Services
You can buy one piece. You cannot buy the last one first.
Positioning, naming and voice, identity direction, launch. Take one or take the sequence. What does not work is a launch with nothing decided behind it, which is the same problem at a higher volume.
What each one involves
- 01Strategy
Positioning
We start from what is already true and badly filed. Interviews with the people who sell your product, four or five who bought it, one who bought somebody else's, and whatever numbers you were keeping anyway.
What comes back is a written position: who you are for, what you are better at, and the claim that still stands when a competitor says the same thing louder. It is short because it has to be carried around in somebody's head. A position that needs a deck has already failed its first test.
- 02Words
Naming and voice
A name has to work spoken down a bad phone line, typed into a search box, and printed on something small. We generate widely, cut hard, and bring a short list with the case for each one and a first look at what is already registered.
Voice is the part that gets skipped and then missed for years. We write the rules the way somebody writing an email would use them: the words you use, the words you have retired, and the same paragraph written well and written badly, side by side, so the difference is arguable rather than a matter of taste.
- 03Design
Identity direction
Type, color, layout and photography, decided together and written down once. We build the things you send every week before the things you make once a year, because a company is met on an invoice far more often than on a billboard.
You get working files you own and a guide short enough that a new hire will read it. If your team cannot apply it without calling us, we did not finish. That is ours to fix, not a support contract to sell you.
- 04Launch
Launch and campaign
A brand nobody has met is a document. We plan the first weeks in public: what goes out, in what order, to whom, and what each piece is there to do. Staff first, then customers, then everyone else, because the worst way to hear about your employer is from a stranger.
Then we help make it, and we stay through the launch and the two weeks after it, which is when the questions nobody anticipated arrive.
What an engagement includes
The same shape every time, whatever the scope. Ask about any line here before you sign anything.
- Who does the work
The people on the first call. There are six of us and nobody behind us to hand your project to once the contract is signed.
- How long it runs
Eight to twelve weeks, with a date on every stage, agreed in writing before the first invoice. Tell us the scope and you get a number rather than a shrug.
- What it costs
A fixed fee against a fixed scope, billed in three stages. Anything outside that scope is quoted before it happens. We have never sent a client an invoice they had not already seen.
- What you get
Working files you own outright, a written guide in plain language, and the reasoning behind each decision, so the next person does not undo it by accident.
- What we need from you
One person who can decide without convening anybody, about three hours a week, and an honest account of what has already been tried and did not take.
- After the handover
We answer the phone. Most clients come back for the next piece of work rather than pay a retainer for one they do not need yet.
Ask for the engagement letter before you decide anything. It is two pages and it says exactly this, in these words.
Working with us
Can we hire you for the name alone?
Yes, and about a third of our work is exactly that. If the position underneath the name is unsettled we will say so first, because a name cannot carry a decision nobody has made yet.
Do you do the design as well as the strategy?
Yes, and we would rather do both. Strategy that never gets made into anything is a document nobody opens twice.
We already have a logo we like. Is this a rebuild?
Usually not. Most of what you have is worth keeping. The work is saying out loud which parts those are, and which two are quietly costing you money.
Who owns the finished work?
You do, on final payment: final files, working files, and every route we showed you and you did not pick.
Are we too small for you?
Ask. We have a floor on scope rather than on company size, and we would rather send you somewhere better suited than take a project we would do badly.
Start where it hurts.
Describe the problem in a paragraph and we will tell you which piece of work it is, including when the answer is none of them.