Strategy
+ Creative

Hinata Retreat is a new luxury mountainside resort experience launched and opened in fall of 2025. Working with hospitality consultant, Howard Wein, the client secured funding and permits to initiate their vision. Their goals for phase one were to develop the site, access, a core building (as an adaptive reuse project) and 30 luxury cabins in the hills of Western Massachusetts. The vision was to create a quiet, luxury couples retreat with breathtaking views of the rolling hills and landscape with all the luxuries of a high-end hospitality experience.

IdeaCo. was brought on to build the overall brand and guest experience, which involved architecture, interior design, experience design, and visual branding. This comprehensive approach assures a consistent and thought-out guest experience at every touchpoint. Our creative role spanned many disciplines and purposes, from digital campaigns to interior furnishings, from branded coffee to comprehensive art direction and on-site photography.

A look inside the participatory creative process — from ideation to realization.

Reimagine an organization and identity, as its mission shifts from academic research to community-building and engagement. This University of Massachusetts research program brought critical research on the human impacts and challenges of adoption to the academic research community for well over a decade. Now its mission is evolving. It is engaging the wider, global adoption community with events, programming, resources, and education for parents, adoptees, and healthcare professionals. In following, the program needed a more engaging and dynamic way to connect with a varied and changing audience.

Shifting away from the traditional academic research aesthetic, this creative sought to bring life, accessibility, and energy to information, stories, and people. Working with a collection of program leaders and community members, this collaborative and inclusive creative process gave vision to voices of passion and commitment within the team. This project is still in development, with an initial brand launch coming in November of 2026.

Launch an entirely new and innovative concept to the industry–the super-coop. A cooperative of cooperatives would be a better way to phrase it. The challenge here was building brand exposure, conveying the benefits, raising funds, and invent and build a fully functional digital community platform.

As the organization pushed forward with many conceptual innovations, the brand and marketing campaigns followed suit, with creative and innovative approaches to making human connections, understanding pain points, fostering engagement and community-building. Elevate launched in Q4 of 2025, and has grown its membership exponentially, month over month. The new virtual community, including coop-coop chat, video conferencing, funding pools, shared resources, and cooperative strategy, launches October 1, 2026.

This project originated when an entrepreneur who owned several branded restaurants purchased a brewing company. The relationship between the restaurants and the brewery, which sought to compete in the open market, was complicated. Each had built brand equity and faithful followers, yet each brand fell short while also being vastly different and disconnected from each other. The owner sought to build a cohesive and unifying brand structure that leveraged existing brand equity while also reinforcing each other through cross-audience marketing.

Development of a unifying umbrella brand, whereby each individual brand experience developed brand equity and exposure for the overarching parent brand. Creative ideation and adaptation of existing brand concepts, led to a thematic concept that allowed for both connection between the brands, as well as a standout identity within their own markets. Work included market research, focus groups, identity development, guest experience, print, packaging, web design/development, video and photography art direction, social media, swag, and signage. The Hangar restaurant has grown exponentially, expanding to 9 brew pubs across Western Massachusetts, while Amherst Brewing has reached full northeast exposure in both packaged products and on-tap at reputable food and beverage outlets.

A fierce, opinionated, and independent entrepreneur, with a genuine sense of ownership and vision for the brand, planned to expand into new markets. The product line was to grow from traditional tea products to a suite of carbonated tea beverages. In short, the existing, home grown brand could not compete and stand out in this new market space, nor rely on name recognition as the product sought growth outside of its regional sales areas.

Development of a new brand concept that would be competitive and remarkable in the bottle beverage market, and expand that brand through the full suite of products. A full redesign of over 200 sku’s across 7 different packaging types, including wholesale and retail. The concept development led with market research that clarified the visual demands for shelf presence, and followed through to a full brand rollout. Deliverables included market research, pitch decks, product catalogs, print, packaging, signage, shop and retail shelf concepts, trade show development, web and digital design/development, online shopping experience. The product reached all high-end markets, including Roche Brothers and Whole Foods across the entire northeast.