CASE STUDY: SONUS CURATED EXPERIENCES
Project Details
Client: SONUS Curated Experiences
Industry: Events, Entertainment & Brand Activations
Strategic Rollout Partner: Francois Haylett, Haylett & Co
Logo Design: Kevin Du Plessis
Project Duration: March 2026 – May 2026
Summary
This case study details the end-to-end strategic pivot of Stellar Productions into SONUS Curated Experiences. Over an intensive three-month sprint, the business was repositioned from LGBTQ+ production house into a premium, enterprise-facing experiential agency.
The project required a coordinated effort between the design partners and copywriters within a short rollout and implementation deadline.
By designing a dual-brand messaging architecture, authoring comprehensive content style guides, formalising a joint venture offering with the Strategic Rollout Partner, Haylett & Co, and building a centralised marketing system, this project successfully merged raw creative vision with enterprise-level operational scale.
Scope
Brand Strategy
Video Production
Copywriting Style Guides
Newsletters, Web Development
Rebranded Stationary
Brochures
Pitch Presentations
Marketing Operations
The Challenge
While originally highly successful within Cape Town’s queer cultural landscape, the legacy brand faced critical growth ceilings:
Brand Identity Disconnect: The name "Stellar Productions" failed to convey the brand’s revised high-end, luxury, corporate event curation. Beyond the name, the brand needed a LinkedIn and professional website matching their high-end corporate audience. The brand’s history as a nightlife promoter needed to elevate to a production partner for corporate clients, without alienating their existing audience in the process.
Market Expansion: Moving from niche community audiences to corporate clients seeking internal marketing, culture activations, and brand launch events. The strategic partnership between experiential production and design lacked formal packages and a differentiating brand image.
Brand Collateral Fragmentation: There was a need to centralise the images and design assets in a shared space. This also included a directory for the stable of performers. Initially, each event/campaign required starting from scratch and resharing material for each brief.
Underutilized Audience Base: The social media followers and contact list of previous ticket buyers needed to be nurtured and grown to become familiar with the new brand vision and offering.
The New Name
The name SONUS—derived directly from the Latin word for sound, noise, or pitch, was chosen to anchor the brand in the realm of immersive, multi-sensory curation. By shifting the linguistic focus to “Curated Experiences”, the name signals an agency that doesn't just manage event setups, but masterfully orchestrates the emotional and theatrical pulse of a space. This identity provides a sophisticated, premium umbrella that unifies high-budget corporate brand activations with an electric, bass-driven nightlife energy.
Brand Assets
The rebrand required building a cohesive marketing presence across digital platforms, print collateral, and client-facing materials, with every asset reinforcing SONUS's identity as a curated, high-touch experience partner.
Design & Brand Collateral
Rate Cards
Letterhead
Email Signature
Business Cards
Web & Digital Presence
LinkedIn Corporate Page — official company profile for B2B visibility
Home Page Website Development — design and copywriting
Performer Bio Pages — individual performer page on the website
Event Sales Pages – branded pages with on site ticket purchasing
Linktree — centralised link hub for social and booking access
Brochures & Pitch Presentations
Performer Bio Brochures — professionally packaged performer profiles
Event Pitch Presentations — focused offering to sell the idea of the event to venues
Video Interview with the Founder
We conceptualized, written, and directed an internal video interview featuring the founder. The creative direction strategy was designed to leverage the founder’s expertise as social capital by focusing on four strategic narratives:
Professional background and personal drivers.
The business logic behind premium curated events.
Transparent, professional workflows with artists and venue partners.
Long-term preservation and elevation of South Africa’s queer cultural spaces.
Brand Strategy Ecosystem
To handle high-budget corporate accounts, we formalised the marketing operations, transforming an unstructured approach into a multi-tiered, actionable and trackable digital engine on a customised project management system. Some of the key architecture elements includes:
Campaign Management: The system operates at both event level and campaign level, by filtering roll out collateral by campaign initiative.
Brand Documentation / Knowledge Base: A self-sustaining source of truth for AI and staff to refer back to in terms of style guides, brand strategy and links to important shared files and spaces.
Event Briefing Form: A branded intake form incorporated into the system that standardises and expedites how design requests are captured and actioned. Rather than relying on ad hoc Whatsapp messages or scattered briefs, the form guides collaborators through a structured set of fields.
Cross-Board Relations: Implemented relational databases linking the newly compiled Performers Directory to Active Events. This allowed mapping performers to individual projects and keeping an ever growing bank of images right at hand when briefing and designing.
Streamlined Status Workflows: Highly visible, action-oriented timelines to keep cross-organizational updates quick and simple.
Automated Onboarding: Built a 9-step employee onboarding process to get new hires briefed on the visual style, brand strategy and training on the project management system.
Results
Strategic & Brand Identity Transformation
Elevation of Brand Equity
The successfully repositioned core identity of the brand evolved from solely a production house, to a high-end corporate curation This cemented the value proposition through cohesive storytelling and a refined, professional image.
Formalization of Brand Assets
The B2B pitch materials and rate cards were upgraded to ensure consistent, high-impact touchpoints that assures clients of the brand’s reliability, professionalism, and creative excellence.
Talent Marketability
Artist brochures were designed to increase their hireability for premium projects..
Corporate Credibility
By establishing a unified, enterprise-grade brand presence, the balance between niche cultural authenticity and the reliability required by high-end corporate clients was maintained. This significantly lowered the barrier to entry for large-scale, premium activations.
Client Experience
Unified, High-Impact Brand Assets
By redesigning and standardising all B2B touchpoints, a cohesive, high-impact brand presence was developed that commands attention. The client journey from initial pitch to final execution has provided their B2B partners with a seamless experience that matched their brand promise through project roll out professional design.
Audience-Centric Brand Resonance
The revised value proposition is now communicated clearly and consistently through design and messaging. It resonates across both legacy community followers as well as corporate stakeholders, ensuring that brand expansion is inclusive rather than alienating.
Operational Ecosystem & Partner Workflow
Scalable Operational Framework
Long-term scalability was ensured by freeing up time spent on oversight by the founder to focus on strategy and less on project management.
Streamlined Partner Collaboration
Established a total creative package offering with standardized briefing forms and content planning, reducing friction and lead times.
