Rescue By Design

Partner Overview

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Rescue By Design’s goal is to create new, disruptive levels of visibility and aspiration for rescue dogs, through building a growing coalition of aligned, aspirational brands that bring rescue to their customers through products, stores, and stories. 

 

Dogs appear widely across products, retail, and branding.  But they are almost never explicitly represented as rescues.  (They are usually, either explicitly or implicitly, presented as purebreds - which themselves can be rescues, but the presentations do not typically make that connection). 

 

Rescue By Design partnerships are aimed at introducing beautiful, aspirational products, supported by imagery and storytelling, into brand presentations - artfully and explicitly as rescues.  Not as a message, but as a design and narrative decision.

 

Brands have reach and visibility that the rescue system does not.  Through products and distribution, they shape what is seen repeatedly —and what becomes familiar, desirable, and chosen.  If aligned brands create both visibility and desirability around rescue, the impact can be transformative.

 

For partner brands, this is not charity, but rather, a new opportunity: a way to engage customers and to introduce products that carry meaning, that are aligned with the core brand tenets and that extend and build on them.  A way to deepen brand equity, explore new adjacencies, and be in an active conversation with customers.

 

There is no single model for participation. Projects might take the form of new products, adaptations of existing designs, limited releases, or capsule collections. A single product, with a story and messaging, can be a vivid marker.  But concurrently, if the customer responds, it can evolve into a broader opportunity.  

 

Our idea is that it is possible to build interesting, surprising, engaging products and stories that, for the right brands, evoke, evolve, and emphasize their core values.  The idea isn’t pure symbolism - it’s functionality and true alignment.  A customer should, encountering the product, think both: “this is a surprise,” and concurrently, “this makes perfect sense.”

 

We anticipate working with partners on product and story ideas.  Our overtures are to brands where we feel there is a tangible opportunity to draw on core brand DNA and create a compelling, unique proposition.

 

We plan gentle co-branding on these products, with a hang tag, logo, and careful messaging.  Customers will see that it is a collaboration.  They will read a tasteful, aspirational rescue message (not driven by the charity and/or urgency that are typically associated with rescue messaging) that is aligned with the brand.  They will thus encounter rescue through their allegiance to the brand and attraction to the product. 

 

And in purchasing it they will also feel that they are becoming part of something:  affirming their own values.  Ideally they will be motivated to tell their friends and colleagues and thus will become net promoters for rescue. 

 

The long-term intent in these partnerships is not to end with single successful product collaboration.  Rather, it’s to build, with coalition partners, a visible, expanding, repeating presence - a new part of the brand DNA.  Over time, this creates new brand opportunities while also making rescue culturally familiar.

 

This can lead to truly transformative change in the rescue arena: visibility beyond what rescue organizations can achieve, and a reframing: rescue as aspiration.

 

Rescue By Design partner brands can further leverage their participation: providing links on web sites; providing local materials in stores.  We again will enthusiastically help brands build collateral materials as deep and strong as they wish to support.  

 

We are seeking to develop a small number of first collaborations in 2026, to demonstrate the potential for brands to reframe rescue, engage with their customers, and ultimately, spur a new cohort of rescuers.  We are reaching out to a few brands that we know and respect, whose DNA seems to us to be potentially deeply aligned - and, by extension, whose customer is also, and thus, we think, is likely to be intrigued, moved, and activated.  

 

Our promise to partners is to be effective collaborators - and to be concerned with the science as well as the art.  Having spent more than a quarter-century in brand and retail businesses, we know the importance of execution.  We not only want to help create inspiring products and stories: we want the process to be efficient, effective, and profitable for partner brands.  That represents true success: not only enhancing rescue awareness and aspiration, but concurrently creating value for our partners.  That in turn will provide critical evidence needed to continue to build an expanding brand coalition and drive ever greater awareness.

 

We are enthused to hold exploratory conversations with brands that feel aligned with this vision.  Please message the studio here.