BSLLC is a branding, strategy, and design firm focused on helping your business look and perform better.
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About
BS LLC—a Cincinnati Branding Agency
BS LLC is a nimble team of research-focused creatives driven to build more effective brands with strategy and intention. We specialize in working with brands experiencing transition or evolution—adept at helping brands rediscover their essence and build corresponding systems to stimulate growth, attract talent, and improve culture. BS LLC possesses the energy, intelligence, and determination to run with our clients towards an unstoppable future. Founded in Cincinnati, OH in 2014 by partners, Ben Greenberg and Sebastien Hue, BS has grown into a full-service agency, with competencies across market research and brand strategy, visual design, communications, and production management.
Our approach to client work is hands-on and organizationally focused. We have seen firsthand the damage that disorganized projects, lagging timelines, and unfocused strategy can have on businesses and institutions. As such, we set out to create systems, processes, and tools to ensure creative projects are as effective as possible, leaving little to chance. The clients with whom we’ve worked continue to do business with us again and again because of our diligent adherence to timelines and budgets as well as our constant pursuit of strategic excellence and creativity.
Our Team

Ben Greenberg
Partner
As co-founder, strategist, and lead copywriter at BS LLC, Ben helps turn insights into deliverables. Ben is both a student and practitioner of human-centered design. For close to a decade, he has helped nonprofits, businesses, and institutions create strategies for growth based on internal reflection, external research, and creative problem-solving. Born and raised in Cincinnati, Ben holds a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania and a J.D. from Northern Kentucky University’s Salmon P. Chase College of Law. He is a member of the board of directors at the Mercantile Library, Breakthrough Cincinnati, and MORTAR.
Listening To
The Grateful Dead
The Grateful Dead
Amazed By
Gravity, Clouds, and the way people drive in the state of Massachusetts
Gravity, Clouds, and the way people drive in the state of Massachusetts
Reading
The Comments Section
The Comments Section
Looking At
The paintings of David Hockney and Arshile Gorky
The paintings of David Hockney and Arshile Gorky

Sebastien Hue
Partner
As lead strategist & creative director of BS LLC, Sebastien Hue translates client goals into achievements. Born in Kentucky, he went on to study Linguistics & International Relations before earning an MBA from ESCP Business School. He is certified in Disruptive Theory by Harvard Business School. During his studies, he spent nights and weekends working in some of the world’s best kitchens in Chicago & Paris, including Taillevant, Lasserre, Charlie Trotters, Blackbird Restaurant, Le Francais, and L’Escargot Montorgueil.
With international experience in technology & business consulting, he went on to serve as the creative director at Boca Restaurant Group advancing them from 50 to 650 employees and a multi-city footprint before joining paths with Ben and opening BS LLC where he oversees creative direction and strategy. He is a board member at the Cincinnati Opera and Cincinnati Memorial Hall Society.
Listening To
After the Fall, Keith Jarrett • Sugaregg, Bully • Kiwi Jr., Football Money • Soundway Presents Columbia! • Donna Summers, Bad Girls
After the Fall, Keith Jarrett • Sugaregg, Bully • Kiwi Jr., Football Money • Soundway Presents Columbia! • Donna Summers, Bad Girls
Amazed By
Cedric Grolet's Wild & Beautiful Pastry
Cedric Grolet's Wild & Beautiful Pastry
Reading
Swann's Way, Marcel Prout • Why Facts Don't Change Our Mind, Elizabeth Kolbert (New Yorker) • Time of Magicians, the Invention of Modern Thought, Wolfram Eilenburger • How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
Swann's Way, Marcel Prout • Why Facts Don't Change Our Mind, Elizabeth Kolbert (New Yorker) • Time of Magicians, the Invention of Modern Thought, Wolfram Eilenburger • How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
Looking At

Sam Lowe
Research and Strategy Analyst
Graphic designer, copywriter, adjunct professor, photographer, executive creative director, adult continuing education instructor, strategist — Sam has contributed to numerous agencies serving a diverse range of roles for at least two lifetimes worth of national and global B2B and consumer clients. Simplifying complex, multi-stakeholder environments are his specialty, providing clarity and human behavioral insight to creative and business-building endeavors.
Listening To
Maria McKee, Gustav Mahler, Talk Talk, Siouxsie and the Banshees, anything by Chopin
Maria McKee, Gustav Mahler, Talk Talk, Siouxsie and the Banshees, anything by Chopin
Amazed By
The meditations of Rupert Spira
The meditations of Rupert Spira
Reading
The Upanishads
The Upanishads
Looking At
The fluid yet functional design lines of Pinarello and Ducati
The fluid yet functional design lines of Pinarello and Ducati

Liam O’Connell
Senior Designer
Liam is a Designer with BS LLC. Liam graduated from Northern Kentucky University with a BFA in Visual Communication Design. He has spent the last 8 years as a visual creative with competencies in photography, communication design, typographic design, and ux design. Born and raised in Louisville, KY, Liam now lives in Covington with his wife, Chelsey. Liam enjoys traveling, visiting art museums, and live music.
Listening To
Music, NPR, and Podcasts.
Music, NPR, and Podcasts.
Amazed By
Space
Space
Reading
Technology & Design Blogs
Technology & Design Blogs
Looking At
Photography, Artworks, Architecture.
Photography, Artworks, Architecture.

Hannah Tucker
Design and Development
Hannah is a designer/developer at BS LLC focusing on website development. She graduated from the University of Cincinnati with a Bachelor’s in Interior Design and a minor in Fashion Design Studies. During her studies, she lived in Seattle, New York, and Detroit working on branded experiences and events.
She currently lives in Cincinnati with her boyfriend and their dog, Pancake. She loves gardening, reading, and visiting local coffee shops.
Listening To
Lorde – Solar Power, Goth Babe – Car Camping, Van Morrison – Into the Mystic, too many true crime podcasts
Lorde – Solar Power, Goth Babe – Car Camping, Van Morrison – Into the Mystic, too many true crime podcasts
Amazed By
Unintentional art – light refractions, color, and shadows in space
Unintentional art – light refractions, color, and shadows in space
Reading
Miami Rising – Taylor Jenkins Reid, Humans of New York Stories
Miami Rising – Taylor Jenkins Reid, Humans of New York Stories
Looking At
Iris van Herpen – Earthrise
Iris van Herpen – Earthrise
Services
“Doubt can exist only where a question exists, a question only where an answer exists, and an answer only where something can be said. ”
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Brand Identity Design
Strong corporate identity design—the process of creating a visual identity for a product, service, or institution through graphic design—combines purposeful and research-driven brand positioning strategy with timeless aesthetic vision. The most iconic and long-lasting brands exist because a group of people dedicated themselves to the practice of discovering a product, service, or institution’s fundamental purpose and representing that purpose through shapes, colors, and words.
Brand Naming
Brand names and product names must serve many masters—the URL, the SEO, the feelings and associations, the sound, the shape of the letters, and the list goes on. The process of developing and selecting brand names and product names can be draining and demoralizing—you think you’ve landed on something perfect, something that captures exactly what you want people to think and feel, plus it looks beautiful in chunky sans-serif text. But then you turn to Google and find out someone has beat you to the punch.
Brand Positioning
Our brand-building process begins with positioning. Brand positioning is the process of understanding how your brand fits into the ecosystem of competitors, stakeholders, and customers. It is the act of creating a brand that occupies a unique and different space in the market, while still communicating the inherent benefits of the product or service. Positioning is essential to the process of creating a brand imbued with purpose and built to last and grow.
Brand Strategy
A great brand strategy is the process of understanding where a brand has been, its current market position and its long-term goals. From it, we can plot a course to achieve future goals based on a deep understanding of how its products or services solve problems for customers and what moves those customers to make decisions.
Branding
Branding is the act of defining and refining the essence or identity of a business, product, service, or institution—it is creating that which comes to represent the totality of experiences and associations with a product or service. Some believe that branding is a promise you make to your customer. We believe this to be a shallow interpretation, as branding encompasses the promise as well as how, when, and why you make the promise. More broadly, a brand is the voice, heart, mind, and style of a business.
Business Strategy
From a top-level, our approach to business strategy begins with research. We define how you currently generate revenue, what problems you solve for your customers, and why they choose you over your competitors (competitive advantage). These fundamental components of business help us align strategic endeavors with branding, marketing, sales, and HR. Together, they produce quantifiable results, including differentiation and growth.
Copywriting
The problem with copy is that almost everyone in the business world can write, and so they think copy is easy, intern-work, get someone to do it, and don’t fret about it. We wish you the best of luck.
Graphic Design Services
Graphic design has never been more accessible than at the present moment. Our culture has become increasingly visual. More and more, we communicate with and through images. For BS, graphic design is more than a tool for communicating ideas, it is the visual representation of brand identity. To us, designing an identity for a brand is a human process.
Hospitality Branding
BS LLC has over 30 years of collective hospitality experience, including opening 12 restaurants and helping to garner prized industry awards from Mobil 4 Star to James Beard, from Best Restaurant in Ohio to Best New Restaurant, and more. Learn more about our work.
Market Research
Market research is the process of analyzing the viability of a product or service through quantitative and qualitative analysis. The goal of this research is to determine or discover a target market, brand position, and marketing niche position. The positioning informs brand strategy & business strategy and lays the foundation to build a marketing strategy. At large, conducting market research increases your chances of success. It outlines opportunities allowing leaders to make better use of resources & processes while mitigating risks. Market research operates on two primary modes of analysis—quantitative and qualitative. These distinct disciplines are deeper and richer when studied together, however, they can operate in silos. In a way, quantitative and qualitative offer a philosophical dialectic: together they pursue the truth about opportunities. Quantitative research is analytical, correlative, and focused on data. Qualitative is human and causal.
Marketing
BS LLC is a Cincinnati marketing firm with expertise in strategic marketing and digital marketing. We work on campaigns but specialize as an outsourced marketing department for small to mid-sized companies. Our growth mindset helps turn insights into action and action into data-driven performance.
Outsourced marketing departments offer a strong value proposition. Internal teams with senior talent, content developers, engineers, analysts are expensive and complex to manage. We’re here to help reduce marketing department costs by 70+%
With 20+ years of experience in marketing strategy and strategic planning, we are able to support your company’s growth and campaign objectives. Our work is defined by transparent planning, objective alignment, metric measurement, and unique flexibility to focus on both short and long-term strategies. Our team’s capacity also reaches beyond traditional marketing to business strategy, brand strategy, branding, design, public relations, and more.
Marketing Strategy
BS LLC helps firms develop marketing strategies to build brand equity and to promote the sales of your products or services.
How do you build a marketing strategy? You begin with the research product /service, the customer, and the marketplace. These research processes are essential to the development of brand strategy & business strategy, the tools that help define your position and identity.
SEO: Search Engine Optimization
How do people find what they need to find online? Well, it begins with a search index such as Google, Bing, and others. Users input questions, keywords, or they talk to their phones and the index scurries off to find information that is highly relevant to their request. SEO is the practice of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic through organic search. SEO is essential to a website’s success as a marketing tool. The most successful SEO-attuned websites require a thoughtful taxonomy that allows its content to be highly digestible by search indices.
Website Design Service
Simple, elegant, unique. Our goal is to create business and institutional websites that provide potential customers the emotional satisfaction and functional understanding necessary to convert leads into customers.
Hospitality Branding
The BS LLC team has opened 15 restaurants. With deep expertise in restaurant operations and design, we are an ideal fit to help bring culinary dreams to life.
Our solutions-based development process has helped build award-winning restaurants from concept to completion, including advising on technical culinary and operational development.
Our Clients
4EG
84.51°
Arcadia Towers
Birdie’s Links & Drinks
Bluecoat Gin
Boca Management
Brownell Travel
CAI Software
Chavez Properties
Cincinnati Squash Academy
Cincy Nice
Cintrifuse
Core Resources
Dear Restaurant & Butchery
Decibel Chicken
Dell’Aria Cafe
Design Lab
Downtek
Driehaus Insurance Group
El Camino
Empower Manufacturing
Fast Park
Goose & Elder
Hart & Cru
Hotel California
Joey
Kelly Shiels Interiors
Kroger
Luceque
Luxury Car Care
Merchants Club
MG Media
Morsco AEC
New Leaf Murals
Ocho Tequila
Quanta
Realm Magazine
Sacred Society
Steriflow
Tapp by HeyBrands
The Alto by Uptown Rentals
The Famous Group
The Literary Club
Workforce Innovations Center
Testimonials
Third-Party Testimonials