Sub Rosa House
Sub Rosa House
The strategic foundation for a new creative platform—and the creative direction to build it.
Sub Rosa House started from a conviction most people treat as a contradiction — that critical thinking and pleasure belong together, not at odds. Three founders had the ideas and the instincts for it; what they came to us for was a foundation solid enough to build a whole platform on.
LOCATIONBrooklyn, NY
PROJECT SCOPEPhase 1 — Brand Strategy
Positioning + Audience
Value Proposition
Brand Attributes
Voice & Tone
Visual Principles
Asset Kit: Name Story, Taglines + Manifesto
Phase 2 — Creative Direction
Creative Brief
Designer Selection
Design Facilitation
THE OPPORTUNITYHonoring what came before, building what comes next
Sub Rosa House is the successor to Dilettante Army — a creative platform that combines publishing and events, a place where visual criticism gets made in good company. The task in front of the founders was a delicate one: carry forward the spirit of what came before while stepping fully into a new identity. Continuity and reinvention at once.
The three founders are writers and editors, one of them a poet — words are their medium, not decoration on the work but the work itself. They came to us for the strategic foundation that would let the new platform stand on its own — and, in time, for the creative direction to build the identity on top of it.
Sub Rosa House brand strategy — title slide
THE CHALLENGEA wealth of ideas that needed a shape
Three founders, a shared history, a wealth of ideas — and no obvious way through them. As one founder put it, they needed someone to take it all and shape it into something coherent and comprehensive. That’s the actual work: not adding ideas, but finding the through-line already there. Doing it for three people is its own challenge. Each arrived with strong instincts that diverged on real questions, and getting everyone to the same place means getting there without anyone feeling like they gave something up.
And because words are their medium, the bar sat higher than usual: every phrase we put forward had to hold up for people who shape language for a living. That made the collaboration richer and harder. Nothing generic would survive the room, which is exactly the discipline the work demanded.
THE PROCESSAsk three founders separately, and the truth surfaces
We began where we always do — with the founders, each working through a tailored discovery process on their own, before anyone compared notes. What surfaced was striking: all three, independently, named the same core tension. Critical thinking and pleasure are usually treated as mutually exclusive, and Sub Rosa House refuses that premise. That refusal became the spine of the whole strategy.
Sub Rosa House positioning statement — the pleasure is essential to the politics
From there, we built the full foundation, making the reasoning explicit at every step so the founders could see not just what we recommended, but why. Two decisions show the level we worked at. We defined the audience as a disposition rather than a demographic — because a writer, a maker, and a feminist can be very different people, and what unites a Sub Rosa House person isn’t what they do but a shared orientation. And when we narrowed twenty-plus descriptors into five attributes a designer could build from, every choice was defended: sharp over rigorous, for the same intellectual precision but with wit and edge; generous over inclusive, because Sub Rosa House doesn’t just welcome people in; it creates abundance.
Sub Rosa House brand attribute spectrum, five brand attributes, and the rationale behind the final brand attributes.
"The process clarified our thinking and added new facets to our project that we couldn't figure out how to develop on our own."
— Sara Clugage, Founder
THE CREATIVE WORKThe pleasure isn’t a flourish; it’s the position
The foundation came together as a set of pieces pulling in one direction. A positioning statement that lands on the line the whole brand turns on — the pleasure is essential to the politics. Five attributes a designer or writer could build from: playful, sharp, generous, daring, stylish. A voice — the smartest person at the party who’s also the most fun to talk to — with tone guidelines to keep it from drifting. And visual principles to carry into the design phase, so the look would follow the thinking rather than the other way around.
Because a foundation should be usable on day one, we added a bonus kit of ready-to-go assets: a name story tracing “sub rosa” and the bread-and-roses lineage, a working set of taglines, and a public-facing manifesto in the founders’ own warm, wry voice.
Sub Rosa House brand manifesto
THE OUTCOMEGet the thinking right, and the look has somewhere to stand
We delivered a foundation precise enough to guide a designer, a writer, or a new collaborator, and generous enough to leave room to grow. Because strategy came first and identity follows, the measure here isn’t a launch metric yet; it’s whether the thinking is solid enough to build on. It is.
And rather than hand the strategy off and hope it survives translation, we’re carrying it into the identity phase ourselves — writing the creative brief, helping select the right designer, and facilitating the design against the strategy, so the look gets built on the thinking rather than beside it. We’ll expand this page with the full identity story once it launches.
Brand strategy is the foundation every other decision is built on.
FROM THE CLIENT“Megan took all of our ideas and formed them into something coherent and comprehensive. The process clarified our thinking and added new facets to our project that we couldn't figure out how to develop on our own. Thoughtful, thorough — she’s really, really good at this.”
— Sara Clugage, Founder, Sub Rosa House
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