Engagement type: Ongoing strategic and creative partnership Client: Deeney's Role: Innovation & Strategic Director From: 2023 — present
Deeney's is an independent East London café brand with 13+ years of community-rooted hospitality across multiple sites. Since 2023 I've been embedded as their Innovation and Strategic Director — working across brand, growth strategy, visual identity, and expansion.
The work spans a lot of ground: a full website redesign, brand guidelines, and ongoing design projects sit alongside the strategic work. But the clearest example of what the partnership has produced is the Quentin Blake Centre pitch.
In 2024, Deeney's had the opportunity to pitch for the hospitality concession at the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration — a significant cultural institution opening in 2026. The pitch needed to do several things at once: demonstrate commercial credibility, show genuine alignment with the centre's values and aesthetic, and stand out in what would inevitably be a competitive process.
The existing Deeney's brand — warm, characterful, community-focused — needed translating into a site-specific identity that could sit comfortably within an institutional cultural context without losing its personality. That's a harder design problem than it sounds.
I led the full pitch from inception.
That meant building the narrative strategy and structuring the pitch deck as an executive-ready document — weaving Deeney's brand voice with hard commercial evidence, referencing the William Morris Gallery as a proof point, and projecting £1M+ annual turnover with a detailed staffing model, financial KPIs, and sustainability commitments.
In parallel I developed a complete site-specific branding system: a new logo variant, a typography system drawn from the centre's own visual language, a colour palette rooted in the architecture and Quentin Blake's illustration work, and a flexible iconography and menu system designed to adapt across seasons and exhibitions.
The commercial case and the creative case were built as one argument, not two separate documents.
Deeney's won the concession. The café at the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration opens in 2026. The branding and guidelines I developed are now the operational visual identity for the site.