Fast 50: ‘Goals and vision’ come first for this design firm

Featured in Baltimore Business Journal
by Andrew Zaleski

Verve Partnership:  List Ranking: 23

Kelly Ennis says what makes the Verve Partnership different is how it begins its conversations about interior architecture with potential clients.

“We start all our conversations out as a business conversation first and as a design conversation second,” said Ennis, a managing principal at the company. “Really understanding the business objectives of our clients has really spurred our growth.”

In other words, the Verve Partnership specializes in architecture that ties the physical space in with the vision and brand a company is trying to achieve. Those in Baltimore who have set foot inside the Federal Hill co-working space Betamore have seen some of the firm’s work.

“The success of Betamore isn’t only that it’s this awesome, cool space; there’s a direct business correlation,” said Ennis, 46. “It’s really about goals and vision first, and then how do we design and plan to those goals and visions?”

This difference in strategy when it comes to architecture — defining a business’ objectives to support the design of a physical space — is something Ennis picked up during her decade in Los Angeles. A graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art, Ennis said the design conversations she was having on the West Coast were dissimilar to those she had with people in the mid-Atlantic.

This ultimately led Ennis to use her personal savings to found the Verve Partnership in 2009. She takes the following approach: A brand strategist and an organizational development researcher are both on the Verve Partnership’s staff of 12, and they’re just as essential to design conversations as the designers are.

The firm primarily focuses on interior architecture work for corporate clients, although it plans to keep up its growth by earning the business of higher education and health care clients. Its flagship client is the Penn Mutual Life Insurance Co. in Philadelphia.

“They’re over 100,000 square feet, and we developed a full-blown business strategy for them, including brand and culture, and designed their space around the changing nature of the insurance world,” Ennis said.