Amara Sithole
Founder & Strategy Director
Fifteen years across brand and performance. Amara leads positioning work and sits in every discovery session.
About us
Built by people who got tired of watching good budgets go nowhere.
Aces & Aces is an independent studio of senior strategists, writers and analysts. We keep the team small on purpose, so the person you meet is the person who does the work.
Our story
Two desks, one uncomfortable observation.
In 2020 our founders had spent a decade inside agencies and marketing departments watching the same failure repeat: strategy sold by one team, executed by another, measured by nobody.
So we started something deliberately narrow. One team. Senior only. Research at the front, measurement at the back, and a refusal to take work we could not defend commercially.
Six years later we have served more than forty brands across financial services, health, logistics, hospitality and B2B. We still cap our client count, and we still turn down briefs where the honest answer is that the budget belongs elsewhere.
Mission
Make marketing a defensible investment for ambitious mid-sized businesses — where every rand spent can be traced to a decision and an outcome.
Vision
To be the partner companies call when the stakes are real: a launch, a repositioning, a category shift, a number that has to move.
Why we exist
Because activity is easy to buy and judgement is not. We sell judgement, and then we do the work that proves it.
Core values
Four rules we do not bend.
01
Evidence over opinion
We would rather be corrected by data than be confidently wrong in a boardroom.
02
Craft is commercial
Better writing, sharper design and cleaner code all show up in the numbers.
03
Say the hard thing
If the brief is wrong, we will tell you before we take the budget.
04
Own the outcome
We measure ourselves on your results, not on hours logged or assets delivered.
Meet the team
Senior specialists, no bench.
Daniel Okafor
Head of Growth
Ex-in-house growth lead. Owns channel strategy, media planning and the numbers behind every recommendation.
Lerato Dube
Editorial Director
Former features editor. Runs our writing standard and reviews every word that leaves the studio.
Rian van Wyk
Head of Research
Quantitative background in market research. Designs the studies that keep our strategy honest.
Naledi Khumalo
SEO Lead
Technical SEO specialist with a taste for large, messy site migrations that other people avoid.
Joshua Meyer
Analytics Lead
Builds the measurement layer. If a number appears in your dashboard, Joshua can explain exactly where it came from.
Company timeline
How we got here.
- 2020
Two desks, one conviction
Founded on the belief that strategy and execution should never be sold separately.
- 2021
First retained partnerships
Three clients signed twelve-month engagements. Two are still with us.
- 2022
Research practice launched
We formalised the research discipline that now underpins every strategy we write.
- 2023
Editorial standard published
Our internal writing standard became the reason clients hired us for content alone.
- 2024
40 brands served
Expanded into financial services, health and logistics with senior specialist hires.
- 2026
Measurement-first by default
Every engagement now ships with an attribution model the client fully owns.
0+
Projects completed
0%
Client satisfaction
0+
Brands served
0+
Years of experience
Work with us
If this sounds like the partner you have been looking for, let's talk.
Tell us what you are trying to grow. We will tell you, plainly, whether we are the right partner and what it would take.