Whether it’s a vibrant, colorful and expressive brand like Centric or something grounded in little more than text and a black-and-white color palette, there’s a rigor to the work of design studio Gretel, an aura that could be described in many ways, but is maybe best described as, simply, thoughtful.

The effect is no accident, according to Gretel owner and creative director Greg Hahn. “We approach the work very much as a melding of an intellectual process and an intuitive process,” he told Brief, speaking from the company’s New York office. “It’s a heavy intellectual front end where we’re reading and talking and writing, having a lot of meetings with clients, pinning things to boards, and really just exhausting ourselves with the thinking. The goal is always to have thought about it enough that when everyone starts working and playing around with frames that it’s informed by the thinking – without us having to think about it.”

It’s an approach that can seem baffling to Gretel freelancers, who when sitting in on their first elaborate, cerebral planning session with the company, often seem to be wondering, “‘okay, when can we just get out there and start making stuff?’” said Hahn. A lot of them get it eventually. Some don’t. The ones who do can see the forest through the trees, can understand a rationale that is really “pretty simple,” Hahn continued. “It’s just more memorable… it’s memorable because there’s a thought behind it. There are a million examples of beautiful, innovative design work that is really visually memorable but not brand-memorable because there’s not a thought that connects it to the brand.”

For Hahn, memorable work has always ruled the day. A college internship lead him to CNN, which lead to working for the likes of MTV, VH1, Trollback + Co and other heavyweights early on. When he broke off to go out on his own and start Gretel, it was with little more than “a laptop in my living room,” he said. And yet, despite needing to find work quickly, when the first job under his new company’s moniker came along, an upfront reel for VH1, Hahn proceeded to turn it down.

“The money was just not there to do it and I had to say no to the first call I ever got as Gretel,” he said. “It was really nerve-wracking.”

However, a month later, VH1 called back requesting another pitch, for a logo for a new network being launched by MTV, and this time the resources were available. Gretel pitched on it, won the job, and was off and running. “By saying no to them I think it made them realize what the aim was at Gretel,” said Hahn. “When I look back it was a good chain of events that lead us to winning that job and it got me into an office with a few desks… I didn’t save a penny after that job but I at least now had infrastructure, some machines to work with and somewhere to go from there.”

It was an early sign that Gretel was going to execute on its own terms, and that the quality of the work was going to come before growth, money and the other traditional tangibles associated with success. Gretel moved steadily from job to job, picking up new clients on little more than the power of word of mouth. The studio had no public relations team and no marketing personnel. For years it didn’t even have a reel. “I had friends who said, ‘you should strike while the iron is hot, get a lot of PR out there and staff up,’” Hahn said. “I really didn’t want to do that. I thought, ‘I don’t want to be in a hurry doing anything in this business because it’s my life as much as it is my work.’”

Ten years after its founding, Gretel has 12 staffers listed on its website, a startlingly small number for a company that has designed brands for clients like IFC, Nick Jr. and Style. But Hahn said the “size is good. We’re able to take on huge clients like Netflix and also take on really small clients or jobs where it’s one person knocking out a logo for somebody or doing side projects… It’s comfortable for me. The idea of running a business where we have 40-plus staff is less exciting for me, at least right now, because I’m still very much interested in the creative and the creative process, and at a certain stage you really are just running a business.”

Gretel is able to handle the brands it does in part because its front-loaded conceptualizing process makes design decisions easier down the road. For branding projects, the company implements a three-tiered approach that begins with the brand’s ethos. “The first step for us is, how do we boil this brand down to its essence?” said Hahn. “You should be able to sum up any good brand in a few words. It shouldn’t take a paragraph to explain what a brand stands for.”

The second tier involves translating that ethos into the brand’s voice, which means both its verbal style and its point of view. For last year’s extremely effective refresh of the IFC brand, Gretel saw the network’s ethos as being for its eclectic programming what a physical venue is for live events. It could then move on to step 2 and make the brand speak in the language of a live arena, replete with the billing of talent, the promotion of acts, the curating of films and the notion that, like any great supporting act, the network never steals the spotlight from its headliners. With a rock-solid plan like that in place, the increasingly minute decisions involved with designing a promo package “just get easier and easier,” said Hahn. “I know we’re off-base if we’re having to answer smaller questions when we’re designing.”

In building all that structure early on, “we’re creating areas of freedom,” said Hahn. “It’s like playing an instrument. In the beginning you’re learning the chords and how to play but the goal is to get to the point where you don’t have to think about it at all. That’s the same with us. On the branding jobs, you want to get the basics down enough that once you get into the design it’s second nature.”

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