Rennie® is a creative design advisory shifting brands and companies through movement, climate & health towards a liveable planet.

An independent studio in Sydney and Los Angeles, working across brand, digital, place and research. Nineteen years in, forty percent of everything we make serves climate, health and movement. The rest sustains it.

In one of our earliest projects, a client told us the work was beautiful. Then they said it didn’t solve their problem. A critique like that changes a career.

Nineteen years and a few hundred assignments later, we steer the studio toward efficacy and accountability, not just aesthetics. We have worked with bootstrapped founders and Fortune 500s, athletes and Elders, from Sydney to Los Angeles, the Daintree to Salt Lake City. We thrive on complex challenges: the tangled places where people, place and brand meet, where the brief is incomplete, the data disagrees with itself, and the ground keeps moving.

We have also learned what does not work. Strategy that ignores the numbers is useless. So are aesthetics that chase trends, and deliverables your team cannot carry without us. We begin with homework and fieldwork, the numbers, the frontline, the place itself, long before we advance to form. Short, intensive sprints or long engagements, carried through implementation. And we hold ourselves to it publicly: B Corp certified, a Design Declares partner, with forty percent of the studio given to climate, health and movement.

Does that sound like how you’d like to work?

Selected clients

Design is not neutral.
It changes things.

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About the studio

From 2009 to 2016 we were good at making things look good. Brands, websites, apps, places. Then we started asking what the work we were deploying was actually doing in the world, how did it show up and what changed as a result of the work, and that question changed everything.

In 2016 we moved away from design for aesthetics. We realised design is not a competitive advantage. The image, the idea, the thing the work shapes in people’s minds and communities, that is.

423

Ten years and 423 projects later, we are still asking that question on every brief.

Experiment as you execute.

Ben and Nicola Rennie, founders of the studio

We’ve worked with bootstrapped entrepreneurs and Fortune 500s, elite sporting brands to NBA and NRL teams.

Rennie has worked in 8 countries and some of the world’s most important cities, from Local time

New York--:--Tokyo--:--

Sydney--:--London--:--

Salt Lake City--:--Barcelona--:--

We thrive on complex problems: the messy intersections of human decision-making, physical spaces, technology and brand positioning.

We work across three territories: movement, climate, and health. Not because they’re fashionable but because they’re where design has the most unfinished business.

Movement

Climate

Health

Our work begins in magazines, books, libraries, and public places. In the margins of research and the stories of the people the work will actually touch. We go there before we go anywhere near a screen, long before we advance to form.

We work in intensive sprints and extended engagements, and we stay in the room through implementation, not just discovery.

If that sounds like how you want to work, bring us your dream or your complex challenge.

We’ll know within the first conversation whether we’re the right fit.

The short version

A small creative studio, working since 2009 from Sydney and Los Angeles. Forty percent of what we do serves climate, health and movement. The rest sustains it.

Our time divides roughly forty/sixty. Forty percent is given to climate, health and movement work, much of it offered pro bono or close to it. The remaining sixty is the commercial practice that sustains the studio and funds the rest.

Since 2019, the first of those lanes has returned more than a million dollars to Australian organisations doing patient, necessary work. That is the studio in a paragraph. What follows is the longer account.

Inside the studio

Where the work begins.

Sydney & Los Angeles

In the studioWhere the work begins

Ben RennieFounder, in the room

Design DeclaresClimate, made public

Reny · 2009Where it started

On the floorTalks, launches, gatherings

Every detail here is a decision. So is every detail we ship.

The studio

The work

What we hold firmly

The work that earns the right to last.

The world is not short of brands raising their voices. It is short of those willing to do the quiet, useful, unglamorous work, and to see it through. That is the gap the studio was built to occupy.

We hold a quiet reservation about the word sustainable. It has been applied to so many things, by so many people, that it now describes almost nothing. We continue to use it for want of a better word, though we hold it loosely. What we hold firmly is a plainer question: did the work leave a place better than it found it? The planet does not read mission statements. It reads outcomes.

So we measure the unglamorous things. Carbon, hosting, materials, travel. Our own website runs on renewable energy and lighter than eighty-eight percent of the world's websites, an A for carbon. We made no announcement of it. We simply built the thing with care and kept it light, which is the least photogenic kind of progress and, perhaps for that reason, the rarest.

The Indigenous peoples of this continent have practised seven-generation thinking for sixty thousand years. We remain students of it, and claim no mastery. It is the most useful brief we know: make the decision your great-great-grandchildren would thank you for. We try to offer the planet a seat at the table from the first sketch, and we favour the slow, deliberate work that takes years to become visible and a lifetime to forget.

What we believe

Creativity and design as a force for impact, balancing profit and purpose to create products, services and experiences that minimise harm to people and the planet, while fostering an inclusive, collaborative future.

Why people choose Rennie^®

Value, growth and brand reinvention.

The founders

Founded by Ben & Nicola Rennie

On occasion, the work is noticed

Awards, talks and the odd honourable mention. Drag to explore.

AwardAustralian New Media · Agency of the Year

AwardAWWWARDS · Honourable Mentions × 12

FinalistFinancial Review Innovation Awards

BookLessons in Creativity · Small Business Book of the Year, Runner Up

TalkSXSW Sydney · Ben & Miff Rennie

TalkWorld Design Congress · London · Ben & Nicola Rennie

TalkTEDx · Macquarie University · Ben Rennie

TalkParliament House · Innovation Talk · Ben Rennie

TalkAustralian Design Conference · Brisbane · Ben Rennie

TalkB Corp Conference · Ben & Nicola Rennie

TalkMelbourne Design Week · Ben Rennie

In conversationGleebooks · Sydney · Lessons in Creativity, with Tim Ross

A brief history · 2009 → now

2009

The studio practice begins as Reny. A small crew, a plain idea: do useful work, and do it well.

2014

A digital practice grows inside the studio. Brand, product and platform under one roof.

2019

The forty/sixty model is adopted. Climate, health and movement become a permanent lane.

2023

B Corp recertified. Back to measuring the unglamorous things: carbon, materials, travel.

2024

Lessons in Creativity is published. Two decades of studio practice, made portable.

Now

Movement, climate and health. The work that earns the right to last.

From the studio

The book

Lessons in Creativity

Ben Rennie’s book on reclaiming the creative confidence we are all born with. Two decades with Nike, Patagonia and Chanel, told as stories and strategy.