or growth has quietly turned a specific business into a general one, and the pitch that used to close deals now needs a preamble.
02Who leads it
Marguerite Okonjo-Vale
Founder and Executive Creative Director
Marguerite started Lumaire in 2014 after eleven years art-directing for publishers and cultural institutions, on the theory that most brand problems are editorial problems wearing a different coat. She leads the studio’s creative standard, chairs the quarterly review of every piece of work leaving the building, and still personally art-directs two projects a year.
Tobias Renn
Partner, Strategy
Tobias runs the positioning practice and has spent most of his career in categories where the buyer is technical and the audience is not — infrastructure, instruments, spirits with long production cycles. He is the person in the room most likely to ask what evidence would change your mind, and he means it as a working question rather than a rhetorical one.
03Evidence
Next step
Engagements start at £45,000 and run 8 to 10 weeks. The first conversation costs nothing and often narrows the brief before there is a proposal to argue about.
