Brand identity that survives being used.
Most identities look their best on the day they're presented and get quietly worse from there. We're more interested in what a brand looks like eighteen months in, once a hundred people who weren't in the room have had to apply it to work nobody anticipated.
Strategy before anything visual
We start with the commercial problem. Who are you actually competing with, what do they all sound like, and what can you say that they can't? If that isn't settled, everything downstream is decoration.
This is usually the shortest phase and the one that determines whether the rest is any good.
Naming, when it's needed
Naming is its own discipline and we treat it as one. Availability checking, trademark screening and linguistic sense-checking are part of the process rather than a problem discovered later.
We named Formara, a human factors consultancy, and built the brand and website around it.
A system, not a logo
A logo is the smallest part of an identity and the part people fixate on. The system around it does the actual work: type, colour, layout, photography, tone, and the rules for how they behave when they meet something unexpected.
We build for the awkward cases. A trade stand, a spreadsheet template, a shop window in bad weather. If it holds there it will hold anywhere.
Rollout is where brands break
Handing over a PDF and leaving is how good identities decay. We stay through application, whether that's us doing the work or supporting an in-house team to do it.
It's what we did for Kuoni, taking a brand they already had and making it work across retail, campaign, print and digital.
Common questions
- How much does a brand identity cost?
- Brand identity projects start at £5,000. That covers positioning, identity and guidelines for a smaller business. Larger programmes with naming, research and rollout across retail and digital run considerably higher. Whatever the scope, we give you a fixed price in writing before anything starts.
- How long does it take?
- Typically eight to sixteen weeks from kickoff to guidelines, depending on how many stakeholders need to be brought along and whether naming is involved.
- Do you work with businesses outside travel and hospitality?
- Yes. Those are the sectors we know best, but we work with ambitious companies anywhere who value the same approach. Recent work includes engineering, film and professional services.