A co-brand with no lead, for Discovery

A co-brand almost always has a lead. You're buying an Apple Watch, not a Nike watch. A McFlurry, not an Oreo.

We do a fair bit of Alliance work with Deloitte, and even there — two serious firms, a real partnership — somebody is still in front. Sometimes it's Deloitte, sometimes it's the partner. It depends on how the thing is going to market. But it's somebody.

Northleaf and Inovia came to us with one that wasn't like that. Discovery is a 50/50 platform backing the next generation of Canadian fund managers, and neither firm could sit in front of the other. Eight weeks, soup to nuts — identity, guidelines, investor deck, landing page, launch assets. A deadline nobody could move.

I assumed the hard part would be landing on the idea. It wasn't.

It was balance, and not as a diplomatic exercise — as a design one. How logos are presented, whether a blue leans toward one firm or the other — all of it needed a reason behind it, not a preference. It turned out to be one of my favourite projects we've done.

We didn't get there by being clever. We got there because both teams were aligned. Inovia flagged that whatever we built had to be run day to day by a team of two. Northleaf flagged that it had to survive being emailed between two firms' IT stacks and still open on the other end.

Most teams wait until the third round to tell you that. We had it in week one. Eight weeks only works when there's a shared goal, and these two teams had one.

Thanks to Isabelle Audette at Inovia Capital, and to Jeyanthy and Rikki Gibson at Northleaf Capital Partners. And to Meg Lynch, Deseray Alvares, and Tiffany Grace Tobias, who got it done in record time.