In 2005, Fairholme Capital's Bruce Berkowitz (later awarded Morningstar’s prestigious Domestic Equity Fund Manager of the Decade, and Year) tasked Lanzara Studio with reconceptualizing and producing websites for Fairholme Capital and the Fairholme Fund, the success of which led to a fruitful and close 10+ year relationship that covered all aspects of Fairholme's creative marketing and branding. In addition to the early websites and subsequent iterations, we created a new logo and tagline, new corporate identity, and communicated Fairholme's value investing philosophy and tenets in terms that laypeople would understand and in which they would feel comfortable investing.
The first phase of our work, from 2005 through 2011, saw the Fairholme Fund’s assets increase stratospherically from a few hundred million dollars to over $20 billion, most of which was due to new investment inflows rather than capital gains. Though correlation does not necessarily equate to causation, and Fairholme's exceptional performance was the major draw, we believe our unorthodox, highly creative branding (at least for Wall St) and irreverent tone played a large part in cutting through Wall Street's staid image to build a cultish following of 500,000 investors who sought to "Ignore the crowd."
Over the years we have led or had a hand in hundreds of client-touchpoint projects related to Fairholme's branding, communication design, and creative marketing: prospectus design and production; corporate identity and stationery; private presentations in print and digital formats; design and development of Bruce Berkowitz's personal blog; print advertising; trade show booth design and production; investor relations communications to 500,000 shareholders; investment applications designs; concept and development of websites to promote specific investments; and oversaw third-party service administrators such as BNY Mellon on back-end design and development of client account interfaces - all to name just a few of hundreds of projects.
Lanzara Studio stands ready to help nascent financial firms and asset managers exceed their marketing goals. We can’t guarantee Fairholme’s success, but we’ll try.
Click images to open them, then move cursor to de/activate commentary
Fairholme entities AUM exceeded $20 billion at their 2011 peak