Opening up a B2B product to a B2C audience.
Most of Columbia Threadneedle's products are built for financial professionals — advisors, institutions, intermediaries.
The $75-million Threadneedle (Lux) Asian Equity Income Fund was different. It was being registered for direct sale to retail investors in Singapore, and it needed creative that could meet individual investors where they were culturally, emotionally, and financially.
The Context
The Singapore launch was part of a broader strategic push to grow Columbia Threadneedle's presence across the Asian region — a market with strong growth potential and a competitive retail investment landscape. The fund itself had real advantages: strong performance, high ratings, and an attractive dividend yield. What it needed was creative advertising that could translate those advantages into something compelling for individual investors, while incorporating elements of Asian culture without resorting to lazy visual shorthand.
This was one of my first projects at Columbia Threadneedle. I treated it accordingly — as an opportunity to show what I could really do.
The Exploration
Rather than developing a single concept for review, I built five distinct creative directions — each with its own copy angle, visual treatment, and strategic rationale. Working independently before bringing my design partner in, I mocked up each concept to make the vision tangible and give us something real to react to and refine together.
"You know the saying. Quality over quantity."
Here, we used Singapore's iconic light trees as the visual environment. Luminous, distinctive, and unmistakably of the region. The copy leaned into the fund's research-driven approach to high-quality company selection.
"Explorers followed stars to chart new worlds. You can follow stars to grow wealth."
A starry night sky as the visual backdrop, with points of light echoing the fund's five-star rating. Aspiration, navigation, and performance woven into a single metaphor. One of the strongest concepts in the set.
"Balancing your portfolio is a science. A strong equity fund can be the catalyst for stronger growth."
Ink clouds in fluid motion as the visual — dynamic, precise, and distinctly scientific. A nod to the Asian market's reputation for research-driven investment culture.
"Stellar performance, unrealized potential."
An orbital view of Earth, zooming in frame by frame to focus on Singapore specifically. The concept spoke directly to the opportunity within the Asian equity market while grounding the fund's performance in geographic context.
"There's no single solution to equity, but diversity pays dividends."
No imagery. Just bold color blocking in cyan and yellow. A deliberate departure from the other concepts — confident, graphic, and built on the idea that visual diversity could reinforce the message of portfolio diversification.
The Outcome
The concepts we developed weren't selected. The direction that was ultimately chosen took the creative to a different territory — one that leaned more heavily on visual cultural signifiers than on the strategic and narrative depth we'd built into our approach.
But that's part of working in a regulated, stakeholder-heavy environment. Not every strong concept wins. However, the exploration itself — five distinct directions, each with its own visual logic and copy rationale, developed from scratch on a new team in a new industry — reflected the kind of creative range and strategic thinking I bring to every brief.
Frankly, the stars concept deserved better.
So did the orbital zoom.
