“I’m a big proponent of gatekeeping”: Special Offer on business, brands and brat

On the surface, or at least on its website, NYC-based design studio Special Offer is a ‘creative tech company focused on the growth of subculture through digital experience’. However, even its founder, Brent David Freaney, knows it’s a whole lot more than that. Founded in 2014 with a focus on web design and development, Brent says: “I’ve written a lot of one-liners over the last ten years about what Special Offer is and what Special Offer isn’t. I’ve started to let a bit of that go over the last year: Special Offer is what it is today, tomorrow it will likely be something different.” The free-flowing, elastic practice that Special Offer has come to embody has now resulted in a studio that feels excitedly self-serving, but in a way that feeds the environment it operates in. 

“Sometimes I say that the key to Special Offer’s viability as a business is that it exists to serve the community of people it is already in,” he explains. “It’s a semi-corny, kinda-catchy, three-second sound bite. But what I mean by that is that we don’t attempt (anymore) to execute on projects that don’t come naturally to us.” Special Offer’s success is due to the interests, intrigues and idiosyncrasies of those behind the scenes – its eight-strong full-time team, something Brent has long tried to foster, especially in the light of the “grim” reality of job security and employment style in the US. “We really try to avoid burnout at all costs.”

Brent is a self-proclaimed digital hoarder with an “obsession” for visual research. “I save anything I see on any platform that grabs me, then when it is time to start a new project, I comb through that archive again.” It’s an act which Brent is private about. “Don’t give away your references!” he says. “I’m a big proponent of gatekeeping; I found it, I’m not telling you where I found it, and it’s mine... fuck off.”

Whatever goes on behind the scenes at Special Offer, it clearly seems to work. The studio sits somewhere between glossy and subversive, and, ultimately, feels removed from what’s ‘mainstream’ (at least, before it becomes mainstream). It would be impossible to talk of Special Offer without addressing the green elephant in the room: brat. Obsessed over, meme-ed, emulated and overanalysed, Charli xcx’s hit album seemed to define visual culture for one steamy summer, as intellectualised to death by LinkedIn threads and New York Times articles alike. Design became a widespread household discussion across the world, and for good reason: it was good, it was interesting, and it was original. 

“Charli is one of the only artists that I have worked with who is brave enough to really, really flip the script on what the world expects of her,” Brent tells us. “The trust that she and her creative director Imogene Strauss gave my studio has been unlike any other project,” he adds, calling it a “true gift” to the team. “From the beginning, Charli knew she wanted brat on a green background,” which, albeit a simple enough choice, was an “extremely radical” one for a pop star. “Special Offer’s challenge became ‘how do we make this special – how does this idea become something that could only exist as Charli xcx’s brat?’” 

Once the cover was locked in, Special Offer was granted total freedom by Charli, Imogene, and Atlantic Records to do whatever they wanted for the packaging, with very few limitations. “The interiors of the packaging are all built on really fundamental and classic design and typographic principles,” Brent says. They opted for a super slick, Swiss-like approach to typography, using Dinamo’s ABC Rom as its primary typeface. “When designing, you need to build a system... a world,” he says, “brat on a green square is but one part of that world – it may be the face but it isn’t the body.” It’s true, there’s a whole world of irreverent merchandise, ads, events and stage designs that sit alongside this face. “The cover is simple,” Brent says, but: “I hate the word anti-design (that’s over-contextualising it), there’s a reason it is the way that it is – it is designed to be that way.”

Beyond Brat, Special Offer recently released its product line and exhibition identity for Martine Syms’ Total, showing at Paris’ Lafayette Anticipations until February 2025. The pair shared a studio together in Los Angeles when Special Offer first started, and so she’s the person Bret’s collaborated with most. “Every project I take on (professionally or otherwise), I like to get her opinion on,” he says. “I’ve been speaking at universities a little recently, and the thing I try to drive home is that having a close collaborator, someone that you can bounce ideas off of.” Otherwise, he ends, “you’ll be designing into a vacuum.”