An Emotive Founding Story
Emotive Brand began with a belief: the brands that make you feel are the ones that move you.
That belief came from experience. When Tracy Lloyd and Bella Banbury started Emotive in 2009, they had already seen how differently people responded when a brand reached them emotionally, and how often emotion was treated as secondary to the supposedly more serious work of strategy.
They saw it differently.
Emotive’s first home was more warehouse than studio, complete with broken glass, no heat, and a single bathroom that was also somehow the kitchen. Yet executives from some of the world’s most iconic brands kept coming back. The work mattered, of course. But so did the experience of doing it together.
Tracy and Bella brought the same thinking to both client work and how we work with one another. They wanted to understand what a company really stood for, define how it should make people feel, and carry that feeling through everything the brand did. And they wanted working with Emotive to feel different, too.
That meant incredible preparation and attention to the smallest details, along with the occasional mid-meeting tequila shot. Clients arriving on the ferry might find Tracy or Bella waiting with Blue Bottle coffee in hand.
The belief at the heart of Emotive has endured. Our understanding of it has become much richer and more precise.
Seventeen years of working alongside ambitious companies have taught us that emotion is most powerful when it gives force to something real. Every company has convictions behind what it is building, the choices it makes, and why its work matters. But those truths don’t automatically travel beyond the people who already know the company well. They have to become recognizable to people on the outside.
That is where emotion does its real work.
Today, Emotive fuses Conviction and Emotional Impact at the foundation of the brand, so what a company knows to be true can become something other people recognize, believe, and value. It’s a more rigorous expression of the instinct Tracy and Bella started with in 2009: truth has greater power when people can feel it.
The agency has evolved around that idea. Strategists, designers, writers, and makers have each brought their own perspective to the work, sharpening the thinking and expanding what Emotive can do. The companies we work with have evolved, too. Today, we partner with product-proven B2B technology and AI companies approaching moments when how the market understands them can have real consequences for what happens next.
Through that evolution, some things have remained remarkably consistent. Emotive is still independent and founder-led. Tracy and Bella remain close to the work and deeply accountable to the people who trust us with it. Curiosity still runs deep, details still matter, and the relationship between Emotive and its clients remains intensely collaborative.
What started in that improbable warehouse has become a clearer conviction about the role a brand can play at the most important moments in a company’s life.
Find what is true. Give it emotional force. Make it felt.
“Tracy is fearless and so unique—she becomes the CEO Whisperer, with a way of telling them what everybody else is too scared to say. She can deliver truth to people who are often shielded from it. She does it from a place of strength and a foundation of having done the work, but once she breaks through, trust is earned and the relationship is locked in. Amazing.”
–Bella“Bella is the glue that keeps it all together at Emotive Brand. From the day she put on the CEO hat, she made shit happen. We all know there would be no Emotive Brand without her because she figures out the hard stuff, enabling every single one of us to deliver easier and faster. She’s operationalized how we work so we can do better work for our clients. As her partner in crime and co-founder, I feel like with her beside me, there’s nothing we can’t do together.”
–Tracy
Fin.
