On May 4th, Blue Creative Group acquired Chiasso, Switzerland-based Sand People Communication (SPC) through a share purchase agreement. This acquisition created an opportunity to merge a debt-free, highly profitable operation with a strong balance sheet, and superior management into Blue Creative Group. Sand People focuses solely on media relations and media buying services, services not fully offered by Blue Creative. The combined entity now manages 68 clients across the globe. 

“Part of our Value Creation Plan (VCP) from day one was to develop an additional book of business that was a higher volume, more transactional, and repeatable,” says Blue Creative Group President George Sass. “SPC’s business model complements the more custom engagement level of Blue Creative Group’s current book of business such as brand audits, strategic development, and digital media engineering.” Blue Creative Group and SPC were already collaborating on multiple clients together. The transaction merges the two companies into a single-source-solution marketing agency — having offices in the US and Europe, serving clients worldwide in the yachting, luxury lifestyle, sustainable energy, finance, manufacturing, and technology markets. The combined company offers clients and the Fresnel portfolio companies a full set of custom services including media relations, media buying, event development and management, graphic design and creative services, SEO, website development, full video production, market research, social media management, strategic planning, and brand development.

Both Sand People and Blue Creative Group retained their respective brand names and management, yet are transitioning to a unified operational structure to leverage opportunities and expertise.

“With Sand People I always had the objective of building up a team and a company with a clear, strong international pedigree. This partnership joins together two powerhouse teams into a solid global organization,” says Gianluca Poerio, founder of Sand People. “The leverage we’ve already seen with shared clients is just a taste of what we can do, and there’s plenty of potential to enhance and maximize client’s promotions, drive incremental revenue across the combined client portfolio, and deliver clients budget efficiency and bandwidth with the unified structure.”

As part of the transaction, George Sass has joined the Board of Directors of the Switzerland-based SPC division. “This merger will significantly strengthen the capabilities of the combined company, further grow and diversify its service offerings, and position the company for continued long-term growth,” says Sass. “I’ve had the pleasure of working directly with Sand People’s incredible team and Gianluca for almost two decades, first as an editor and then as a client. The level of creativity, energy, and dedication to their clients’ success is deeply ingrained within the SPC’s culture.”Since Blue Creative Group serves as the centralized marketing-services provider to Fresnel’s portfolio of companies, this merger also transitions the portfolio from English-only communications to an additional seven languages. This provides the foundation for Tring Live Media, Perpetual Sports Network, X-Med, Torus Global, and Blue Creative Group itself to expand into new markets. The impact for Emergent International Payment Systems and Blue Creative Group was immediate. Emergent IPS will have French-language PR experts and writers who can create an immediate social media presence within the Congo and neighboring French-speaking countries, while Blue and Sand People have already secured new clients solely based on the merger.

It’s revealing when you look back at the genesis of a business relationship and how it came to be. The successful ones often seem like they’ve been in existence for decades. They rely on mutual trust, complementary skillsets, and a common core of objectives and values that collectively form a powerful unified approach to problem solving and creating investor wealth. And this certainly summarizes Fresnel’s nine-month relationship with Axenic.

With offices stretching around the world, Axenic applies a refreshing approach to business that leverages an ecosystem energized by investors, entrepreneurs and industry influencers. They’ve achieved significant success by applying a creative and strategic approach to start-ups and incubator stage companies, along with an investor focused model that has fueled successful capital raise initiatives around the world. Today, Axenic is currently managing $80 million in capital assets.

The Axenic team, led by founders Lewk Schulze and Ariya Behjat, is currently focusing on raising capital for Fresnel Growth Capital (FGC) within its extensive global investor network. During this endeavor, Axenic also recognized the mutual benefits of pulling XMed into FGC to leverage Fresnel’s management expertise and operational infrastructure. (See Q&A with XMed CEO Sean Field.)

“Working with Lewk and Ariya was a highlight of an already exciting year for our group,” said Tom Thies, Fresnel co-founder and partner. “From that initial meeting where Axenic truly understood our philosophy and approach, it’s been a strong relationship. Like Fresnel, they care down to their core about the entrepreneur and their investor. They’re not playing the typical PE numbers game. Instead they know how to build real brands and care deeply about every aspect of that process.”

The Axenic-Fresnel relationship has expanded across the portfolio and beyond the capital raise endeavors. The Blue Creative Group has partnered with Axenic on the public relations strategy for sustainable energy company Gevo (NASDAQ:  GEVO). “They’ve already taken such a deep dive in our businesses as part of the FGC capital raise program, that bringing in Axenic for the assist on other projects was a no-brainer,” said Fresnel CMO George Sass Jr. “Their team hit the ground running on unlocking earned media opportunities and complemented Blue’s efforts. ”

Fresnel is also reviewing market expansion opportunities with Perpetual Sports Network through Axenic’s network and expertise. “We’re looking forward to a long and mutually beneficial relationship with Axenic,” said Tom. “It’s odd, but I feel like they’ve been part of our group for years.”

Tring offers a reinvented approach for retail by leveraging the power of in-store audio in ways that drive sales effectively. The difference lies in the level of service Tring delivers, and how the company can adapt to changing conditions through custom opportunities. That comes down to Sandy Barnes, who has helped build Tring into a loyalty powerhouse, one customer at a time.

“I work with customers on the advertising side when they want to do their in-store messaging,” Sandy says. “We create their brand ID in a 30-second snap, or they want to promote particular items or if they want to do something new. Right now, there’s a lot of focus on ‘buy online, pick up in store.’”

Making sure the message is to the customers liking is one thing, but using the expertise of the staff at Tring makes sure the customers in the store get the message too. Understanding the customer experience in the store is the key to understanding Tring’s own customers. That’s a big part of what Sandy does. “I’ve worked in all sorts of retail from Mrs. Field’s Cookies to Timberland to Stonewall Kitchen, even an apple orchard that had a store and baked their own apple pies, helping them with sales and customer service,” she says. “A friend had a small business, and I helped her set up her marketing and merchandising and just basically doing whatever was needed. That’s how I’ve learned to grow my role, determining what the needs are for each individual customer, to get the job done and make their shoppers happy.”

Tring has a wide range of customers, from small retailers with three or fewer stores to huge grocery chains who sell some products that have margins of pennies. “The team we have is very responsive, and we’re small,” Sandy says. “We’re fast, we can move on a dime, because we work really closely together.”

And as markets shift and change, retail operations need to tailor their needs, and Tring can play a big part in that brand shift, something the team understands very well. “Once upon a time, it was the instinct of a shopkeeper figuring out, This might be a big seller,” Sandy says. “We’re adapting to find ways to help those existing brick-and-mortar stores reach more of their customers and bring in the statistics that the vendors need to target market their products. The data is huge. But we can see, there are only good things ahead.”

Fresnel Growth Capital is thrilled to welcome both Sean Field and XMed to the Fresnel family. Sean is the CEO of Xmed, and from day one has delivered the necessary critical thinking and innovation needed with a vast healthcare background. Entrepreneurship runs in his veins, with several companies created and then sold under his leadership. Sean pioneered technologies that reinvented how medical information is gathered, and he’s still doing it, and he shares his fresh perspective on the future of healthcare data, Xmed, and his work with The Fresnel Companies.

The Lens: Tell us a little about your background.

Sean Field: I got my start in 1990 when I founded a data-management company focused on critical-care diagnostics in hospitals. I saw an opportunity. I was young—20 years old—and my father worked in the critical-care testing field. I saw the lack of connectivity for the diagnostics results and the need for data management that was not taking place in that world.

I founded a software company together with a friend of mine who was a software engineer. Our company, called Laboratory Data Systems, was the first connectivity and data-management solution for decentralized testing in the hospitals. It was kind of a big deal, because back then it really was primarily critical care blood gas testing that was being done near the patient, or now what we refer to as the point-of-care. Whereas everything else was sent to the central laboratory for analysis.

We pioneered the connectivity, from both a hardware and communication protocol perspective. Therefore, not only were results captured for those tests analyzed in the near-patient-testing setting, but it created the foundation for other devices or tests to establish connectivity capability throughout the hospital. This enabled expansion of more routine tests to near-patient testing with connectivity being the conduit to improved patient-care outcomes. We provided quick results for more routine tests. For example, 30 years ago, for what we perceive today as a simple Glucose test, your blood was drawn and was sent to the lab for analysis. With the advent of connectivity solutions, and technological advancements of diagnostic devices, our solution served as a catalyst that enabled testing to leave the central laboratory and be done at the point-of-care.

TL: Sounds like a pretty fundamental change in the way healthcare is delivered. What happened next?

SF: I sold that company about eight years after I founded it, and went to work for the company that bought it, which was a major diagnostic equipment manufacturer for hospitals. Then about a year and half later, we sold that company to Roche Diagnostics, the largest diagnostic testing company in the world.

I moved overseas to work at Roche for five years, and founded a division of the company that was primarily focused on the information technology and actionable health information. That was really kind of the first step in the industry towards taking data and aggregating it in such a way to help improve patient outcomes through better medicine techniques based on data as opposed to just based on experience.

TL: It sounds like you were still pursuing the same idea: better healthcare through better information.

SF: That’s correct, but I saw much more opportunity than what we were pursuing. So I left that job and came back to the United States, and refounded my old company, Laboratory Data Systems, and went back and did the whole thing all over again. This time, we had a much bigger focus on all point-of-care testing, since the world, point-of-care testing and information had changed so much, so quickly. Eight years later, I ended up selling it to the largest point-of-care diagnostic company in the world, Alere. I worked for them for a few of years, running their informatics division.

When my contract was up with them, I decided to leave. I thought I was going to semi-retire, you know, go fishing and play golf, and all that kind of stuff. I realized very quickly that I just needed to be busy and involved in something that I believe in, where I feel like I could be beneficial and help something grow and make it into a great company. It didn’t necessarily have to be a healthcare informatics company.

I started looking around and got involved in some ventures and some startup businesses, not so much involved in the day to day, but it did lead me to people like Fresnel partner Andrew Murphy. We have become very good friends in a relatively short time. And whenever there have been opportunities for us to collaborate and work together on things, we’ve done that.

TL: And the next opportunity came out of that ongoing conversation?

SF: That’s how I got involved with Xmed. Andrew knew my background in medical software, and felt like I’d be really good for the organization from a leadership perspective.

I really like the concept behind the platform. It’s a social and community-oriented environment, that we’re looking to create from a health and fitness perspective, as opposed to just being a website with informational content. We’re already working with the team on a lot of strategic stuff, setting up development teams and other things. But we are very focused on what we believe is going to be a unique way to present, engage, and share health and wellness information.

TL: Does Xmed present another paradigm shift?

SF: With an app, one of the things that I think we all see on the surface is what it does, and our understanding usually stops there. Look at an example, like Teladoc. It’s a telemedicine platform, where people go online and visit with a doctor, get a diagnosis, and get a prescription. The invention of it was created at Roche Diagnostics, back in 2004, and I was actually part of an innovation team at Roche that created the initial platform. We didn’t call it Teladoc back then, but it’s gone through multiple hands of ownership, multiple transformations to its look and feel, and whatever else. But what people see today on the surface, is the feature of a virtual doctors visit or consultation.

What they don’t understand is that there is a now a whole new subset of data that the medical world is starting to collect on illnesses, symptoms, or problems that patients are having that can be handled and managed without a doctor’s visit. It really does come down to the data, rather than just finding another way to provide treatment. Because at some point in time, we’re going to learn from the data that there are certain things you just can’t do with telemedicine. And there are a lot of things we didn’t think we could do. But now we realize we can, and I find it incredibly interesting to be able to analyze and understand the information in that data and then just see where the telemedicine part of this is going to be 10 years from now. The data is going to drive that.

TL: That sounds very promising for changing the way healthcare is delivered.

SF: I think 10 years from now we may find ourselves very rarely going to the doctor. With the Internet-of-Things, which is what diagnostics devices fall into now, we have the connectivity, the test results, treatment information, and thus the data for the analytics, that will drive change in how healthcare can be administered.

I think this is where general practitioner care is headed. Solutions like Teladoc, and a key part of what we are building on Xmed, will serve as a platform for getting physician care when you feel you need it for a fairly routine illness or symptoms. The platform has its own pool of physicians and patients can schedule a visit with a licensed physician or possibly get an immediate consult if a physician is “online” and accepting “walk-ins.”

TL: You’re talking about a shift in how people gain access to healthcare. Xmed seems to be looking at the next generation of patients.

SF: What I feel is going to make Xmed different, from a health and wellness app perspective, is that it’s based on the concept of a community, that’s socially interactive, sharing and engaging in many aspects of our daily health and wellness needs.

It’s more than an application where you go to find your physician or get a diagnosis and a treatment. It’s also where you can go to find out whatever you need or want to know. If you’re into fitness, it can be your fitness platform. We’re engaging with experts, motivators and influencers, who will be members on our app, who provide fitness activities or training classes or whatever it may be.

If you think about the industry today, all these things are separate. If you wanted workout videos, you get a fitness app where you get workout videos. And you figure out what you want to do: Am I doing flexibility? Am I working on strength training? Do I want a cardio session?

I’ve tried one of these, and the app assigned a coach to me. I didn’t choose the coach. And when I had questions about what I can do, if I find my performance has plateaued, that’s the only avenue of information that was provided. I see this as a problem and the solution is the social community focused on many aspects of health and wellness including general care, physical health, nutrition, mental health, the list goes on.

TL: That other app sounded reminiscent of the old ways of healthcare, when you were assigned a doctor.

SF: Exactly, and that’s what Xmed does differently, we want to allow the community to be part of that conversation. Yes, you can see your doctor, or another doctor or expert on the platform. But that doesn’t have to be your only avenue to finding the information or solutions you need. Why not provide a platform that enables a member to engage the entire community? Let the community have a voice, and share their experiences: Hey, this works for me, or This didn’t work for me, this might work for you. Whatever it may be.

The demographic we’re targeting—people who are younger now, have a comfort level with technology and social media, and are going to be needing increased healthcare as they get older—they tell us that they’re looking for that engaged community. It makes them want to keep coming back to the platform to get the information that they’re looking for, and have that interaction with other people who may be experiencing the same things or have other insights.

Part of our strategy is ensuring recurring use of the Xmed platform. If we were just providing a Teleconsult app, we don’t drive recurring use. We will provide features, tools, and information that will make it an everyday app for our users. We will employ gamification concepts that make it rewarding in many ways. These tools and rewards systems will encourage greater engagement in the app and drive the creation of new data that will hopefully enable the new advancements in healthcare.

At the end of the day, Xmed can make healthcare far more effective than it is today, even if it doesn’t necessarily deliver any major medical advances, such as a cure for cancer. We can definitely enable dramatically improved health and wellness to the lives of many people and because of that I’m very excited to be a part of it.

Learn more about Xmed.

As part of Fresnel’s initiative to leverage its current IP and human capital across developing markets to create additional value, the Perpetual Sports Network recently joined the Fresnel Growth Capital portfolio of companies. Founded by professional basketball player and coach Reggie Jordan and sports-industry veteran David Glynn, Perpetual is focused on Name, Image, and Likeness opportunities.

Torus and Cipherium’s technology team and Blue Creative Group’s veteran content developers have combined a Blockchain Smart Contract Platform, a full-stack Content Hub, and a Subscription App. Bringing together these portfolio assets as a singular solution creates value and revenue by protecting all stakeholders—athletes, colleges and universities, partners, and sponsors—helping young people play an active role in building their future, and providing turnkey opportunities to monetize NIL.

At the heart of the content hub is the mobile content app developed with leading sports technology company Venuetize. This content hub will feature unique, custom-produced content focusing on the athlete as the brand. The hub is also connected to Perpetual Sports Network’s proprietary blockchain smart contract platform, a key component to protecting the athlete, providing secure levels of transparency, and additional elements of compliance tracking for colleges and universities. These three pieces come together as a single, integrated solution to protect the athlete, build their future, and provide athletes with new NIL opportunities.

On the first day that an athlete signs with Perpetual, the Content Studio will kick off a content plan that includes robust video storytelling produced by Blue’s team of action sports and documentary experts, long-form journalism stories that are unique to each athlete, and social-media content that will share the collegiate experience of each athlete with an audience. Employing Venuetize’s extensive experience in developing mobile platforms for specific teams, leagues, and venues, the Perpetual Sports Network app is designed to host the unique content within a subscriber channel. Subscription revenue then flows to the athlete via the company’s digital ledger platform. The guidelines of the digital ledger are pre-loaded to parallel any legal, college, or university regulatory parameters as well in an effort to reduce any additional hindrance on athletic departments.

This mobile experience is designed to allow for the organic integration of paid ads and sponsored content, delivering yet another channel to generate revenue for the athlete or collegiate institution and the company itself. Additional media revenue channels include events, email campaigns, third-party audience purchasing plans, and a consumer-facing, fan-centric website. Creating a media enterprise around the athlete versus creating a platform to aggregate the athlete-specific content allows Perpetual Sports Network to build lasting value for an athlete and the company.

“Coming together with a singular solution bridging technology and unique studio-level content will create value by protecting the athlete, building their future, and providing turnkey opportunities to monetize their NIL within the rules engine of the final legislation,” said David Glynn, Perpetual Sports Network president.” At this writing, athlete recruitment is underway, the app prototype is complete, and is scheduled to go live February 4, 2021. For more information, visit Perpetual Sports Network.

Blue Creative Group is excited to add Executive Vice President Kelly Blake to its team. With more than 20 years of experience, Blake made her name time and again by listening to clients and tailoring campaigns and services to meet their specific goals. She creates traditional media strategies, including marketing, events, retailer and consumer promotions, chiefly in the sports, outdoors, and health and wellness industries. In her spare time, Blake launched Plastic Impact Promise, which was built on the pledge of ending the use of single-use plastic cups and bottles at outdoor-industry events. “Kelly gets it done—that’s why she’s here,” says George Sass, managing director of Blue Creative Group. “Whether it’s identifying a problem like an enlightened crowd generating plastic waste or winnowing down an intricate strategy into action steps for a team to tackle, she gets results with a focus on high quality and meeting deadlines.”

Prior to Blue, Kelly was a Vice President at Catapult Creative Labs, the marketing agency for Active Interest Media, and also served as an Executive Director at Golin, a global IPG communications agency, taking the lead on the Clif Bar & Company and Mount Gay client work for the consumer practice in the San Francisco office. “I’m excited to join Blue Creative Group,” Blake says. “This is an opportunity to work with a terrific team. We have clients across a wide spectrum of industries and we’re able to deliver a range of top-quality services that target their needs with an approach that goes beyond what many agencies do. That’s fulfilling and fun at the same time.” Blake will work out of her office in the Bay Area, where she lives with her family and a pair of cats, and enjoys an active lifestyle.