Vancouver, November 1999.

Rethink is an independent advertising and design agency founded in Vancouver in 1999 by Chris Staples, Ian Grais and Tom Shepansky. Marketing magazine, reporting on the agency on 8 March 2010, gave the same three founders and the same year. English Wikipedia dates the founding to 1 November 1999 and says all three had previously worked at Palmer Jarvis DDB, now DDB Vancouver, where Staples was national creative director, Grais was creative director and Shepansky was director of client services. The company’s website gives its legal name as Rethink Communications Inc.

Wikipedia says the three opened the agency with no staff and no clients, and that in December 1999 they won the account of the Dominion grocery stores in Ontario and the national account of A&W Food Services of Canada, in English and French. It says the young agency was featured on the CBC Television business programme Venture, offered clients a money-back guarantee tied to criteria the clients set themselves, and launched its own Rethink Beer to show what its branding could do. Wikipedia says the beer was sold in British Columbia and Alberta until 2003.

The name is the idea. Chief creative officer Aaron Starkman told The Drum, in an interview published on 20 July 2022, that “Rethink is a one-word business model”. He said that from the start the agency set out to rethink what a typical agency is: its process, its priorities and its relationships with clients. The agency’s website repeats the thought in the line “One word® changes everything”, and describes Rethink as a full-service creative agency working across ideas, strategy, design and PR.

Starkman tied the name to working habits as well as to campaigns. He told The Drum that the rethinking is aimed mainly at cutting what he called “wheel-spinning”, or wasted time, and that the agency does not want its creatives working until midnight or at weekends, because it believes their work suffers if they have no life outside it. Rethink introduced what it calls No-Meeting Mondays, as an alternative to the Monday client meetings that tend to push preparation into the weekend. Starkman also described a “go-then-grow” approach: putting out an idea in a small form, such as a social post, watching how people react, and then investing time, resources and budget in it.

From Vancouver to Toronto, Montreal and New York.

Toronto came a decade in. Marketing reported on 8 March 2010 that Rethink would open a Toronto office on 5 April that year, and noted that the partners had often said they would not put an office in the city. Staples told the magazine that the agency had “basically grown as big as we can in Vancouver”, and that three of its larger clients, Sobeys, Solo Mobile and Sympatico, were already in Toronto, where the partners were spending a good deal of their time. He said almost all national accounts were headquartered in Toronto and that Rethink had turned many of them down over the years because they wanted a local office. The magazine listed A&W Restaurants and Mr. Lube as Vancouver-based national clients.

The Toronto office, on Spadina Avenue, was to be run by partner and managing director Pema Hegan and creative director Dré Labre, who had previously been at Tribal DDB. Marketing said Hegan had been an account director at Rethink Vancouver until December 2004, when he left to launch the magazine Dose, and later co-founded the social media start-up GigPark, which Canpages bought. Staples said the pair’s digital background was an important element of the new office, and that it would have the full creative resources of the Vancouver office behind it.

In 2021 the agency moved into the United States. MediaPost reported on 7 December 2021 that Rethink was establishing an office in New York and joining Dawn, which it described as a network of independent agencies founded by Bob Kantor and Crossmedia. The report said the expansion was led by three managing partners, chief operating officer Goodman, chief strategy officer McDonald and chief creative officer Starkman, and that the New York office was in Chelsea, at the same address as Dawn. Goodman told MediaPost that Rethink “has always done well by launching new offices with existing Rethinkers”.

By then the Canadian network had three cities. MediaPost gave the agency’s Canadian offices in December 2021 as Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal. The Drum described Rethink in July 2022 as headquartered in Vancouver, with offices in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal and a New York office in Chelsea, and Starkman told the paper that the agency would consider new markets when an expansion lined up with its values. The agency’s website now lists offices in New York, Montréal, Toronto and Vancouver.

Wordmarks, campaigns and agency culture.

For an advertising or design agency, the name is the one piece of branding it has to live with on every pitch, credit and door plate. Canadian agencies have taken very different routes. Some keep the founder’s name. Bruce Mau Design was named after the designer who started it in Toronto in 1985, and it kept that name after Mau moved to Chicago and Hunter Tura took over as chief executive in 2010; the studio still uses it, usually shortened to BMD. Others turn the founder into something less literal. Zulu Alpha Kilo, which Zak Mroueh started in Toronto after leaving Taxi in 2007, takes its name from the NATO phonetic spelling of his name, and for a time its website introduced three fictional founders played by actors rather than the real one.

The rest of the identity tends to be built from what an agency shows rather than a logo alone: the work it puts on its site, the way it describes its offices, the projects it chooses to name, and how it carries one name across studios in Toronto and cities such as New York, Vancouver, Chicago and Los Angeles. When reading these identities, look at how much the name explains about the people behind it, how the agency’s own website and spaces are staged, and which client projects it puts forward as evidence of how it thinks.

Clients and campaigns, dated.

The client list has been reported at intervals. English Wikipedia lists advertising, design and online work for clients including A&W in Canada, Shaw Communications, Molson Coors, IKEA Canada, Coast Capital Savings, WestJet, Mr. Lube, Playland, Science World and Weston Bakeries. Marketing named Sobeys, Solo Mobile, Sympatico, A&W Restaurants and Mr. Lube in March 2010. MediaPost named Ikea, Molson Coors, Kraft Heinz, Tazo and RxBar among the agency’s US clients in December 2021, and The Drum named Ikea and Molson Coors in July 2022. The agency’s own website currently leads with work for IKEA and Coors Light.

One campaign shows the go-then-grow method in practice. The Drum reported in July 2022 that during the Covid-19 lockdowns, when jigsaw puzzles became a common pastime, Rethink made a puzzle for Heinz in which every piece was the same shade as the brand’s ketchup. The agency describes it on its website as “what might be the slowest puzzle ever made”, a nod to the ketchup’s slow pour. Starkman said the team expected people to find it funny at a not-so-funny time. The Drum said the project began as a social media campaign with a small giveaway of puzzles and was then scaled up when it worked, and Starkman said the puzzles ended up on permanent sale at Walmart.

The agency’s structure is part of its identity. Rethink presents itself as independent, and the 2020 handover from its founders was reported in exactly those terms, with the agency described as “as independent as ever”. Its 2021 move into New York was made by joining Dawn, which MediaPost described as a network of independent agencies. Starkman told The Drum in 2022 that growth for its own sake was not a priority, and that the agency would not expand for financial reasons alone.

For a design guide, Rethink shows how an agency can make a single verb carry both its name and its working method, and keep that idea in place as founders hand over to partners and offices spread from Vancouver to Toronto, Montreal and New York. Compare Zulu Alpha Kilo and Cossette, two more Canadian agencies in this collection. For this guide we use signal red, concrete grey and ink black with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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