Moda Bagno is a luxury furniture and home goods brand. With its impeccable curatorial eye, the luxury brand has been a tastemaker for five decades, dramatically shaping homes in Greece, Turkey and Cyprus.
In 2024, the iconic brand turned 50 and approached Marlon Tate to create a celebratory campaign. Our intention was to celebrate the brand’s heritage of 50 years of style so to reflect this, we centred the campaign’s look around a “dynamic” logo system, featuring 50 kinetic logo-idents that reference different styles of furniture and interior design. To top it all up, we developed a month-long campaign that encompasses 200 unique print, digital and outdoor executions plus a limited edition of shopping bags and merch. ‘‘We really wanted to reference the brand’s unapologetic creative heritage by creating something that’s really off, but is also funny and superfluous’’ Marlon Tate’s creative Director, Nikos Georgópoulos, said to The Brand Identity earlier this year.
Isabella’s is a new bistrot restaurant that opened its doors in 2024 inside the premises of The Twenty One Hotel in Kifisia, Athens. Open exclusively for lunch, Isabella’s is inspired by the history of Kifisia and its Belle Époque while taking its name from Isabella; the original owner of the historic building.
To support its grand opening, Marlon Tate created a brand narrative and identity that references nostalgia and 1970s European luxury, love letters, postcards and ice-cream as if these were the restaurant’s ingredients. The identity is centred around a custom drawn logotype designed for use across all Isabella’s communications.
Vakalo College of Art and Design is the first school of Applied Arts in Greece to offer programmes of study at tertiary level. Founded in 1958, with a history of 65 successful years, it has established a reputation as the foremost design education institution in Greece, and among the top colleges internationally.
Marlon Tate’s Creative Director, Nikos Georgopoulos, started teaching at the iconic art School in late 2023. As a means to promote our collaboration with the Art School, we wrote, directed and produced a TikTok reel inspired surreal TV ad to celebrate the beautifully unexpected nature of creativity.
Marlon Tate is a new creative agency known for creating narrative-driven branding and advertising for exciting brands by combining fiction and surrealist storytelling. A small, yet prolific creative agency, our offices are based in Athens and London but we also claim to have two more; one in Jupiter and one in Mars as a humorous take on the myth of the massive ad agency with offices in ”New York-Milan-Shanghai’’. Our objective was to come up with a creative way to let journalists, clients and other agencies know who we are and what we do.
Our strategy was to create a press kit that would not only let people know who we are, but it would also expand on our metaphorical narrative that we are the first agency with offices in space while at the same time promoting Marlon Tate’s strong suite; storytelling. Essentially through this press kit, our objective was to highlight our talent, our creativity; our imaginative copywriting, our provocative art direction and the strategic abilities of our team. They say that the best way to tell a story is to immerse your audience in it and that is why we wanted our press kit to have an experiential aspect to it. So we decided to create a press kit that could have been posted from outer space.
We created vacuum-sealed space bags containing a newspaper with fictional news (that we wrote), fictional ads (that we made) for fictional products (that we wish they had existed).
Essentially, the press kit is a vacuum-sealed packaging that draws upon the food packaging NASA create’s for the astronauts who travel in outer space. Inside our vacuum-sealed press kit the recipient can find The New World Times; a fake newspaper featuring fictional news and fictional ads for fake products. By flicking through the newspaper, one can read the weather forecast in Mars, an interview with our very own creative director Nikos Georgopoulos on how does it feel to lead the first creative agency with offices in space as well as a series of articles such as the one about Rorry Ross (fictional character), the charismatic Chief Executive of Open Planet (fictional company) who teamed up with other Earthlings celebrities to launch a new hip brand of mood stabilisers called ‘Moondyz’ (fictional brand). The ambitious young editor of this article, expresses her enthusiasm and offers her congratulations to Mr Ross because ”… Moondyz are here to change everything we know about space travelling”. After all, as she notes, no matter how brilliant and rewarding the journey to the Moon is, it’s also really tough on the human body and overall mood. She also notes that it has been more than a few instances that she has missed on extraordinary performances at the ‘Galaxia Opera Centre’ (fictional concert hall on the Moon) or dinner reservations at the iconic ‘Loona’ (fictional fancy restaurant on the Moon) due to appalling mood drops caused by being inside a space rocket for 8 hours. Of course, the chances of this happening again, she claims, are near zero because of ‘Moondyz’ although she goes on to note that ‘Moondyz’ come with its fair share of side effects— most famously, the possibility of turning your hair electric blue (for at least five days)
Commercial developer Blue Residences is creating an ambitious residential complex, located in the ‘posh’ suburb of Marousi. Set around an incredible park and the most ambitious business district of Athens, this new place will offer a sophisticated collection of beautiful and spacious apartments, elegant living spaces, unique amenities, smart features and stunning views towards the city. Looking to encapsulate this ‘blissful’ take on contemporary living, we helped them name, brand and shape a bold and completely new idea, which we called ‘effortless living’.
By considering the above, we positioned this place as a flourishing community at the intersection of contemporary urban and suburban living. We created a brand narrative that highlights one simple truth: this is the ideal place to live. Our first step was to name this exciting place ‘Paradise Quarter’ to reflect its scale and strategic ambition. Our concept was to make everything look ‘paradesian’ and pop, aiming to resonate with the audience, consisting of young families and first-time buyers. Drawing upon visual language often associated with paradise, we constructed fluffy cloud messages to evoke the ‘paradesian’ feeling that naturally, effortless living would evoke. The campaign launched with a small plane flying around Athens with a banner featuring the tagline ‘Effortless living forever’, positioning Paradise Quarter exactly where it is meant to exist; in the sky. Following this guerrilla marketing stint, the number of people discussing it and documenting it on social media grew rapidly, leading to high numbers of people visiting the website and the marketing film that we created. One week later, we launched the print campaign in newspapers, OOO, as well as digital ads on websites and social, expanding on the narrative. We also designed and art directed the marketing brochure, hoarding, and pavilion filled with plants and water fountains.
Aiming to avoid the slick branding typical of new developments & smart living, every creative decision that we made, was carefully orchestrated around our narrative responding to a simple question – ‘how does it feel to live in Paradise?’.
There is a crack in everything and that’s how the future gets in. Located within the mainly residential area of Bromley-By-Bow in Hackney, East London, Jolles House is a historical building named after Sir John Jolles; a city of London merchant and a member of the Worshipful Company of Drapers, who was Sheriff of London from 1605 to 1606 and elected Lord Mayor of the City in 1615. As part of an ambitious redevelopment programme by Poplar Harca and Pollard Thomas Edwards architects, the estate will now become an ambitious landmark building providing 70 new residential units within two buildings for young professionals interested in culture and East London’s famously vibrant community. Ahead of its launch, Marlon Tate created a new place narrative, brand identity, a tile-based environmental graphic system and launch campaign for the redeveloped Estate.
Our strategy was informed by the City of London itself, highlighting the fact that in this globally celebrated capital, past, present and future coexist in the most extraordinary ways. Inspired by heritage, local vernacular, British typography and specificity of place, our brand identity, wayfinding and marketing campaign for the landmark building echoes London’s past and present by drawing upon the disrupted aesthetic of old and new layers of torn up posters. That’s probably how the future gets in anyway.
Ilior is Greece’s first major co-living scheme. Formed in 2018 by Daniel Lyssy, it aims to create exceptional spaces for young and creative professionals who work from home. Ilior One —launched in the centre of Athens— is the first of the brand’s instalments. Indeed, Ilior is in the process of building an ambitious network of plug-and-play spaces and buildings across the nation, that will radically transform the way Greeks live.
We were given creative freedom to brand this unique scheme. Similarly to other Mediterranean South European capitals, Athens is not very familiar with the concept of co-living. With this in mind, we decided to change the subject completely and position Ilior as an imaginary country.
Inspired by the notion that ‘our house is our castle’, we developed an overarching modular and flexible identity system that draws upon the idea of a ‘special place’. For this purpose, a responsive brandmark that references the concept of a flag becomes central to the identity. A flag of an imaginary country where people can dream freely; work collaboratively; debate fruitfully and develop. By drawing upon the flexible architecture of Ilior spaces, the brandmark expands and contracts across different formats, as required. To further illustrate its uniqueness, the colour palette embraces bright pop colours, that no country in the world would ever use for its national flag. This country is entirely imaginary. In fact, that is its strength. Welcome to the land of the dreamers.
Located at the start of the Athenian Riviera, in the heart of Piraeus Port, the biggest passenger port in Europe, the Piraeus Tower was originally built in 1972 with the ambition to become a landmark in an area which was, at that time, rapidly changing and developing into an international hub for shipping and transportation. However, after 1982, the project was abandoned, and the Tower remained empty for the next 50 years.
In 2020, real estate company Dimand in collaboration with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and Prodea Investments undertook the 99- year concession of the Piraeus Tower from the Municipality of Piraeus with a vision to restore the building into the landmark that was always meant to be. The Joint Venture appointed Marlon Tate as the creative agency to lead on the creative direction and strategy of the Piraeus Tower’s branding and advertising. Marlon Tate designed, art directed, and developed the official website of the Piraeus Tower, managing to attract the attention of investors, politicians as well as the local community. What is more, we wrote all texts and created the content for the entire responsive and modern website, including custom maps and interactive infographics designed to reflect the visual language that we created for the landmark building.
Once an industrial hub and the home to the biggest Kodak Factory outside the US (55 acres) for 125 years, this exciting new area in Harrow is London’s most exciting regeneration story. Named after George Eastman, the co-founder of Kodak in 1888, Eastman Village will be a vibrant new destination that will provide 2,000 homes, in addition to planned restaurants, cafés, shops and offices set around a landscaped park creating a new leisure, business and residential destination. The area will benefit from a new school, 3,000 new jobs and fast transport links to central London.
As part of the £1.75bn regeneration programme, Marlon Tate was invited to clarify, define and express the vision of this new area by creating a brand narrative, identity, and launch campaign. Our strategy was informed by the fact that during its peak, the Factory housed 6,000 workers who produced the famous Kodak film strips. Once the place that enabled us to capture our memories, now the place that will enable us to create our own. The new brand is anchored around a custom brandmark which references the original alignment guides on Kodak’s 35mm filmstrips. Central to the launch campaign was our slogan ‘making memories in Eastman Village’. We also designed the external wayfinding programme and we are anticipating its planning approval.
