CRUDA
CRUDA is a narrative practice
for founder-led companies.
We work with companies whose reputation was built in person and now has to travel without them.
How it started
The first client came three years before the company did.
In early 2021, Karen Mannheim hired Fran Herrera through an agency where TRAZZO was one of the accounts. The work outlasted the agency and ran for five years.
CRUDA was registered in February 2024, the same month Norhart restructured and the in-house job ended. The practice already existed. What changed was the name on it.
Operating principles
How the work is done.
We remove the layers that aren't yours until what's left is the part you'd have said anyway.
Nobody is told what to believe about their own company. We return what we see and let the founder decide.
Names, numbers, places and dates. The more specific a story is, the more people recognise themselves in it.
No urgency, no scarcity, no last chance. If it isn't a fit, it isn't a fit.
Every engagement carries numbers the client can check. A result without a figure is an opinion.
How the work is structured
The person on the first call is the person who writes the last line. Nothing is briefed down, because there is no one to brief it down to.
That is only possible because the execution layer is machine-assisted and the judgment layer is not. The system handles volume. The decisions — what is worth saying, what is true, what gets cut — do not scale and are not meant to.
Who runs it
Fran Herrera
Founder · Abu Dhabi
Ten years building brands across three continents, in-house and on the agency side, on accounts for TikTok, Oreo, Brahma and PedidosYa. Direct work for Purina and the United Nations. Born in Salta, in the north of Argentina.
CRUDA is what that experience looks like pointed at one kind of client.