About Us

Story Cube is a collaboration between Robbie Dale, an award-winning creative director and writer and fledgling entrepreneur and Michael Murdoch, a business coach, lecturer in branding and founder of The House London, a digital branding agency with clients across the globe. 


📖 Our Story.

We met in the mid-2000s when The House helped out on some projects at 1000heads, the agency where Robbie was working at the time. We had a number of functional, professional, successful collaborations before life moved us in different directions. Then, in 2016, we sat down for a coffee and a catch-up and the conversation turned to an observation we’d both made independently: too many organisations were spending too much time and money on their brand without ever nailing the basics.

For bigger organisations that was frustrating, for smaller ones it could be devastating. Determined to do something to share our ideas on how things could be better we began running ‘Branding On A Budget’, a workshop for The British Library’s Business & IP Centre that would become the basis for Story Cube. We ran that workshop dozens of times, improving and learning from hundreds of organisations’ feedback and, eventually, refined the framework we now call Story Cube.

Our goal was, and remains, to make it easy for any organisation to access good quality, practical advice about their brand and - critically - how that applies to tangible success. Story Cube is used in the curriculum at London’s Brunel University, remains a popular element of The British Library’s business training activities and has been delivered in partnership with General Assembly, Wayra, EY, Google, The School for Social Entrepreneurs, Impact Hub, The Museum of Brands, Jisc, and many others, to thousands of organisations of all shapes and sizes all across the world. 


👋 Our Bios.


Michael founded The House brand and marketing agency in 2009 and has been a Brand Strategist for nearly 20 years working out of Hong Kong and London with clients all over the world. Graduating from courses at Central Saint Martins, UWE and Oxford University, Michael is a trained designer and using a structured, creative process to work in partnership with both emerging and established organisations to help them unearth the essence of their brands, past clients include: NHS, MTV, Diabetes UK, Sanyo, Fairtrade, Nokia, Bulb and Mixcloud.

Michael has been invited to lecture at various British universities, and was accepted onto the prestigious Goldman Sachs 10ksb programme in 2017. He has also been recognised with an award from the Design Council and has acted as a mentor and awards judge for Jisc, RSA, Wayra, Wincanton, The School of Social Entrepreneurs, The British Library, Teach First, Emerge Education and Level 39, to name a few. You can see the nuts and bolts (and connect with him too if you like) over on LinkedIn

Robbie started his career dabbling in graphic design, before realising he was better suited to writing. That took him to into the world of creative agencies where he ran creative departments for a global agency working with clients including Microsoft, Lego, the BBC, Benefit Cosmetics, Cancer Research, PlayStation and many others. Robbie has spent the last five years consulting with a wide range of organisations to help them tell their stories more effectively including: Mandarin Oriental hotels, King’s College London, politicians, publishers, Hollywood studios, other agencies and plenty of start-ups, social enterprises and charities. 

Robbie is an alumni of the prestigious Marketing Academy programme and, more recently, a fledgling entrepreneur building projects through his studio Make More Dots. You can see the nuts and bolts (and connect if you like) over on LinkedIn.


Between us we've worked with hundreds of organisations of all shapes and sizes, run courses, given talks, worked on our own education, won awards and built our own companies.

You can get a flavour of our combined experience below...

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