The Creation and Success of BRNDHAUS PL-ZEN™ with Heather Knapp
Sep. 2026 - Little Black Book
As GERTRUDE, OZ MFG COMPANY, RAYE and The BRNDHAUS PL-ZEN™’s operations and account management front line, Heather Knapp brings 25 years of brand guidance and strategic business leadership, backed by expertise in nurturing relationships, maximising budgets, developing strategic plans, and applying a comprehensive understanding of consumer behaviour and media to craft insightful, seamlessly executed campaigns.
Her top-notch brand experience includes AB InBev, Absolut Vodka, The Coca-Cola Company, DIAGEO, Disney, Fisher-Price, Gillette, Google, The Hershey Company, J&J Snack Foods, Kellogg’s, Mars Wrigley, Mattel, MillerCoors, PepsiCo, Procter & Gamble, Red Bull, Red Tree Beverages, and Singha Beer.
Heather’s extensive career spans advertising, strategy, positioning, brand identity, new product development, content, experiential, and promotion.
Heather holds a B.A., Magna Cum Laude, from Colgate University in Art and Art History, and a minor concentration in Sociology and Anthropology. She also studied at the Zambler Institute, Venice, Italy.
Heather sat down with LBB to discuss how her team has successfully leveraged the ‘BRNDHAUS’ for all aspects of brand and advertising development.
The Problem
Building a brand is hard. Creating an entirely new brand, including positioning, market fit, brand design, packaging and advertising from scratch, is even harder. But these are the tough tasks that we love to tackle at GERTRUDE.
We are a 20 plus year independent brand innovation agency that works with Fortune 500 brands, across all categories, to incubate brands and grow with them on their road to becoming category leaders. One of the problems that we identified early on was that very few brands are able to grow over time with a consistent slate of agency partners because very few agencies have the in-house capabilities to be stewards of a brand along the full journey.
This leads to a constant cycle of agency onboarding, key knowledge loss, inconsistent branding and design use and procurement’s worst nightmare – agency sprawl.
What We Made
We set out to change this. To help our clients address these problems, we developed THE BRNDHAUS PL-ZEN™, a global brand innovation and content factory dedicated to the development, consumer co-creation, incubation, and activation of brands all under one roof in GERTRUDE’s 35,000 square foot Chicago headquarters. The ‘BRNDHAUS’ also provides GERTRUDE an ideal production space, and has been utilised to produce photoshoots, broadcast, TV shows, corporate meetings, fabrications, and experiential environments.
THE BRNDHAUS PL-ZEN™ is governed by four simple principles:
- Clarity over complexity – write it in plain language, not jargon.
- Involve creatives early – pressure-test the strategy with the people who will bring it to life.
- Stress test for longevity – will this foundation still make sense in five years?
- Revisit and refine – not constantly, but intentionally, as the brand grows
Ideation and Inspiration
THE BRNDHAUS PL-ZEN™ is inspired by the highly influential modernist Bauhaus movement and school of the 20th century, whose dedication to experimentation and approach to understanding art’s relationship to society and technology made an enduring impact globally.
The GERTRUDE team embraces these same sensibilities to deliver innovative strategies, solutions and creative to their growing roster of clients, including: AB InBev, The Coca-Cola Company’s alcoholic beverage subsidiary – Red Tree Beverages, DIAGEO (Ketel One Vodka, Guinness), Fisher-Price, The Hershey Company, Mars Wrigley, Mattel, Inc., Minute Maid Spiked, PepsiCo, Quaker (Near East, Rice-A-Roni), Red Bull, Singha Beer, and Smoothie King, to name a few.
It’s a roster aligned with our agency’s strategy-and-innovation-forward expertise and entrepreneurial spirit.
Outcomes
We pride ourselves on not just delivering exceptional creative but also the outcomes that drive business success. We have successfully leveraged the ‘BRNDHAUS’ for all aspects of brand and advertising development, and our clients saw the impact.
- New Product Launch: Smoothie King Bowls and Home Delivery for Smoothie King campaign content. One million bowls sold in just six weeks.
- Social Content: Minute Maid Spiked's entire year of social content was captured and edited. 2.5M organic views and counting.
- Experiential Pop-Up: Designed and fabricated the Rice-A-Roni Trolley, activated for a U.S. tour, in six markets; four new products launched; $150,000 samples.
- Brand Photography: Annabelle Candy Company product launch assets.
- TV spots: Maker's Mark ‘Remarkable Meet Remarkable'.
While built exclusively for GERTUDE’s brand clients, another interesting use case emerged due to the design, location and capabilities of THE BRNDHAUS PL-ZEN™. A few prominent Chicago-based TV shows, including ‘Chicago P.D.’, ‘Chicago Fire’ and ‘Love is Blind’, used the interior and exterior as location shoots.
We believe that investing in a unifying physical space where brands, strategists, agency creatives, production companies, consumers and talent can all come together in service or our clients was one of the best decisions we made in our 20-plus year history.
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