Ten Years in Reflection:
The Founding and Flow of Nimble.
Our approach to Branding for the Built Environment® is one we've honed consistently throughout our careers, anchored in trust and a distinct lens for delivering brand value across diverse intersections.
But how did Nimble get its start, and what core learnings have influenced our lens and methodology over our 11 years in operation?
Nimble. Origins
Nimble. was founded in 2014 by Candice Riley Campbell. Interior Design by education, and a growing multi-disciplinary skillset spanning brand strategy, identity design, and marketing activation by trade, Candice took the leap to found the studio you know today in response to growing awareness that brand was far too commonly siloed in its development and activation by trades and clients, especially in the commercial real estate industry.
Nimble. serves as a strategy-first design consultancy. We invest in partnerships with select clients for long-term engagements. These have ranged from national real estate portfolios to new ventures, guided by head-first right-fit filters:
How specifically does this project opportunity plan to impact at the intersection of brand and place?
Does the client and its expanded team trust in a creative process and is their a mutual accountability for time, uncovering, and connected change?
Do we share a lens for project impact and engagement success?
By retaining the above filters since day one, we’ve proudly supported the strategic launch of over 200 place brands, 70 company and/or non-profit brands, and countless brand campaigns, branded environments, and brand decisions along the way.
Gaining Steam
Nimble. was founded to challenge silos and champion continual brand value for place. In our first five years, we invested our time and grew our team by servicing and expanding ongoing partnerships. A typical project for us resembled: brand strategy and foundational brand definition, integrated with marketing campaign design and launch activation for adaptive reuse projects and value-add repositionings coast-to-coast.
We had the great pleasure of partnering with the same Asset Managers and Developers we started our career with, branching our relationship and impact beyond creative services into strategic creative direction and capital oversight, building trust and a consistent design influence.
We sustained long-term partnerships and portfolio influence in California, Arizona, Nevada, Washington, and Oregon. We grew our knowledge base and expanded our reach in the Sunbelt. When opportunities arose, we took pleasure in supporting brand and place integration for the Southeast. Our work stretched from our home base in Atlanta to Charlotte, Nashville, Orlando, Jacksonville, and Miami. We were also delighted to partner with local non-profits, fellow founders, and concept brands. We helped shape their early-stage brands, guiding them from vision on paper to market launch.
Our foundational years let us absorb daily nuances—from end-user personas and decision-making drivers to real estate trends, methods, and programming influences. We refined our script to educate on the effect of brand and place on user behavior. We also tested our ‘how we help’ delivery by broadening services and using sprint-style phasing.
The Beauty of Continuous Iteration
Years 5-10 presented worldly disruption that shook our primary vertical, commercial real estate, to its core (ahem, pandemic times). During this season, we remained humble, agile, and strong-willed, retaining our ‘how can we help?’ lens and applying strategic problem-solving and adaptive delivery to keep our project brands and their responses to change alive.
Client conversations around immersive content, brand content delivery, and human-centered language became our new norm and we invested years in learning, testing, and applying new technologies to capture the feeling of branded environments and space availabilities succinctly for digital mediums and nomadic audiences.
During this extended season, we rediscovered that our greatest superpower remains in our ability to see and respond to space as a living soul. Beyond selling ideas and collaborating on creative, we take immense responsibility in finding a better way to connect, engage, and foster belonging with the brands and places we help shape.In these years, our ‘who’ and ‘what’ shifted even further.
In response to a changing real estate market, we remained agile, investing in our education and self-discovery to expand into industry verticals, from built-to-rent residential to life science and cold storage. We expanded our studio [literally, investing in a new hat as commercial real estate owners (still our most ambitious and always-on hat to date)] and our reputation as a trusted advisor in branded environments, growing our client count and retiring projects and relationships that had reached peak impact.
Looking Ahead
As we flip the page on year 11, we hold close the invaluable education we’ve received through our decade-plus of trials, reflection, and conscious iteration. Small business is arduous. Some days the flow fits and we’re making headway; other days the disruption of world news, industry volatility, or the everyday pain point of technology and program glitches throws us an abrupt curve. Yet, we continue to pursue ‘how can we help?’ as a constant: to serve, to impact, to educate at the intersection of brand and place. It’s our guiding mission and our driving heart, and for as long as we can, we’ll remain Nimble.
