Combo breaks its silence: The quiet agency behind cult brands turns 10

After a decade of flying under the radar, the design studio behind Saie Beauty, Away and The Nue Co. is finally stepping into the spotlight. In an exclusive interview, Abbey Bamford speaks with Combo’s founders about building trust, resisting trends, and redefining what a creative partnership truly means.

At the corner of Grand and Mulberry in New York’s Chinatown, there’s a space that doesn’t quite behave like an agency. There’s a retail showroom, a library of vintage fashion catalogues, and upstairs, there’s a team that has spent the last decade quietly shaping some of the most culturally resonant brands in beauty, wellness, and travel.

This is Combo – the design and branding studio behind Saie Beauty, The Nue Co., Away, and Gap’s recent rebrand – and, until now, one of the industry’s best-kept secrets.

Founded in 2014 by former Mother creatives Brennan McGrath and Kapono Chung, Combo has deliberately resisted the hype cycle for most of its life. Its four partners now include Phil Graham and Greg Matson, alongside Brennan and Kapono.

“Big things take time,” says Brennan. “It’s easy to come out of the gate and make promises you don’t intend to keep, but it’s quite hard to build something that means something – to clients, to the industry, and our team.”

That ‘something’ has been a slow-burning, unusually durable creative model, as Combo doesn’t just launch brands; it grows with them. Relationships last years, not quarters – a decade with Away, a decade with Diageo – and often evolve into genuine creative partnerships.

Would you believe that some even move in? Vowels, a boutique fashion brand and Combo client, launched its first-ever retail concept inside the studio’s own ground-floor space earlier this year.
“We span from strategy to design to creative,” explains Kapono. “So we’re invited in early and asked to stay through the entire journey. It’s easier to develop long-term relationships when you’re being asked to stay.”

This summer marks 10 years of Combo, and it’s the first time the agency is actively telling its story. “We have the best clients and an otherworldly staff,” says Brennan. “It’s been a long path, and it’s time to invite people in to see what we’ve been building.”

Scale doesn’t equal success

Combo’s resistance to scale-for-scale’s-sake is no accident. The studio grew up in the shadow of 2010s-era DTC brands, where rapid scaling and investor optics often took precedence over strategic longevity. Brennan calls it “the biggest con of our generation.”

“When we look for solutions that can mean everything to everyone, we end up with nothing,” he says. “We’re obviously in the business of helping our clients grow. But the singular obsession with disengaged scale has left us with a dead reef.”

Combo’s response has been to double down on focus: designing brands that endure by staying close to people – not just ‘audiences’.

“Fragrance and wellness now share a wall,” Kapono notes of The Nue Co.’s functional fragrance line, which Combo helped shape from insight to identity. “We built this for a savvy audience that understands beauty is wellness, and wellness is beauty.”

A different kind of speed

Despite their contrarian stance on scale, Combo embraces speed – just not the kind that drives sameness. “Right now, the industry is using fast to get stuff done quickly,” says Brennan. “Combo likes to use fast to create more.”

That ability to toggle between long-term thinking and fast-moving culture is at the heart of the studio’s appeal. It’s also why their name, Combo, fits so well.

“We say we’re smart and stupid,” Kapono laughs. “Smart enough to find valuable, unexpected opportunities, and stupid enough to act on them.”

That duality also runs through their approach to team structure and tools. While many creative businesses have pivoted entirely to remote work, Combo still invests heavily in its Chinatown HQ, not as a relic of pre-pandemic work culture but as a living extension of its creative philosophy.
“Productivity survives when you’re apart,” says Brennan. “But vision suffers.”

The Vowels effect

That vision comes to life most tangibly in Combo’s street-level retail space. It was here that Vowels, the design-forward fashion label, launched its debut store, showroom, and library. With Combo’s encouragement, they transformed the brand deck into a living, breathing space that curates rare design books, photography, and vintage magazines around the brand’s point of view.

“Most clients launch a brand and then walk away,” says Kapono. “But Vowels was brave. They leapt out of the deck and into the real world – and that’s when the real fun began.”

It’s a move that speaks volumes about the trust Combo has cultivated and how they’ve managed to create something rare: an agency that feels more like a collective than a service provider.

Learning from the long haul

Away is one of Combo’s longest-standing partners, with a relationship that began when the brand was still an idea in a pitch deck. Combo built the name, the positioning, and the identity from scratch, intentionally avoiding fad-driven trends (USB suitcases, anyone?) in favour of a more timeless vision.

“We worked hard to imagine a brand that could live above gadgets,” says Brennan. “It had to have emotional longevity, not just functional appeal. Something closer to the romance of Pan Am than a piece of luggage tech.”

That longevity, he adds, only works when the brand is built on truth. “But truth doesn’t mean stuck. With the right strategy underpinning it, a brand can evolve without betraying its DNA.”

A new kind of creative business

If Combo is now stepping into the spotlight, it’s doing so on its own terms, not as a ‘hot shop’ or trend-chaser, but as a business trying to define a new creative paradigm.

“We’re going crazy, in a good way,” says Brennan. “It’s a very uncertain time for our industry. But that’s exactly when you have to go out on a limb and find what’s next.”

That ‘next’ includes a growing international presence (with future hubs in Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and Barcelona) and continued experimentation in format, function, and ownership. Combo is investing in new businesses and alternative ways to support creativity, especially the kind that leads to lasting careers.

“There are some serious headwinds facing our industry,” says Kapono. “But we feel so lucky to do this work, and we’re motivated to help others build lives around creativity.”