Stockholm, 1999.

B-Reel is a Swedish creative company that grew up making digital productions for brands and agencies. Creativity, the creative title of Ad Age, profiled its founders on 5 June 2011 in a piece by Ann-Christine Diaz. It said the company was founded in 1999 in Stockholm by Anders Wahlquist, Pelle Nilsson and Petter Westlund, and described it as an integrated production shop that helped agencies and marketers make ambitious brand ideas work.

English and Swedish Wikipedia list five founders rather than three, adding Johannes Åhlund and Fredrik Heinig. Swedish Wikipedia says Åhlund and Heinig were working at the time with Nilsson at the television production company Spader Knekt, and English Wikipedia says that company was later renamed St Paul. English Wikipedia says the two businesses worked side by side for several years before merging into the film company that became B-Reel Films, while B-Reel itself carried on under its own name as a creative agency offering strategic, creative and digital services.

The founders spoke about their outlook in the 2011 Creativity profile, which ran as a short Q&A. Asked to define creativity, Wahlquist answered “Pushing things forward”, and described the rush of a room of colleagues working on a problem until someone found a way through. Nilsson said risk was a common element of the work, because the company wanted to make things that had not been made before, and that over time a team builds systems, processes and instinct for dealing with unknown factors. Wahlquist named bureaucracy as the thing that kills creativity. Westlund said he was inspired by the people the company worked with.

The way the company writes its name has shifted with its surfaces. Press coverage and both Wikipedia articles use the hyphenated form B-Reel. The company’s current website sets the name in capitals as B-REEL, describes its output as creative projects in storytelling and technology since 1999, and decorates its pages with small typographic symbols, including an umbrella sign that stands in for the word umbrella in its own description of itself.

From Stockholm to New York, London and Los Angeles.

B-Reel expanded abroad within ten years of its founding. Swedish Wikipedia, citing the 2011 Creativity profile, says the company opened an office in New York in 2008, added London the following year and established itself in Los Angeles in 2010, and that it opened two more offices, in Berlin and Barcelona, in 2013. A company press release announcing the Los Angeles office, carried by the trade site SHOOT, said co-founder and executive producer Pelle Nilsson was relocating from Stockholm to oversee operations there for both B-Reel and its sister company B-Reel Films, and quoted Wahlquist as chief executive.

Film became a second branch of the group. Swedish Wikipedia says B-Reel started a commercials production company, B-Reel Films, in 2009, renamed it B-Reel Commercials in 2012, and added feature and documentary production the same year. The Nordic film-industry site Nordisk Film & TV Fond reported on 11 May 2012 that the Stockholm company St Paul Film, co-headed by Heinig and Åhlund, had announced a change of name to B-Reel Feature Films, becoming the feature film division of the B-Reel group. The report said B-Reel then had offices in London, New York and Los Angeles, and named a development slate that included Palme, a documentary about the former Swedish prime minister directed by Maud Nycander and Kristina Lindström.

The group divided in 2017. The Swedish trade magazine Resumé reported on 17 January 2017 that, through a reorganisation, B-Reel was drawing a clearer line between its production company and its agency. All moving-image work, from commercials and feature films to branded content, was being gathered under a single production brand, BRF, while B-Reel Creative Agency stepped away from the production company to become a pure advertising agency. The magazine said the two businesses would still share the same premises, and that a new visual identity was being presented alongside the reorganisation.

The same Resumé article quoted Heinig, described as a founding partner of B-Reel, saying both the commercials and the feature film sides held strong positions in their fields and that the new structure would let them develop from one another. It said the producer Agnes-Lo Åkerlind would lead branded content and television, and that the newly hired producer Yasmina Suhonen would take charge of new talent. English Wikipedia now describes B-Reel Films as a sister company, written as BR•F.

A reel, a hyphen and an umbrella.

Digital and interactive studios rarely have a product on a shelf, so the name and the website carry the identity work. Many of the names are made up rather than descriptive: a word with a numeral attached, a film-industry term borrowed and hyphenated, a phrase that hints at a way of working. The same name can also be written several ways over the years. Trade magazines may print it in lower case while the studio’s own site sets it in capitals, and a hyphen or a numeral can become a distinctive part of the mark.

The studio website is usually the main brand surface. It works as a portfolio, with full-screen video and case studies in front and the typography kept plain. Office cities are often written as short codes along the top of the page, and project credits, director rosters and archives are treated as part of the brand, because they show who made what and when.

These identities also change shape as the business changes. Studios open and close offices, split a film arm from an agency, or fold their work into new ventures under the original name. When reading them, look at how the name is set across the website, the credits and the trade press, how the studio lists its cities, and what it keeps from earlier eras in its archive.

Interactive projects and later ventures.

The 2011 Creativity profile described B-Reel’s work through named projects. For the agency 180 L.A., the company made Mitsubishi Live Drive, which let people test-drive a real 2011 Outlander Sport on a track in Los Angeles from their own keyboards. The magazine said B-Reel was a key partner in producing The Wilderness Downtown, the interactive music video by Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin for Arcade Fire and Google Chrome, set to the song “We Used to Wait”.

The same profile listed later work. 3 Live Shop, for the Swedish telecoms provider 3 Sweden, was an online shop in which customers could interact with a real salesperson through the web. With the Stockholm agency Lowe Brindfors, B-Reel made Magnum Pleasure Hunt, an online game in which a girl travelled across the internet collecting bonbons and passing through other brands’ sites along the way. Creativity said new projects for Google were in the works, along with a web app to show which news stories were drawing attention across social media.

The company today presents itself differently. Its website describes B-REEL as an umbrella for ongoing ventures and calls Feels Like the latest embodiment of its design and technology capabilities, a studio that the site says pushes the boundaries of what interfaces can be. The same page lists a consumer app, State, and an archive of work labelled as covering 1999 to 2024, with advertising for clients such as Storytel, The North Face and Nike. It also says Earth Studio, an animation tool for Google Earth’s geographic data, was initiated and developed at B-Reel and Feels Like.

For a design guide, B-Reel shows how a production company can split its name across a group — an agency, a film brand written as BRF and a family of ventures — while the original hyphenated name stays as the umbrella. Compare UNIT9, a London production company of the same era, and Firstborn, a New York digital studio in this collection. For this guide we use umbrella yellow, Stockholm navy and night with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep B-Reel’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.