Concepts
We collaborate with like-minded partners who understand the value of community in the world off tech and innovation.
We specialize in creating content and experiences that engage purpose-driven leaders in the innovation space and build connections into underserved communities.
Event Production + Community Development + Evergreen Content Creation
lululemon
2022
lululemon needed to create a lockdown-safe, inclusive activation to bring a national community of wellness consumers and influecners together. This event-series requires the client to change the way they interacted with their community based on public health restrictions. The project aimed to facilitate real connections + generate net new content with a seamlessly integrated brand story.
OR’s role: Content Developer, Community Liason, Event Production, Event Marketing
Team: 1 PM, 3 Project Assistants
Challenges
The series was developed in the midst of a global pandemic that restricted the global brands ability to maintain connectivity with its local community. One key challenge was the team’s lack of ability to physically bring wellness and fitness enthusiasts together in person. The team also needed a small, nimble, cost effective time to create a compelx hybrid experience that made for a complete accessible event for a national audiecne while platforming local thought leaders and brand ambasssadors.
Impact
Newsletter subscription
↑2x
Event Production + Inclusive Community Development + Tailored Network Activation
BKR Capital’s capstone event is a full day experiential activation designed to gather new and emerging black venture capital professionals with seasoned veterans in the Canadian vc market with the goal of diversifying a hisorically monolithic space. The event served as a celebration and culmination of a 9-month intensive training program for aspiring black vc professionals.
OR’s role: Concept development, speaker curation and
Team: 1 PM, 3 Project Assistants
BKR Capital
2023
Process
At lululemon, in-person activations are a cornerstone of the business and the most direct pathway into the local communities for customers, ambassadors and staff. The concept for this event was developed with the goal of expanding the brand’s reach into the entrepreneurship, innovation and tech by carefully considering the content, guest list and thematic focus of the event + selecting strategic, local brand partners that served as connective tissue to a different demographic for the iconic brand.
Event Production + Community Development
lululemon
2022
Founders’ Night served as an intersectional, in-person event designed to foster connection, showcase product and deepen a hyper-local community. The event - hosted at lululemons iconic West 4th location - brought creatives, influencers, thought leaders and customers together for a unique, private experience.
OR’s role: Concept Development, Event Marketing, Content Curation, Facilitation
Team: 1 PM, 3 Project Assistants
Context
For close to a decade and as far as the data shows, VC funding to black entrepreneurs has remained at ~1% of total funding. Also, over the last few years, there has been concerted effort to recruit black employees at VC firms, but majority of these effort translated to recruitments at the junior levels.
Impact
Newsletter subscription
↑3x
Job Placements
↑2
Virtual Event Production
The Brief
2020
The Digital Technology Supercluster need a platform to reach a new audience of new and aspiring women executive leaders in the venture space. The Brief was an initiative designed to give voice to women in the worlds tech, vc and entrepreneruship who had been hisotrically overlooked and underestimated.
OR’s role: Concept Development, Content and Guest Curation, Facilitation
Team: 2 PMs
Speaker HIghlights: Tara Bosch - Smart Sweets, Fatima Hussain - Comcast Ventures, Christina Sass - Andela.
Challenges
This initiative was launched in the early days of a global movement to ensure diversity, equity and inclusion were considered in business. There was no template for elevated marginalized voices and livesteams series was developed without an established audience.
Additionally, the series was created with a lean budget + no name brand affiliation. The project team leveraged relationships, key insights around speaker potential and built in audiences of the thought leaders that were tapped for the series to create momentum and develop a net new audience through high-calibre content.
Learnings
The Brief provided an template for develop a grassroots movement through meaningful content, relationship-driven speaker recruitment and cultural aligned project goals. The project team also had the opportunity to fully appreciate the possibility and limitations of developing content with inescapable budget limitations.
Impact
Newsletter subscription
↑1500%
SHORT ESSAY
MAR. 2025
Time + Space
BY MARLON THOMPSON
Money is a construct.
It took me over 30 years to really understand this. The pursuit of wealth had always been an unintentional one for me. I knew that I wasn’t born into it, I knew that people who had it seemed better off, and so I oriented my entire life around the pursuit of career success without much investigation.
For a while - mostly in my early thirties - I had a one dimensional understanding of wealth. To a large extent, this perspective was shared by a large majority of mid-career millennials like myself at time. Somewhere between 2015 and now, being wealthy became the opposite of aspirational. In 2021, The Guardian shared a confusing report that looked at shifting attitudes across Gen-Z and millennial populations in the UK around the economy. Nearly 80% of millennial and Gen Z Britons blamed capitalism for the housing crisis, while 75% believe the climate emergency is “specifically a capitalist problem” and 72% backed sweeping nationalization.
At the same time, popular culture was increasingly damning the wealthiest groups in western society. HBO’s critical and commercial darling ‘Succession’ spent four seasons - about 37 hours straight - scooping up every single award for repeatedly making the point that billionaires do not deserve what they have. The 2022 satirical black comedy “Triangle of Sadness” took great pleasure in throwing a group of out-of-touch passengers on a luxury cruise ship around a cabin in their own excrement and vomit. And AOC literally wore a dress with the words “Tax the Rich” spray painted across the back to the Met Gala.
Like many of my peers, I started to wonder if buying into the pursuit of wealth was an indicator that something was actually wrong with me. But as I get closer to 40, I understand that it’s simply more complicated than that.
Growing up, my family had next to nothing. We couldn’t always pay the hydro bill, and I still remember gerry-rigging some wires to create a completely makeshift antenna to plug into the single television we owned in our living room to get whatever tv channel we got. Wealth was a complete mystery to me. What I was missing wasn’t just a basic understanding of how currency, investing and the economy work. I didn’t realize that we were completely starved of the luxuries that come with the time and space that wealth affords you.
I started working at 11. I did a pretty inconsistent job of delivering newspapers to my neighbours on the five or six blocks that surrounded our semi-detached home in Oshawa, Ontario. It was the only way I could afford to do anything with my friends who typically had more financial stability than we did. I developed a good work ethic very early on, which I’m grateful for today, but I didn’t have the freedom to be truly creative, or explore different pathways than the most conservative one available: go to university, figure out how to pay for it, get a secure job, buy a house and so on.