Madrid and London, 2001.

Saffron Brand Consultants was set up in 2001 with a base in two cities at once. Wikipedia gives the founding place as Madrid and London and names two founders: Jacob Benbunan, who had worked at the London consultancy Wolff Olins, and Wally Olins, the man whose surname that consultancy carried. Wikipedia describes the firm as an independent brand consultancy, and its article on Olins calls Benbunan an ex-colleague from Wolff Olins.

The way the two men came together is told slightly differently in the press. In an obituary of Olins published by The Guardian on 15 April 2014, the writers Peter York and Mark Damazer describe Saffron as a Spanish-based international brand consultancy started by a Wolff Olins alumnus, Jacob Benbunan, which Olins joined soon after 2001 as a hands-on chairman. Wikipedia counts both men as founders. Both accounts agree that Benbunan led the business and that Olins served as its chairman.

The timing matters to the story. The Guardian says that in 2001 Olins sold Wolff Olins to the American group Omnicom, and that there had been a general assumption he might step back to write, teach and travel. Instead he took the chair at Saffron. The obituary says that in his seventies and eighties he spoke about branding on platforms around the world and took on the business of country branding.

The name itself is a single word, with no surnames attached. That breaks with the pattern of Olins’s earlier firm, which had been named after its two founders in 1965. The Guardian records that Michael Wolff and Olins started Wolff Olins that year and that Wolff left in 1983. The Saffron name, by contrast, carries neither founder’s surname, and Wikipedia gives the firm’s full name as Saffron Brand Consultants.

Offices, a chairman and a second chapter.

Wikipedia lists offices in London, Madrid, Vienna and Istanbul, with strategic partners in New York and São Paulo. The consultancy’s own website, read in October 2026, describes one team across London, Madrid, Tokyo and Vienna. Wikipedia names Jacob Benbunan as chief executive, alongside a chief creative officer, a chief client officer, a chief strategy officer and a chief financial officer.

Olins remained the public face of the firm for more than a decade. Wikipedia says he served as chairman of both Wolff Olins and Saffron, and lists his books from The Corporate Personality in 1978 to Brand New – The Shape of Brands to Come, which it says was published by Thames & Hudson in April 2014. The Guardian reported that Olins died on 14 April 2014. The newspaper’s obituary ran with a photograph credited to Saffron Brand Consultants.

Place branding appears throughout the firm’s record. Wikipedia says Saffron has worked on place-brand strategy and identities for Vienna, London, Northern Ireland, Turkey, Trinidad & Tobago and Poland, citing a report in the Polish news site Gazeta.pl for the Polish project. Its article on Olins says he worked on branding projects for cities and countries including London, Mauritius, Northern Ireland, Poland, Portugal and Lithuania, and The Guardian described country branding as part of his work in his later years.

The consultancy also works on what Wikipedia calls the employee value proposition, the way an organisation describes itself to the people who work for it, and names Sodexo as a client for that kind of work. Its client list in Wikipedia runs across telecoms, energy, banking, airlines, retail and museums, including Vueling, Iberia, Repsol, Turkcell and the Victoria and Albert Museum, and among more recent clients it names the airlines HK Express and Gulf Air. Saffron’s own website presents the business as integrating identity and interaction, a phrase that places digital products alongside logos and naming in the firm’s description of itself.

Names, partners and the studio’s own surfaces.

A smaller design studio rarely has a product on a shelf, so its identity has to live on the surfaces it controls directly. The name comes first. Many studios choose a single short word or a founder’s surname, and that choice sets the tone for everything that follows: a one-word name has to work in a sentence, on a door plate, in an email signature and as a domain, often in that order of difficulty.

Partnerships shape the story as well. Studios are often founded by two or three people, and the way founders arrive, leave or hand over the business becomes part of how the studio is described in the trade press. A name that combines surnames records that history; an abstract name lets the studio outlive any single partner.

The studio’s own website is usually its main brand surface, carrying the typeface, the grid and the way projects are presented. Some studios also publish books, monographs or small runs of printed matter about their own work, which act as an extended identity. For a design guide, the useful habit is to read these surfaces as a system: the name, the type choice, the website and any self-published material are all expressions of one point of view.

Client work, stated plainly.

The clearest dated piece of Saffron client work in the design press is the corporate identity for Facebook. Dezeen reported on 6 November 2019 that Facebook had launched new branding for the company behind its apps, made with the branding agency Saffron and the UK type studio Dalton Maag. The system, to be used on services the company owned, set the company name in an all-capital, rounded typeface, coloured to match the service it appeared in: green inside WhatsApp, and tones of yellow, pink and purple inside Instagram.

Dezeen said the lower-case blue lettering would stay with the social networking app itself, so that the company and the app were written differently. The capital wordmark replaced a grey “from Facebook” endorsement that had been added to the interface of the company’s apps earlier in 2019. Dezeen quoted Facebook as saying the branding used custom typography and capitalisation to create visual distinction between the company and the app. The same report noted that Dalton Maag had also redesigned the typeface used on Airbnb’s platforms.

Other clients appear in Wikipedia, which names YouTube and cites a Saffron case study for that project, as well as Siemens, Santander, BBVA, Fujitsu and Lloyd’s of London. Its article on Olins lists organisations he advised, including Repsol, Renault, Volkswagen and Tata.

For a design guide, Saffron Brand Consultants shows how a consultancy can take a one-word name, bring in a co-founder of an older firm as chairman and then let the work carry the name forward after him. Compare Wolff Olins, the firm Olins co-founded in 1965, and North, another studio in this collection. For this guide we use saffron gold, burnt umber and clove with a grotesque sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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