DeSantis Breindel

I’m the CCO of an investment advisory firm. We’re a low-volatility money manager based in Charleston, South Carolina. I’ve been with the firm for almost 10 years.

We were looking to restructure our existing brand language.

DeSantis Breindel helped us reposition everything, including our brand platform, positioning statement, brand voice, messaging pillars, and principal language. We wanted to restructure our existing language with a new refresh and lens.

We worked with four teammates, including Will, their senior strategy director; Ryann, the account director; Howard, a co-founder of DeSantis Breindel; and Cara, whose title I can't remember, but she was incredible too.

We found DeSantis Breindel doing a Google or AI search. We wanted a partner in the marketing space with a focus on the financial sector. We chose them because we appreciated their discovery process, where they considered all perspectives. That was a differentiator because we didn’t hear that from other firms we interviewed.

We spent around $75,000.

We started working with them in January 2026, but the project started in February 2026. We ended the project in June 2026.

We haven’t rolled out the new language yet, but we'll release it later in 2026. We expect a lot of ROI from this project. Overall, DeSantis Breindel did a nice job providing more clarity about what we do. This will be great for our internal team when talking about our product, and for everyone who sells on our behalf, including our clients and advisors.

They were super organized and thoughtful with their timelines. They stayed true to the schedule the entire time. We never waited for emails or chased updates. DeSantis Breindel handled everything with professionalism and clarity, and they set the budget in stone, which was great. There was no wiggle room, and it stayed true the entire time, which was excellent.

Their creativity and ability to take what our team was saying and translate it into beautiful new messaging were impressive. They absorbed our feedback and acted on it. They also provided feedback on why we wouldn’t want to make certain decisions. Overall, the transparency between both teams was helpful.

No, there weren’t any.

Don’t be afraid to be transparent in the feedback you give DeSantis Breindel because they’ll work with it and weave it into the end deliverable. Ensure the communication line is clear and be responsive. DeSantis Breindel can only create what you give them. If you don’t give their team the proper insight and tools, they won’t have any way of gathering that. Be transparent and stay on top of them. Be respectful of their schedule as well as yours.

I’m the VP of a financial services business focused on plugging operators into businesses going through growing pains or an existential crisis. We’re a team full of operators with CFO and CEO backgrounds that operate businesses.

We needed a revamp of our website and marketing materials. We had a website set up in 2018 when our firm had three people. Now, we have a team of about 50 people, and we’re looking to have 100 people in the next year or two. We want a more professional and dynamic website with updated colors, logos, and photos. We want to be ahead of the growth in terms of marketing.

DeSantis Breindel helped us revamp our website and marketing materials. Initially, we gave them our website and branding guidelines. We also had a few follow-up calls to level-set on what was currently existing and what we were looking to do. We shared our vision with them.

We worked with 5–7 teammates from DeSantis Breindel. There were two project managers, but only one worked full-time. The initial project manager went on maternity leave, and a new project manager came in. The rest of the team focused on the design aspect of the website. One individual focused on the copywriting.

We talked to a bunch of companies. Our head partner on this engagement had either used DeSantis Breindel with a prior company or was familiar with a website they had put together for another client. He knew their work and liked it, so that was ultimately why we decided to go with them.

We spent around $180,000.

We started working with them in June 2025, and our website launched in January 2026. We’re still in communication with them, but they’re not doing anything right now.

Everyone was happy with their recommendations regarding the new branding and color palette. From the beginning of the process through the actual publishing of the website, DeSantis Breindel provided a lot of really good ideas. We couldn’t implement those ideas at launch because we didn’t have the information to publish those things on our website. However, those ideas allowed us to grow into that as we became more professionalized and grew our team.

We shared a lot of to-dos via email and Word documents. When we got to the development phase, we had a website-based camp where we could access and provide feedback. That was a little easier to keep track of.

DeSantis Breindel’s ability to take our scattershot view of what we wanted and consolidate it to produce something that checked all the boxes was impressive. We had a lot of type-A personalities that shared a vision but also cared about the presentation. None of us were marketers; we were all finance people. We all had slightly different views on what we wanted.

My only complaint was some of the project management. Sometimes it was a bit unclear to me who had ownership on their side. We were a little lagging on the timeline. We launched the website later than anticipated, but that was partially due to them and partially due to us. We were a little slow in getting them some information.

Maintain an open line of communication. DeSantis Breindel was really responsive for the most part. Even when we didn’t give them clear guidance, they were pretty good at using their creativity to come back with multiple suggestions.

I’m the marketing director of a corporate tax consulting firm in the greater Philadelphia area. I've been here for 12 and a half years.

We were embarking on our 30th anniversary and wanted to come out with a refreshed look and bolder, more elevated messaging. We engaged DeSantis Breindel for the logo redesign, core messaging, and website design, architecture, and messaging.

The team managed everything related to our brand messaging, new website, and its content. DeSantis Breindel started by reviewing documentation we had previously prepared.

We worked with around 8–9 people. We had a key project manager who kept us on track. Three individuals were on the design side at varying levels, two were on the strategy side with messaging, and two to three teammates were on the website side.

Historically, we have always used firms very local to Philadelphia. We found DeSantis Breindel through Google searches. Their website really stood out to me; it looked a little bit bolder, which is where we wanted to go. That prompted us to engage in a quick conversation to see what it would take.

We spent around $200,000–$250,000.

We worked together from October 2024–July 2025.

We just launched the website, so it’s hard to say definitively whether engagement has increased. However, we definitely recognized an increase in engagement and excitement about the brand internally. We also noticed an uptick in orders of new logo merchandise. The logo's theme was very clear, succinct, and easy to follow.

DeSantis Breindel met deadlines and stayed within our budget. They let us know if anything fluctuated. In fact, DeSantis Breindel made it incredibly easy to work with them.

DeSantis Breindel’s understanding of our needs and their approach were impressive. They handled any questions that came up; everything was very smooth. Their professionalism was impressive — they knew what they were doing. Everything they did for us was very clear, elevating them from other vendors. Their performance really stood out.

No, there's nothing for them to improve. We were incredibly impressed by DeSantis Breindel.

If you have a clear understanding of what you want, that will help. At the beginning, set the stage and ensure you’re all on the same page. Stay in constant communication, and that will make everything else that follows incredibly seamless.

I’m the director of marketing for capital markets at a global financial services company. We provide a variety of services, including wealth management, private equity, investment banking, equity research, and asset management. I oversee the marketing and branding for the business units that serve in the capital markets area.

We hired DeSantis Breindel to revisit our employee value proposition (EVP) from an external recruiting perspective. We wanted to have a greater impact on communicating what made us different and better to work for as an investment bank with prospective junior investment banking talent.

We started with a healthy level of intake, where they asked us to do an information dump on them. This included everything from brand guidelines to examples of current recruiting materials. They did interviews with different stakeholders to better understand what we currently go to market with as it relates to recruiting talent.

There were up to five individuals from their team working on the project at various points.

We did an RFP process, where we went to Google and other colleagues in the marketing and communications department for references of firms that might be able to help with the type of work we were looking for. We cobbled together a list of about eight or nine potential firms. We put together an RFP document and went to all those agencies to ask if they were interested.

We spent just under $200,000.

We worked together from September 2024–February 2025.

There was no way that we could've done this work on our own. We absolutely needed an outside partner to manage it and help us recognize our blind spots. We're in a really unique industry, and there's a little bit of skepticism about how much impact this would have and whether this partner would understand our industry and the current situation. DeSantis Breindel more than demonstrated their knowledge of the industry and was extremely thoughtful about crafting a scope of work that would help us get the information we needed and couldn’t get for ourselves. Overall, they put us on a path that I think will get us to a better place.

We used Zoom for conference calls and emailed them back and forth.

Chelsea did a great job of keeping us on track, thinking in advance about different milestone dates, and working backward from a timetable. This was particularly important because we had a lot of internal stakeholders who needed to know some of what we were doing but not all the details. She was a great partner as we navigated that component.

We were impressed with their ability to use market research to articulate clear learnings and themes and then boil them down into very resonant and memorable messages.

I honestly can’t think of anything. We started a little bit slower when we first engaged with them, but they adjusted pretty quickly.

They are worth solid consideration as a partner primarily because they are incredibly thoughtful and smart about how they approach work.

I’m the VP of marketing for Berkeley Research Group, a global consulting firm.

We needed to update and elevate our brand.

DeSantis Breindel has helped us define the project's scope, which is articulated more as a brand refresh. Their initial work with us has been to refine that.

Depending on the different workstreams, we've had between five and ten people at any time. Shannon, the head of strategy, has been the lead individual on the project from the start. Chelsea, the account director, has overseen the whole process. We've worked with several people on the messaging and verbal identity.

We'd worked with them five years before on a previous brand project, and they did a great job. We chose them particularly because of their experience in professional services brand work, working with firms in our sector, which is quite specific. We knew they had a really strong record of working with professional services firms and financial services organizations.

We've been working together since June 2024, and the engagement is ongoing.

The quality of the work is excellent. Over 800 people have completed brand training, for which they developed the communications. Internal employees have given very positive feedback on their reaction to the refreshed visual identity and messaging.

They've been excellent across the board in terms of project management. They've delivered the work on time and within budget and communicated well with us. We use Microsoft Teams calls and emails to communicate and Microsoft SharePoint for file sharing.

Chelsea has played an exceptional role in organizing the many different workstreams, deliverables, meetings, and actions throughout the project. It definitely could not have run as smoothly and effectively without her. Given the breadth of the role, how efficiently and effectively she's performed it, and her excellent relationship with us as the client team, I'd say she's exceptional.

They're very focused on ensuring that internal communications are well thought through and stakeholder engagement is strong, which is critical in professional services, given complex organizations with many leaders. They've navigated that really well with us.

They've put so much work into this, and I imagine at points they might have over-serviced to a degree. They've never pushed back on anything additional we've needed, particularly when creating multiple versions of things for deliverables for different stakeholders within the firm. I'd be interested to see if they feel over-serviced and how they feel about some of that.

Take advantage of their expertise in shaping a piece of work that needs to be done rather than prescribing it too rigidly from the start. We've certainly benefited from being open to their lead.