With hundreds of innovative brand projects under her lead in 20 years of Eastern rock’n’roll, Aneta advocates branding and design as business and reputation tools, creating and revitalizing entrepreneurial, corporate and institutional brands in emerging environments. Her forte is finding patterns where others see chaos, which comes in handy when clients pop up with unsolvable problems. She is never average: cynical and idealistic, authoritarian and inspirational, a fresh, break-the-rules storyteller with a speculative and passionate discourse.

Aneta Bogdan attributes her achievements to a strong intuition, a relentless drive to move things forward and to having been raised in an emerging environment. This may sound deceivingly simple from someone with a rock solid academic and professional credentials and an extensive marketing experience. She graduated Economics at ASE Bucharest and holds an MBA from Open University Business School (UK). In recognition of her contribution to the marketing profession, she is a Chartered Marketer and a Fellow of The Chartered Institute of Marketing (UK).

Aneta founded Brandient in 2002, following an accomplished career of over 10 years in marketing, most notably as Marketing and Communication Director for Connex (subsequently acquired by Vodafone), where she contributed to building one of the most admired and valuable brands in Eastern Europe.

Aneta is writing in professional and business magazines and, in 2010, published the best selling book Branding on the Eastern Front (in Romanian); she is a highly-regarded conference and seminar speaker and juror of national and international design, branding, advertising and PR competitions.

Mihai Bogdan is a founding partner of Brandient and member of the managing team. He is in charge with business development and with the entire financial and administrative standing of the firm.

He had achieved expertise in finance and business administration by having previously spent over ten years in top finance positions with multinationals like Tetra Pak, Reckitt Benckiser and JTI, in different industries in South Eastern Europe and Sweden.

Mihai has a degree in Economics from ASE Bucharest and holds an MBA from Henley Business School (formerly Henley Management College) in the UK, with a thesis on Value and Valuation in Business. He is also a chartered accountant and a chartered valuator in Romania.

With a broad understanding of the business processes and a particular interest in intellectual property and valuation of intangibles, Mihai brought us not only finance acumen, but also strong insights about how to recognize and build brand value. In that respect, he worked out the proprietary tool Brand Stamina™ for our brand audit process.

Like any decent accountant, he is very reluctant to disclose his private hobbies, but he maintains there is nothing illegal, immoral or fattening. Or too much fun either.

Irina Ilie is managing the liaison and the relationship with our clients and as such is overseeing most of the project management activities. Not many would measure up to this task, given the complexity, variation and lack of easily manageable patterns in our branding projects. Moreover, branding is a visceral matter for the brand owners, so it takes all the empathy you can get to push through a new brand or a brand change. Irina is a natural in that respect.

However, her serenity has been built up on her humanistic education and polished by her extensive experience in the dog-eat-dog advertising world. Irina graduated the Faculty of Journalism and Communication Sciences at the University of Bucharest and she started to intern for advertising agencies as a student. Consequently, she spent 12 years with the big advertising names in Romania—such as Ogilvy&Mather, McCann-Erickson, D'Arcy DMB&B, TBWA/Merlin and Tempo Advertising—and managed countless advertising accounts, from the likes of Nestle and Coca-Cola to emerging local brands. That included managing global accounts, e.g for Azimut-Benetti.

Over the past four years at Brandient, Irina has found the perfect place to put her education, experience and personality to work. Much to our happiness, and to our clients'.

Our youngest Senior Designer, Ciprian knew what he wanted to do with his life from early childhood. With his father a painter and his older brother a church painter, Ciprian learned to draw, paint and talk in this particular order.

Naturally, he followed through an art education, by attending the Arts High School and subsequently graduating the Design and Decorative Arts College at the University of the Arts “George Enescu” in Iaşi.

After a few good years as art director in advertising agencies in Bucharest—and a Silver Effie as a memento—he joined Brandient in 2008 as Designer and has contributed to many award-winning identity projects.

Over the past decade, he displayed his paintings, graphics and etchings at several art exhibitions. Another proof that Ciprian is amongst the happy few that do not have to think about quitting their day job in order to pursue a passion.