Banyan Tree
Banyan Tree is a creative agency & consultancy founded by Dinesh Sonak. Based in Amsterdam and specialized in brand ideas and innovations at the intersection of creativity, commerce and culture– with an approach that combines empathy and curiosity with design-thinking and business acumen.
Banyan Tree’s services include concept and business development, creative collaborations and brand partnerships, program curation and training design, as well as art direction and design management. Banyan Tree’s clients include start-ups, scale-ups, brands, NGOs and industry platforms.
Banyan Tree is named after the Indian tree whose deep intertwining roots and branches have sheltered great ideas, under which merchants would conduct business and storytellers perform, and whose huge overarching shade was a place of learning.
Illustration by Satoshi Hashimoto
Dinesh Sonak
Dinesh Sonak (Dutch/Indian) is a creative educator, curator, director and connector - passionate about creative people and ideas in the context of business, culture and society.
Dinesh combines a background in strategy and economics with experience in the worlds of communications, innovation, design and education at e.g. Heineken, IMD and frog design - in Europe, Africa and India.
He was a founding team member of THNK School of Leadership and a founding Board member of A’DAM&Co. He is co-founder of PlusPlusOne, a platform for underrepresented talent and inclusion in the world of brands, and he serves as a Board Member of Tennis Club Wimbledon Overveen Combinatie. Dinesh was Managing Director of ADCN, the club for creativity in the Netherlands and he continues to coach creative professionals and leading brands as Director of ADCN Academy.
He has consulted for and collaborated with a range of creative companies, including Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, WeTransfer, Wieden+Kennedy, Patta, Media.Monks, The Social Hub, Rituals, Jio, Heineken and Original Beans. He was a Young Lions judge at Cannes Lions, host at What Design Can Do, and speaker at India Design Forum and TED India.
His work has been featured in Stanford Social Innovation Review, Het Financieele Dagblad, Adformatie and India Today. Dinesh continues to learn and has completed executive courses at Insead, Columbia Business School, Central Saint Martins, Sotheby’s Institute of Art and Stanford Graduate School of Business. He works from Soho House in Amsterdam and the beach in Bloemendaal.