Your rebrand won't fix that

Half the studios that come to us for a new identity don't need one. They need to say what they actually do. A fresh coat of paint on a locked door.

Here’s an uncomfortable thing to admit as a studio that sells brand work: most of the companies asking for a rebrand don’t have a brand problem. They have a clarity problem, and they’ve decided it’s a design problem because design is the bit you can point at and buy.

We can tell within about twenty minutes. The tell is when we ask what the company actually does, and three people give three different answers, and all of them use the word ‘platform’. No new logo survives that. You can wrap the most beautiful identity in the world around a business that can’t finish the sentence ‘we help ___ do ___’, and within a year it’ll feel just as muddled as the old one, because the muddle was never in the visuals.

This isn’t us talking ourselves out of work — we’d rather do the right work than the flattering work. Sometimes the right work is a brand. When a company knows exactly who it is and the current design is simply lying about it, a rebrand is the most powerful thing you can do, and we’ll fight for the budget. But when the confusion is internal, the honest move is to send them away to have the hard conversation first. A rebrand can express a decision. It cannot make one for you.

So before you brief a studio, try this: get your five most senior people in a room and have each write, alone, one sentence on what the company is for. If the sentences match, you might genuinely need us. If they don’t, you’ve just found the actual project — and it’s cheaper than a rebrand and worth more than one.