BONE is a committee, a collective, a business co-op, a consulting firm — actually all of the above. Seven men with diverse experience and talent in marketing, finance, advertising, photography, IT systems, graphic design, and a few more skills are partners in BONE.
The guys involved are Tarek Adam, Jason Dauphinee, Rod Grainger, John Kuehne, Hugh Ruthven, Brad Simpson, and Shon Taylor, and they gather in an eclectic office on the top floor of the Duck’s building on Broad Street.
“It’s a varied interdisciplinary group,” says Adam. No kidding.
Ruthven was director of marketing for McDonald’s for eight years and had worked at DDB agency in Vancouver, while Grainger spent a dozen years at JWT and Ogilvy Mather ad agencies. He came to Victoria in 2002, when he joined Silk Questo’s agency, Malahat Group.
Ruthven and Dauphinee were also at Malahat, which closed last year.
Kuehne, an accountant with Canadian and U.S. designation as well as an MBA, had worked for eight years helping small public companies. Simpson has a background in finance and worked at RBC managing investments and is now doing work with a financial services company in Toronto. Adam is the information technology specialist and software developer, and Taylor a photographer and designer for the last 14 years in Victoria. They partner up as skills are needed for different projects.
A sampling of BONE’s work includes campaigns for United Way, Island FX, Vic’s Steakhouse, and Industrial Plastics, and it is agency of record for Lorandus, a Toronto meeting, incentive travel, and communications planning company. It’s also helping an industrial equipment supplier compete and improve how it talks to customers, and Simpson and Adam are working on a “document system that gets your employees excited.”
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Simpson describes their collaborative work as “bringing together the many pieces that make a business grow.”
As for the agency’s name, for Grainger, it denotes, “there is no fat.” It stands for bare bones, strength, and honesty, Ruthven says. See www.bonecreative.com
Check out some of our other 2010 10 to Watch winners:
AdrenaLINE | Vibes Fitness | Shaw Ocean Discovery Centre | AJ’s Organic Catering | Base Lounge | Victoria Executive Centre | Lúz Gallery | MD Esthetics | BONE | FOO
