Foundry Talks: The Hospitality Podcast · 2026-04-28 · 49 min
What does it actually take to build a hotel brand that holds up over time? This week Rachel sits down with Carly DeFilippo, co-founder of Cognoscenti Creative , a branding studio run by two sisters out of Colorado. Carly and her sister Lauren got their start working in-house at major restaurant groups before launching an agency built specifically for independent and boutique hospitality properties. Carly shares how their intake process, what she jokingly calls brand therapy, goes way deeper than most operators expect. The goal is to surface what a property is truly about before a single logo or color palette ever gets made. She walks us through how they approach hotel naming (meaning comes last, energy comes first), what luxury actually means in 2025, and why having a clear and specific point of view might be the most underrated branding asset a hotel can have. We also dig into the New Orleans property they named after a Walt Whitman connection, the Outrider Hotel in Manitou Springs, and why the Surf Hotel in Buena Vista keeps coming up as a gold standard for cohesive brand storytelling.
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