34 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 10, ISSUE 10 was not in the original design scheme for Breakhouse. Based in a beautiful area of the country, Halifax, Nova Scotia with design options to suit the uniqueness of this breathtaking region, the company started as a design firm of retail and hospitality (branching out to include large multi-unit residential design work). It was through the design process that the idea of branding became a key component of the company’s business operating principle that naturally fell into place. “It wasn’t intentionally isolated as an offering, it was always what we did, we just didn’t realize 15 years ago that it was called branding” Vandenbrink remarks. “We have always been doing design work within some retail and hospitality spaces and whenever we started our design work, we were asking a lot of questions about what kind of customer a client would want to have or what sort of experience are they looking to create and what is the client’s business position,” Vandenbrink reflects. It became clear to Breakhouse that messaging was the nucleus from which the design process took root. “When we were working with a large brand and marketing firm client designing their offices. We were in what we call the discovery phase of our design process, which is essentially asking a lot about the company culture, how clients move into their space, and so on that someone in the meeting said – we were branders, not just designers .” Vandenbrink recalled that his colleagues went back to their offices and put their collective heads together to determine how to incorporate the notion of client branding and how to be able to offer this service along with the traditional
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