Montreal, 1993.

Sid Lee is a creative services agency founded in Montreal. English Wikipedia says Philippe Meunier and Jean-François Bouchard founded it in 1993 as an advertising agency called Diesel. The Financial Post reported on 24 July 2015 that the two had worked together on their high-school newspaper and started the company as recent university graduates who could not find work at other agencies. For the opening five years, the paper said, they worked alone, before hiring Bertrand Cesvet and gradually adding to the team. Wikipedia dates Cesvet’s arrival to 1997 and says he had been a Diesel client before he joined.

The name changed in the mid-2000s. Marketing magazine, the Canadian trade title, reported on 11 December 2006 that the Montreal agency formerly known as Diesel had become Sid Lee, an anagram of Diesel, chosen to end confusion with the Diesel jeans brand. The Financial Post gave the same reason in 2015: the founders called the firm Diesel, then switched to the anagram to avoid confusion with the clothing label. The new name kept every letter of the old one and rearranged them into two short words.

The Marketing piece made clear that the rename came with a wider argument about what an agency should do. Bouchard, then president, told the magazine the agency had never believed in the ad-centric model. The article described its idea of “commercial creativity” as a toolbox in which advertising was one tool among several, alongside retail architecture, experiential marketing and industrial design. The agency had also released a manifesto titled “Building Strong Brands by Leveraging Conversational Capital”, which used clients such as Cirque du Soleil and the Montreal smoked-meat restaurant Schwartz’s as examples of brands people like to talk about.

The same article quoted Mitch Joel, then president of Twist Image in Montreal, who said that in a world of agencies with unusual names such as StrawberryFrog, a name like Sid Lee was no big deal. Bouchard also told Marketing that an office outside Canada was coming, though when and where were still open questions at the time.

From one city to several, and a new owner.

Cirque du Soleil runs through the agency’s early history. The Financial Post reported in July 2015 that in 2000 the agency pitched in a global competition to redesign Cirque’s website, and that Cesvet opened the pitch by reading a poem from a specially designed book. Meunier, by then co-founder and chief creative officer, told the paper that winning the work was a key moment because it showed how creativity could expand beyond one discipline. The paper said Cirque bought a minority stake in the firm in 2012. Wikipedia says that in the same year Sid Lee and Cirque du Soleil launched C2 Montréal, a conference on business and creativity.

The office map grew over the following decade. Wikipedia lists Amsterdam in 2008, Paris in 2009, Toronto in 2010 under Vito Piazza, New York in 2012 and Los Angeles in 2014. It also says Sid Lee Architecture was set up in 2009 by Jean Pelland and Martin Leblanc as a branch within the agency. The interest in buildings came earlier: Marketing reported in December 2006 that Sid Lee had formed an alliance with the Montreal architecture firm Aedifica, with architects working in-house on retail design, and listed projects including a Bose prototype store in New York and a store prototype for SAQ Sélection, a Quebec liquor board format, launched in Laval.

Ownership changed in 2015. The Financial Post reported on 24 July 2015 that Sid Lee had been acquired by Kyu, a unit of Japan’s Hakuhodo DY Holdings; Wikipedia gives the date as 6 July 2015. Bouchard, co-founder and chief executive, told the paper Sid Lee would continue to operate under its own name, and the paper said Cirque du Soleil sold its stake as part of the deal while remaining a client. Hakuhodo DY Holdings has owned Sid Lee, through Kyu, since 2015.

The European set-up then narrowed. Adweek reported on 19 October 2017 that Sid Lee had closed its Amsterdam office the previous year and consolidated its European operations in Paris, and that it was acquiring the Paris creative and production agency Yard, founded in 2014 by Yoan Prat and Tom Brunet, which would become part of Sid Lee Paris. The same report said Sid Lee had moved its US creative operations from New York to Los Angeles that September.

A borrowed word, turned into a name.

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.

An umbrella in the US, and dated identity work.

In the United States the agency became an umbrella for other Kyu companies. Ad Age reported on 29 May 2019 that Sid Lee had named Andy Bateman, formerly of Monitor Deloitte Australia, as its US chief executive, and that the Kyu companies Digital Kitchen, Hornall Anderson, RedPeak and Infrared had been repositioned under the Sid Lee umbrella, with Bateman overseeing all of them. The report named Cesvet as Sid Lee Group chief executive and Piazza as Sid Lee Group president. Wikipedia says the agency also opened an office in Seattle in the wake of these moves.

Named identity work appears in the record as dated projects. The Financial Post said in 2015 that the agency had rebranded the Toronto Raptors, and that the “We The North” platform launched early in 2014, ahead of the team’s 20th-anniversary season. Piazza, then president of the Toronto office, told the paper the Raptors had long been seen as outsiders, and that the agency’s mandate was to turn a longstanding weakness into a strength. For Cirque du Soleil’s Las Vegas show Zumanity, the paper said, Sid Lee created a campaign under the line “the other side of Cirque du Soleil”.

The name has held since the rename. Bouchard said in 2015 that the agency would keep it under Kyu, and the 2017 and 2019 reports in Adweek and Ad Age still describe the Paris, Los Angeles and US group businesses under the Sid Lee banner.

For a design guide, Sid Lee shows how an agency can keep the letters of its old name and change everything else around them, from the offices to the owner. Compare Cossette and lg2, two other Quebec agencies in this collection. For this guide we use signal red, graphite and ink with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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