In academic and professional traditions, a Fellow has earned next-level recognition by their peers. With that recognition comes a special place in that community, and a unique responsibility to it.
These are people whose thinking and character have earned our respect and an invitation to shape — with us — the discipline of brand and business design for others.
You’ll know them by their badge: LVLC.
LVLC FELLOWS
THE BOARD
Fellows chosen by Fellows to lead.
Sloane Scott
Founder, Sloane-Co
Nashville USA
Sloane is an exit architect who has spent more than three decades at the intersection of brand and business, helping companies grow, go public, and exit.
She believes brand is a valuation lever—and has made a career of understanding what makes a company worth more. A master of the multiple, she asks the question few are thinking about, challenges the assumption everyone else has accepted, and shoots straight.
Dog mom. Student of beauty. Three-time ovarian cancer survivor. Relentlessly curious. And a deep believer in the responsibility that comes with making things people will see, use, and believe.
Founder, Build Smart Brands
New Orleans USA / London UK
Kelli Binnings
Kelli is a psychology-led brand strategist, designer, and founder of Build Smart Brands, helping founder-led businesses create brand experiences worth remembering.
She holds an MSc in the Psychology of Art, Neuroaesthetics & Creativity from Goldsmiths, University of London, and brings nearly 20 years of experience across branding, design, writing, and photography.
She is the author of The Breakout Creative, a practical guide to turning your story, habits, and one-of-a-kind perspective into a brand no one else can copy.
Founder, SIGNAL Brand Innovation
Palm Springs USA
Cheryl Farr
Cheryl is a brand strategist, researcher, writer, and speaker who helps organizations turn opportunity into strategy, and strategy into stories that create lasting value.
At SIGNAL Brand Innovation, she works with C-suite leaders to align business strategy, brand strategy, consumer understanding, and culture. She has advised more than 100 emerging and global brands, including Fairmont Hotels & Resorts, PulteGroup, the Coca-Cola Company, and Junior Achievement.
Her belief is simple: the best leaders help people imagine a better future—and give them a reason to join in.
THE MEMBERS
Trusted artisans who belong in the room.
Marcel Schubert
Founder, burnt GmbH
Essen GERMANY
Marcel is a business and brand architect who challenges startups and scaleups to strengthen and redesign their business models, increasing profitability, customer value, and investor appeal.
He brings more than 25 years of experience working with brands like Range Rover, Diesel, Bayer, and MillerKnoll, helping founders make better decisions early, before costly detours turn into even more expensive problems.
He asks the questions that hurt, and pursues bold ideas with one goal: improving his clients' odds of success — with a mindset no competitor can simply copy.
And when he’s not doing any of that, you'll find him with a guitar, on a motorcycle, or refueling with a kinderriegel in hand.
Barbara Monahan
Founder, Cube Design
Dublin IE
Barbara is a brand strategist and designer with more than three decades of experience—and the only Level C Fellow on the island of Ireland.
Starting as a graphic designer before computers entered the picture, she now helps founder-led businesses uncover the patterns, assumptions, and behavioral truths shaping their businesses, often before they’ve fully named the problem themselves.
Her work is grounded in empathy, humanity, ethics, and the kind of honest conversation that builds trust and stronger brands.
Shannon LaBare
Founder, Purveyor Branding Co.
Los Angeles USA
Shannon is a brand strategist and founder of Purveyor Branding Co., where she creates brands people can gather in and around.
She works with leaders shaping places of consequence, translating bold ideas, inherited stories, and stakeholder priorities into complete brand worlds—from strategy through physical experience.
Drawing on decades of experience, she helps turn complex places into coherent, meaningful experiences people can recognize, remember, and belong to.
Rod Aparicio
Rod Aparicio Consulting
Frankfurt GERMANY
Rod is a commercial strategist who helps specialized B2B companies in technical markets turn expertise into stronger positioning, bigger deals, and better margins.
He works with businesses at inflection points—entering new markets, raising prices, expanding into new business models, or building a more sophisticated commercial organization—and helps them rethink how they package, sell, and capture the value they already create.
His territory is positioning, pricing, go-to-market strategy, and the commercial systems that turn technical credibility into pricing power.
Amer Alobeidli
Head of Marketing, Dept. of Tourism
Abu Dhabi UAE
Amer is an Emirati brand strategist who began his career as a financial analyst before moving into brand building more than 15 years ago.
His work has spanned energy, aviation, Louvre Abu Dhabi, and the Department of Culture and Tourism, where he helps shape how Abu Dhabi’s cultural sites and museums are presented to the world.
He sees every brand as a cultural narrative—and every branding decision as part of the story people come to believe.
Meg Donovan
Founder, OnYourMark Co, LLC
Charlotte USA
Meg is a strategist who helps big change keep its meaning as it moves through an organization.
After 15 years inside Fortune 100 companies, she crossed the table to advise them—finding the story at the center of high-stakes change and building the language that helps people understand it, believe it, and act on it.
Her rule is simple: the message can change for the audience. The meaning shouldn’t.
Miroslav Miljenovic
Brand Strategy Consultant
Belgrade SERBIA
Miroslav is a brand strategist with two decades of experience in leading global agency networks including Publicis and WPP, now focused on helping hospitality businesses become meaningfully different.
He calls the problem the Baseline Trap: when good rooms, good service, and good reviews become expected, leaving guests to choose on little more than price and location. He works with leadership teams to find the difference people can actually feel, value, and remember—and to make the business capable of delivering it.
His approach is collaborative, direct, and deeply human. No canned answers or strategy theatre. The goal is simple: become harder to replace, easier to choose, and worth paying more for.
Sarah Mason Sears
Principal, S Design Inc.
Oklahoma City USA
Sarah is a brand strategist and designer who approaches business, brand, and design as an evolutionary experiment—looking for the systems, patterns, and human behaviors that shape what an organization can become.
As founder of S Design in Oklahoma City, she has spent more than three decades building brand systems for organizations navigating growth, transition, and reinvention. Her work treats brand as a real business asset, combining strategic rigor, creativity, and the flexibility to evolve without losing coherence.
Raised around artists, economists, and engineers, and trained in the precision of Swiss and Bauhaus design, Sarah brings an unusual mix of curiosity and restraint to the work. An AIGA Fellow, she has led brand programs across business, nonprofit, government, and civic life.
Federico Reveda
CEO, Smarti
Cesena, Emilia-Romagna ITALY
Federico is an Italian marketing strategist, entrepreneur, and author who helps B2B companies and startups turn overlooked potential into growth.
In 2004, he founded Smarti, a branding and digital marketing agency, and has since worked across industries on everything from positioning to the way companies take their ideas to market.
He is a father of three daughters, a Brazilian jiu-jitsu practitioner, and an enthusiastic student of marketing, technology, innovation, dachshunds, and very good food.
Dina Baenninger
CEO, Charisma Nova GmbH
Zurich SWITZERLAND
Dina is an executive strategist and business designer who challenges leaders to rethink business as a living system – one designed to adapt, regenerate, and prosper. Through B4GOOD™, she turns that philosophy into brands and business models that make positive impact an engine of profitability.
For more than 25 years, she has worked with premium brands and industry leaders around the world –from iconic Swiss luxury hospitality and global TV entertainment to pioneering regenerative development.
An artist by training and a strategist by practice, Dina is as comfortable with business models and systems transformation as she is with beauty, culture, and nature. She fuses intuition with strategy, artistic intelligence with business logic, and deep human insight with experience design. She asks the questions others overlook and connects people, ideas, and possibilities that rarely meet. Her north star: love for life.
Robin Veurink
Owner, BrandZuiver
Zwolle NETHERLANDS
Robin is a Dutch brand strategist who helps leaders make the choices that create meaningful difference. Working at the intersection of brand and business strategy, he aligns ambition, strategy, culture, behavior and communication around what an organization stands for and what it chooses not to do.
His work turns brand positioning into strategic infrastructure: a living source of direction that guides decisions, connects the organization and builds resonance with the people it seeks to matter to, as cultures and markets evolve.
Since 2000, he has worked for organizations including Apple and Spa, and later brought those experiences into his work as a brand strategist for Unigarant, ROVA, Windesheim, Vechtstede Notarissen and Aeres.
Curious by nature, thoughtful in acting and with a fresh way in his thinking, Robin brings strategic sharpness without losing sight of the people who ultimately build the brand.
The Future
Join us…
Ani Maisuradze
Brand Architect, Lineate
Tbilisi GEORGIA
Ani is a brand and marketing leader with nine years of experience turning ambitious ideas into brands people notice, trust, and choose.
She currently leads brand across the United States, Georgia, and Armenia for an international technology company, and heads marketing for a national technology association in Georgia. Her work spans commercial strategy, creative direction, market expansion, and industry influence.
Early in her career, during COVID-19, she led the launch of a major retailer’s first e-commerce platform and self-service systems, creating a new revenue channel while its physical stores were closed. It set a pattern she has kept ever since: when there is no playbook, Ani writes one.