Brand Development
& Marketing Agency

We're a branding and web design studio built around one idea. The people who think through your strategy should be the same people who build the thing that carries it. Founded in 2018, with more than fifteen years of experience behind the founding team, and more than 500 projects and roughly 150 brands delivered since.

The head office is in Toronto and the American side of the practice runs out of Chicago, San Francisco and Miami. For a US client the useful consequence is boring and practical. Every state in the lower 48 sits inside three hours of the head office clock, which is a different proposition from an agency whose build team works while you sleep.

The work splits into six disciplines, and every one of them lives in-house.

• Branding. Market and customer research, positioning, naming, logo work and full identity rebuilds.
• Web design and development. Marketing sites, ecommerce and custom builds on Webflow, WordPress and Shopify, held to ADA and WCAG standards from the first wireframe instead of patched after a demand letter.
• SEO and GEO. The technical groundwork plus the newer job of getting cited inside ChatGPT and AI Overviews, instead of only ranked underneath them.
• UX and UI design. Interaction design, prototyping, usability testing, and the customer research that has to sit underneath all of it.
• Consultation and audits. An outside read on where things actually stand, delivered as a roadmap you can act on with us or without.
• Digital marketing. Paid search, paid social, PR and campaigns built on brands we already understand from having made them.

The client roster runs from early-stage startups to names like ArcelorMittal, Safeway, Albertsons, McGill University, First Horizon Bank and TeraWulf, and that range isn't accidental. What ties it together isn't industry, it's how the work gets made.

Some of the record is checkable without us. 250+ verified five-star reviews, an A plus with the Better Business Bureau, and the awards itemized at the bottom of this page. Leads across past programs have risen 250% on average, and that figure pools engagements at wildly different scales and starting conditions, so read it as a record of what has happened and not a forecast for you. Anyone quoting an average lift without that sentence attached is selling the number instead of explaining it.

Nothing here gets passed between vendors. One team carries a project from the first workshop to launch, which is the only reason strategic thinking survives all the way to the finished product. The same head office runs the Canadian side of the practice, and companies expanding in either direction across the border get a partner who already works on both sides of it.

Most agencies split your project across three teams, one for research, one for creative, one for development. Something gets lost at every handoff. We don't split it. The strategist who sets your positioning is in the room reviewing your website copy. The designer building the identity is the same person designing the site that has to carry it.

A few things follow from that.

There's no account layer between you and the work. No junior team executing a senior person's pitch, and no coordinator relaying your question to someone else and then relaying the answer back with the reasoning slightly wrong.

Nothing is white-labelled or quietly outsourced. Everything stays in-house across the four offices, and how we hire is deliberately slow for exactly that reason. Adding a senior person who fits takes months longer than adding one who happens to be available, and the alternative dilutes the thing clients are paying for.

Every design decision has to earn its place against a real business goal, which is why some of our recommendations come back smaller than the brief that arrived. Decoration is easy to sell in a presentation and hard to defend a year later.

The honest case for hiring an American shop instead. Worth stating plainly, because it is real and a good buyer is already thinking it. A domestic vendor is simpler for your procurement team. One tax form set, one insurance regime, one currency, and no questions from accounts payable about a foreign payee. Some solicitations, particularly public sector ones, require a US-domiciled prime contractor or in-state registration outright, and where yours does we are the wrong answer and you should establish that in week one instead of week six. A firm in your city can also put a person in your lobby this afternoon, which occasionally matters more than anything else on a list.

What we would say against that. The administrative differences get settled once during contracting and never surface again. The differences that decide whether the work is any good, meaning whether the positioning is right and whether the site earns anything, are unaffected by which side of a border the invoice comes from. Weigh the second set heavily and the first set once.

None of this means we push every client toward the biggest available scope. Some companies don't need a rebrand. Some don't need a new site. You'll hear that in the first conversation instead of after a contract is signed.

Chicago is our US headquarters, with additional offices in San Francisco and Miami, and Toronto is where the agency started and still runs as our Canadian headquarters. All four are working offices with real teams, not addresses rented for a listing.

• Chicago (US HQ). 30 N Michigan Ave, Suite 504, Chicago, IL 60602
• San Francisco. 71 Stevenson St, Suite 400, San Francisco, CA 94105
• Miami. 80 SW 8th St, Suite 2000, Miami, FL 33130
• Toronto (Canada HQ). 60 Bloor St W, Suite 401, Toronto, ON M4W 3B8, base for clients across Canada

Time zones are the part worth doing arithmetic on, because they're the only feature of this arrangement that changes your week. Toronto runs on Eastern time, the same clock as Miami and New York. Chicago is Central, an hour behind. San Francisco is Pacific, three hours behind. A head office day of roughly 9 to 6 Eastern lands as 8 to 5 in Chicago, 7 to 4 in Denver, 6 to 3 in San Francisco. An East Coast client shares the entire day, a Central client about eight hours of it, a Mountain client seven, and a Pacific client starting at 9 shares roughly six, which is still a full morning and an afternoon.

One detail sounds trivial and causes real friction when nobody raises it. Canada and the United States change their clocks on the same dates, so the offset between us never drifts twice a year the way it does with most offshore arrangements. Arizona is the exception, since it doesn't observe daylight time, so the gap to Phoenix moves an hour in March and November.

Near any office you're welcome to meet in person for a kickoff or milestone review. For everyone else the remote process is structured instead of improvised.

• A working kickoff where scope, decision-makers and review dates get locked
• A fixed check-in cadence set inside your business hours instead of ours
• A shared channel for the small questions that would otherwise wait a week
• Milestone reviews approved on record, so nothing gets reopened in month three

Across several hundred engagements the deciding factor has been how fast decisions move on the client's side, not how many miles sit between us. A client three time zones out with one person who can approve direction moves faster than a client nearby with five people who all need to agree.

The honest limit. If your approver only reviews work after 5pm Pacific, our last working hour has already passed and you'll have answers the following morning. That's a genuine cost, worth an hour of scheduling talk at kickoff, and we'd sooner name it than let you find it in week three.

Two numbers matter here, and they're not the same number. The agency was founded in 2018. The people running it have worked together for over a decade, with more than fifteen years of experience between them before Brand Vision existed at all.

There's a third number an American buyer should ask for and almost never does, which is how long an agency has been working in your market instead of how long it has been in business. Those two come apart constantly, and only the founding date shows up in a pitch deck. We've been running work out of Chicago for more than five years, which is long enough that a large share of what comes through that office now arrives by referral from somebody we worked with three years ago.

That continuity is rarer than it sounds. Most agencies churn, and the team that wins your pitch usually isn't the team that finishes your project. Ours has stayed intact through more than ten years of client work, long enough to carry Roncelli Construction and TeraWulf through full enterprise rebrands, and to sit inside the UI research for Albertsons and Safeway, where a wrong call costs real revenue and not merely a bad review.

It's also long enough to have lived through several full cycles of how this industry works. Template builders gave way to component systems. Keyword-stuffed SEO gave way to search built around what somebody actually meant when they typed. Core Web Vitals arrived as a ranking input with published thresholds attached, meaning largest contentful paint under 2.5 seconds, interaction to next paint under 200 milliseconds and cumulative layout shift under 0.1. Now AI search optimization is reshaping the question again, from does Google rank you to does an assistant cite you, and several of the largest AI crawlers request JavaScript files without ever executing them, so content that only appears once a script runs is invisible to them. Design trends cycled twice in the same window, flat design into depth and texture, brutalism arriving and mostly leaving again, gradients coming back.

None of that is a history lesson for its own sake. It's what lets us tell you, on your first brief, which parts of it are built to last and which parts are fashion that dates within three years.

The ceiling on the claim is worth naming. Longevity doesn't predict that we're right for your project. It predicts that we've already watched this kind of project fail in the four or five ways it usually fails, which is a narrower and more useful thing to be buying.

Fifteen-plus people, every one of them senior, every one of them in-house, and the roster is still growing. Strategists, brand and visual designers, UI and UX designers, front-end and back-end developers, SEO specialists and content writers, all listed by name on our about page.

The team assigned to your project scales with what the work needs instead of with what fits a template. A focused identity sprint might run on one strategist and two designers. A website adds developers, a writer and an SEO specialist. A product surface pulls interaction design, prototyping and user research into it. An enterprise program adds a named lead and formal approval gates you control.

Here's the part a US client should push on, because most cross-border agencies won't volunteer it. A fifteen-person senior team is not duplicated in four cities, and we won't pretend otherwise. Your project runs on a team spanning a US office and the head office, and at kickoff you get names, roles and which office each person sits in. What that means in practice is that a client in San Francisco gets the whole practice on the file instead of whichever two specialists happen to live nearby. It also means that when you ask who is on your clock today, the answer comes back as a list of names and not as a reassurance.

We stay intentionally smaller than the volume of work would suggest, and that's a tradeoff worth naming outright. Fewer projects running at once than a shop staffing junior teams under one creative director means everyone on your project is senior, and the person answering your question is the one who actually made the call and not someone relaying it. We hire against that standard instead of for availability, and the roles we're open on are listed publicly. Occasionally it also means a start date sits a few weeks out, and you'll get a real date instead of a deposit request and a slow first month.

The honest ceiling here is capacity. At this size the practice can carry a serious brand program, a full site build and a monthly search engagement concurrently. It cannot carry a forty-market rollout on a six-week clock, and where that's genuinely the brief we'll say so on the first call and point you toward a shop built for volume. Turning that work down costs us money, and it costs you far less than discovering the gap in month two.

In-house, entirely. Strategy, design, development, SEO and marketing are handled by Brand Vision employees on the Chicago team, in the Miami office, and in San Francisco and Toronto. Nothing gets white-labelled, and no project gets quietly passed to a subcontracted studio or an offshore dev shop.

There's exactly one exception, and it's disclosed upfront instead of discovered later. When a project calls for a specialist we don't employ, photography and video production being the usual cases, we bring that person in under our direction and name them in the proposal. Trademark work is the other boundary worth stating. On a naming project we run the screening and prepare the documentation, and clearance and filing sit with your attorney, because we're not a law firm and won't behave like one.

It's a fair question to ask any agency, ours included. Who writes the code, where do they sit, are they employees. For a cross-border engagement there are a few more, and this is the list we'd want if we were sitting on your side of the table.

1. Which entity signs and which entity invoices. Those are sometimes different, and your finance team will find out either way.
2. What currency the quote is in, and whether the contract fixes it. A quote that doesn't say is a quote you can't compare against a domestic one.
3. Governing law and venue. Ask what a firm will accept, not what its template says.
4. Whether the people building the work are employees, and which office each one sits in. Ask specifically about whoever writes your code, since development is the role most often resold.
5. What paperwork your finance team needs from a non-US supplier. Usually a completed W-8BEN-E from a foreign entity, and a vendor who has never seen the form will add weeks to your first payment run.
6. Certificates of insurance, and whether the coverage actually answers to your contract. Worth confirming before a kickoff date is agreed, not after.
7. Where client data and backups physically live, and whether that satisfies your own policy and your customers' contracts.
8. Overlap hours in your time zone, written into the schedule. A verbal assurance about availability is worth nothing in month three.

We answer all eight in writing before a proposal goes out. None of it is legal or tax advice and anything carrying real exposure belongs with your own counsel. What the list is genuinely for is that an agency turning vague on two or three of these has told you something useful at no cost to you.

Over 500 projects, spanning early-stage companies to names like ArcelorMittal, Safeway, Albertsons, First Horizon Bank, McGill University and TeraWulf. The full portfolio walks through the reasoning behind each project instead of only the finished screens, which matters more than it might sound. Anyone can buy polish. The argument behind a decision is the thing that actually shows whether an agency can solve a problem it hasn't already solved once before.

Three worth a look.

• Safeway, where a household grocery name got reframed for business buyers. Harder than it reads, because the consumer familiarity that makes the name valuable is the same thing a procurement audience discounts it for.
• FHN Financial, where institutional trust had to become something usable as well as credible, for an audience that arrives already knowing the category and has no patience for being explained to.
• Roncelli, where a full identity transformation ran alongside a complete website and digital platform rebuild for a legacy construction firm, and where the binding constraint was that the result still had to look like the company people had done business with for thirty years.

There's a question a US buyer should ask about any cross-border portfolio and almost nobody does. A portfolio blends markets, and a case study page rarely says which engagements were American or which office led them. Ask. We'll tell you which team ran a given project and which names on that list are US companies, because if the honest answer were that none of them are, you would deserve to weigh that before signing anything.

None of this needs to be taken on faith. Our Clutch profile carries a 5.0 rating from more than 64 verified client interviews, where named companies describe actual scope, budget and outcome. That's a considerably higher bar than a page of curated quotes, and it's worth reading about any agency you're considering, this one included.

The limit on any portfolio is worth stating outright. A case study records the version of the work that survived the client's own approval process, which is not always the version that was recommended. So the useful question about a project you like is what the situation was before it started and what got cut along the way. Both get answered on a call.

Startups up through publicly listed enterprises, and headcount was never really the filter. Stakes are. A twelve-person company facing a launch that has to land carries the same real consequence as a four-thousand-person company navigating a merger that's left two brands where there should be one.

What changes by company size is scope, timeline and budget. What doesn't change is how we work.

Startups. Positioning that survives investor and customer scrutiny, an identity with room to grow as the product changes, and the build itself sized to convert launch traffic instead of a corporate governance program with nothing yet to govern.

Small and mid-sized companies. These get the most out of sequencing. Foundation first, so a limited budget compounds instead of spreading thin, then growth after.

Enterprises. Brand architecture across divisions, design systems that hold up across dozens of contributors, accessibility conformance, and staged rollouts that don't tank existing search traffic. Alignment, and not design, is usually the hard part at that scale, and we treat it as part of the job.

Public entities and the companies that sell to them. This is the segment where American requirements are hardest and least understood. The Department of Justice rule under ADA Title II names WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the technical standard for state and local government web content and mobile apps, with the compliance date for larger public entities having passed in April 2026 and smaller entities and special districts following in April 2027. If you're a city, a transit authority, a public university or a school district, that standard is written into a rule instead of inferred from case law. If you sell into one of those bodies, it usually arrives in your contract as a flow-down obligation. Federal procurement runs through Section 508 instead, and organizations receiving federal financial assistance carry obligations under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which catches plenty of not-for-profits who assumed none of this reached them.

Title III, covering places of public accommodation, works differently again, driven by private litigation instead of a published rule. California's Unruh Act attaches statutory damages to a violation, which is much of why filing volume concentrates in a handful of states. We build to WCAG, we name the conformance level in the contract instead of leaving it as a general assurance, and we are not your lawyers, so anything with real exposure goes past counsel before it goes live.

Where we're the wrong choice is worth saying too. If your solicitation requires a US-domiciled prime contractor, hire one. And if the honest answer is a smaller engagement than what you came in asking for, that's what you'll hear on the first call.

Websites run $7,000 to $50,000 and up depending on scope, and branding starts at $4,000 for a refresh or $10,000 for a full identity system. There's no single number, because no two projects are solving the same problem. What follows is a real range tied to what the work has to accomplish, quoted in US dollars.

• A focused microsite of 3 to 5 pages runs $7,000 to $15,000
• A full marketing site, usually 6 to 10 pages with custom design, runs $15,000 to $30,000, with most projects landing near $20,000
• A Webflow build with custom interactions and a CMS your team can genuinely manage starts at $10,000
• Ecommerce and highly custom builds start upward of $50,000, driven by catalogue size and integration complexity
• A brand refresh working inside existing brand equity starts at $4,000
• A full identity system built from strategy up, including logo design and usage guidelines, starts at $10,000 and climbs with research depth and market complexity

The bigger cost driver, more than any line above, is how many decisions the work has to support. How many audiences you serve. How contested the category is. How many stakeholders sign off before direction gets locked.

Then there's the cross-border half of the money question, which American buyers usually raise late and should raise first.

Currency is fixed in the contract. A move in the exchange rate between signature and final invoice isn't something you absorb halfway through a build. A quote that never states its currency also isn't comparable to one that does, and that is worth checking on every proposal you're weighing, ours included.

Media spend stays yours. Budget paid to advertising platforms goes to them directly out of your own accounts, and management is a separate flat fee instead of a percentage of what you spend, because a percentage rewards recommending a bigger budget.

The paperwork that actually delays a first payment is a completed W-8BEN-E, the form most US companies request from a foreign supplier, plus a certificate of insurance. We send both with the proposal instead of waiting for your accounts payable team to ask, since that request is what turns a two-week onboarding into a six-week one. None of that is tax advice, and your own advisors should confirm what your business needs.

Ongoing programs carry a six-month minimum, because a shorter window can't produce a fair read of anything. Every proposal is itemized line by line so you can remove what doesn't earn its place. Book a call and we'll tell you which range applies to you, and a scoped audit is the cheaper way to find out whether you need the larger version at all.

Websites typically run 8 to 12 weeks. A focused build with clean content and a single decision-maker can land in 6. Larger builds involving ecommerce, system integrations or migrating a large legacy WordPress estate usually run 4 to 5 months. Branding moves faster on the front end, 2 to 4 weeks for a focused identity sprint, and 1 to 3 months when research and strategy are part of the scope.

SEO and GEO don't fit either timeline. Technical fixes can move the needle in weeks when real problems exist, but meaningful ranking and traffic growth takes four months to a year. Any agency promising page-one results in thirty days is either overselling or targeting terms nobody's searching for.

The thing that actually controls your timeline isn't our schedule, it's how fast content and feedback come back. That's why a content plan gets built in week one and decision-makers get locked at kickoff, before the clock starts.

There's a scheduling layer on a cross-border project that almost never appears in a proposal and costs real days when it's ignored. Two countries means two holiday calendars, and they don't line up.

• Early July. Canada Day on the 1st and Independence Day on the 4th sit in the same week, so both sides lose working days in the same stretch.
• Thanksgiving twice. The Canadian one falls in October and the American one in late November, which is also the week most US retail freezes code.
• Late May. Victoria Day and Memorial Day are a week apart, which usually costs two separate review slots instead of one.
• February. Family Day and Presidents Day land close together on the same principle.

None of that is a problem when it's in the plan at kickoff, and all of it is a problem when a milestone review falls on a day one side is closed. We publish the combined calendar alongside the project schedule so you can see the gaps before agreeing to a launch date.

Launch timing is the other one. For retailers and anybody with a seasonal peak we plan go-live for a shoulder period, and we won't ship a replatform into the week before Black Friday no matter who asks for it.

One more, specific to the West Coast. A client in the Bay Area whose approver reviews work late in their own afternoon effectively adds a day to every review round, because our last working hour has already gone. That is survivable and it belongs in the schedule instead of being discovered in week four, which is the whole reason the cadence gets negotiated at kickoff and not assumed.

Completely, once the project is paid in full. That means your source files, your custom code, your content and analytics history, and full administrative access to hosting, domain, CMS and analytics accounts, all registered in your name from day one.

Two standard exceptions apply, both spelled out in the agreement instead of hidden in it. Concepts explored but not selected stay with us. Licensed fonts, stock imagery and paid plugins carry whatever terms they came with, itemized so you know exactly what's yours and what's licensed. Font licensing is where companies most often discover they don't hold what they assumed, since a licence covering web use frequently doesn't cover an app or a broadcast, and plenty of commercial typefaces restrict use inside a logo entirely.

The question an American client should add to that list is where the data actually sits, because a cross-border engagement makes it a real question instead of a formality.

Your accounts, your region. Hosting, CMS and analytics are in your name, and the region they run in is your choice. Where your own policy or a customer contract requires data to stay resident in the US, that gets configured at setup instead of migrated a year later at your expense.

Our systems during the engagement. Design files, research material and project documentation live in our tooling while the work is live and get handed over at the end. Ask for a list of what that includes before signing instead of after.

Subprocessors and data processing agreements. Software companies get asked for a subprocessor list by their own enterprise customers, then discover their agency was never covered by anything. Raised up front it's a short conversation. Raised during a security review it's a scramble with a deadline attached.

State law follows your visitors and not your office. Close to twenty states now have comprehensive consumer privacy statutes and the list keeps growing, so what your site owes a person depends on where that person is. California's rules are the strictest of them, and the two places builds fail are the consent banner and the tracking pixels nobody audited. We build to it, we flag what we can see, and your counsel confirms it.

Nothing we build depends on a system only we can operate. If you keep us on afterward for design work, a paid media program, or anything else across the full range, it's because the work is worth the fee and not because leaving isn't an option.

Four Awwwards, one of them a Site of the Day, a Webby Award for design craft, and four consecutive years of Clutch naming us a top creative agency. We'd sooner let outside judges make the case than make it ourselves.

What each of those measures is worth spelling out, since an American reader will recognize some of them and probably none of the Canadian ones.

Awwwards. An international jury of working designers and developers votes on craft alone, which makes it one of the harder marks to earn in this field and one of the few nobody can buy.

The Webby. The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences judges it, and what it weighs is the whole experience and not the surface of it.

Clutch. A review platform widely used by American buyers, which verifies by interviewing clients directly, so the named company describes scope, budget and outcome on the record.

RGD and CGD certification. These two are Canadian and they'll mean nothing to most US buyers, so here is the gloss. RGD is the Association of Registered Graphic Designers, a professional body, and CGD is the certification its members hold. They're accreditations earned by practitioners instead of prizes awarded to a project, which makes them a different kind of signal, and there's no direct American equivalent. Some of our case study work is published on RGD's own site.

An A plus with the Better Business Bureau, which measures how complaints get handled and says nothing about the work itself.

None of it substitutes for fit. An award measures the work on the day it launched, judged by people who are not your customers. A verified review measures what one client experienced. Neither answers whether we're right for your specific project, and any agency implying otherwise is hoping you'll skip the harder questions.

So here's how we'd judge an agency, this one included. Read a relevant case study for the reasoning behind the decisions instead of the screens. Ask which named people will be on your project and what else they're carrying that month, because the second half of that question is the one that's difficult to answer honestly. Ask what a firm would refuse to do. Check whether anybody there has worked in your category, which the industries overview answers for us. Then take an actual conversation over any of it, because thirty minutes tells you more than a wall of badges.