What a brand identity actually costs.

If you have spent an afternoon looking for this answer, you will have found two kinds of page. One offers a logo for £99 by tomorrow morning. The other is an agency site with no prices at all, just a contact form and a promise that every engagement is bespoke.

Neither is much help when you are trying to work out whether you can afford to do this properly, and whether doing it properly is worth it.

The numbers

Brand identity work starts at £5,000. That covers positioning, a visual identity and guidelines for a smaller business: enough to be consistent, enough to hand to a printer or a developer without them guessing.

Most identity projects for an established SME land between £10,000 and £25,000. That range buys proper discovery, naming if you need it, a system rather than a logo, and enough application work that you can actually use the thing on the Monday after we finish.

Above £25,000 you are usually paying for scale rather than better design. More stakeholders to bring along, more markets, more touchpoints, research that has to stand up in a boardroom, or a rollout that runs for months after launch.

Below £5,000 we would tell you to spend it elsewhere. Not because cheap design is beneath us, but because under that number nobody can afford to do the thinking, and identity without the thinking is decoration you will replace in two years.

What actually moves the number

Four things, roughly in order of how much they matter.

How many people have to agree. This is the big one and almost nobody expects it. A founder who can decide in the room is a different project to a board of six with a marketing committee. Not because consensus is bad, but because every additional decision-maker adds rounds, and rounds are the thing you are paying for.

Whether it needs a name. Naming is its own discipline and it is slower than people think. Generating candidates is quick. Finding one that survives a Companies House search, a trademark screen, a domain check and being said out loud in a meeting is the work. Add £3,000 to £8,000 depending on how contested the category is.

How many surfaces it has to work on. A consultancy that needs a website, a deck and a document template is a smaller job than a hospitality brand that needs signage, menus, uniforms, packaging, vehicle livery and a booking journey. The identity is the same size; the system around it is not.

Whether you want us to stay for the rollout. Handing over a PDF is cheaper than being there while a hundred people apply it. It is also how most good identities quietly decay.

What you are paying for that isn't the logo

The logo is the smallest part of the job and the part everyone fixates on. If you priced our time by output, you would conclude we charge several thousand pounds for a shape.

What you are actually buying is a set of decisions that hold. Who you compete with and what they all sound like. What you can credibly say that they cannot. The typeface, the colour, the layout logic, the tone, and crucially the rules for what happens when the system meets something nobody anticipated. A trade stand. A spreadsheet. A shop window in bad weather.

You are also buying the ability to defend it. When a well-meaning colleague asks why the logo isn't bigger, someone needs an answer better than personal taste. Guidelines that explain the reasoning survive that conversation. Guidelines that only show the artwork do not.

How we structure it

Every project runs in four stages: discover, define, design, deliver. The cost is split evenly across them, and we only move to the next stage when you are happy with the last.

That structure exists to remove the single biggest anxiety a business has about commissioning design, which is handing over a lot of money at the start and hoping. You are never more than a quarter of the budget away from a decision point.

You get a fixed price in writing before anything starts. We have never sold hours, partly because measuring design in hours rewards the wrong things, and partly because nobody wants an invoice that arrives as a surprise.

What cheap actually costs

There is a version of this where you spend £500 and get something usable. It happens. If you are testing an idea and expect to rebrand within eighteen months, that might be the right call, and we would say so.

The failure mode is subtler than bad design. It is design that works in exactly one context and falls apart everywhere else. A logo that only reads at one size. A colour that dies in print. No type rules, so eleven people pick eleven fonts. Six months later you are paying someone to sort it out, and you have spent the difference twice.

The other cost is comparative. Cheap design tends to be trained on what already exists, so it produces the average of your category. If the point of the exercise was to look unlike your competitors, average is the one outcome you cannot use.

A better first question

Cost is a fair thing to ask and we are not going to be coy about it. But it is rarely the question that decides whether this works.

The more useful one is: what has to be true in twelve months for this to have been worth doing? More inbound enquiries. Charging more without losing people. Being taken seriously by a client you cannot currently reach. Recruiting people who currently pick your competitor.

Answer that and the budget usually answers itself, because you can see what the outcome is worth. It also tells us what we are actually solving, which changes what we make.

If you want to talk it through, we will give you a straight answer on scope and cost, including whether we think you need us at all.