What we do
Above the door
brand and identity
Customers recognise a business by a colour, a shape, a turn of phrase. Nobody has ever counted which of those you own outright.
Nobody builds a business for thirty years without building a brand at the same time. It happens whether anyone intends it or not, in a colour that got used because it was the ink the printer had, a phrase somebody’s father said to customers, a shape on a board that has been repainted four times and never quite redrawn.
What almost nobody has is a record of which parts of that are doing the work.
What you are already recognised by.
Measured rather than guessed. We take the name off and ask people who buy what you sell what your colour, your mark, your phrase and your packet belong to. Two numbers come back for each: how many knew, and how many said only you.
The system nobody ever wrote down.
Your mark drawn properly and made to work at every size it has to work at. Colour and type settled once. Templates for the things you actually make every week, so the next poster does not restart the argument. No new logo, and for a great many businesses this is the entire job.
Change that keeps what was working.
When the identity does need to move, for a new format or a new city or a generation taking over, it moves around the things the measurement said were load-bearing. Not through them.
And the launch, when there is one.
Naming, packaging, signage, the site, the campaign, and the film to carry it. Made by the people who did the measuring, which is why it tends to look like the business rather than like an agency.
Ask a hundred and fifty people who you are.
Not your customers. People who buy what you sell, from anyone.
We show them your colour with the name taken off it. Your shape. Your phrase. The face on the packet. One question each time, and it is always the same question. What does this belong to?
Two numbers come back for every asset. How many people knew. And of the people who named anybody, how many named only you.
The things that score on both are yours outright, and they are the things nobody should touch. Most businesses have one or two. Almost none have ever been told which.
Measure first. It is the cheapest part of this and it decides the rest.
The redesigns that went wrong in public went wrong the same way. Something got removed that customers had been quietly using to find the place, and nobody had checked which parts those were, because checking is unglamorous and hard to argue for in a room that has already seen the new drawings.
So nothing gets drawn here until we know what is holding weight.
Sometimes the answer is that nearly all of it is, and the right piece of work turns out to be writing down what already exists and stopping it drifting.
That is a smaller job than the one you came in asking for. We will say so.
Where we stop.
Drawing a typeface.
In Malayalam especially. That is a foundry’s work, it takes years rather than weeks, and we will introduce you to people who do it properly. What we do is choose, pair, and buy the licence in your name. Never ours.
Clearing and filing a trademark.
We will shortlist and check what can be checked. An attorney clears it and files it. Guessing at this is how a name gets used for two years and then lost.
Making the sign.
We design it, and we will stand at the press while it runs. Fabrication is your vendor or ours, billed to you directly, with nothing added on top.
Telling you what your brand is worth.
A different discipline carrying a different liability. That half of us trained in audit is a reason to be more careful here, not less.
And work that begins in the middle of a disagreement.
A project like this asks everyone with a claim on the business to agree on what it is. Where that is not settled, we would be taking money to run an argument, and the drawings would become the battleground. Settle it first. We will still be here.