Designing brands that thrive in the real world

That means design­ing with your real con­straints in mind: the size of your team, the speed you need to work, the vol­ume you pro­duce, and the chan­nels you need to fill.

Right now, every mar­ket­ing team is under pres­sure to do more with less: tighter bud­gets, short­er dead­lines, high­er expec­ta­tions. And that’s where brands most often fail, not because the strat­e­gy is wrong, but because they nev­er tru­ly land­ed.

As Kuoni’s Mar­ket­ing Direc­tor, Car­o­line Child, told us before their rebrand:

Because a launch is just a moment. A brand only comes alive when your peo­ple use it every day, in the messy, high-pres­sure, ​“need it yes­ter­day” world they work in.

That’s why our job doesn’t stop at the cre­ative idea. We turn brand think­ing into tools, sys­tems, and habits that make it easy to deliv­er great work at pace. We stay with you to stress-test, fix, and refine, so the brand doesn’t just look good in the guide­lines, it works in the real world.

Brand­ing means business

Brand is so much more than how you look. It’s how you work. It shapes your direc­tion, your deci­sion-mak­ing, and how you show up for cus­tomers and col­leagues.

That’s why our work goes beyond the mar­ket­ing team. We help every part of the busi­ness, from prod­uct and retail to ser­vice and HR, under­stand how to use the brand and apply its prin­ci­ples in their day-to-day. Some­times that’s through work­shops, some­times through new tools or process­es, but always with the goal of embed­ding the brand into the way peo­ple work.

A strong brand doesn’t just look the busi­ness — it dri­ves the busi­ness. It’s the oper­at­ing sys­tem behind your cul­ture, your cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, and your com­mer­cial growth.

How it lands, inter­nal­ly and exter­nal­ly, mat­ters just as much as the big reveal.

Proof in practice

Every brand chal­lenge is dif­fer­ent, so the way we work is nev­er one-size-fits-all. Some clients come to us under extreme time pres­sure, launch­ing in weeks, pro­duc­ing over a thou­sand pieces of con­tent, and need­ing a sys­tem their team can use imme­di­ate­ly. Oth­ers need to fix the biggest pain point hold­ing them back: coher­ence across chan­nels, brand assets that actu­al­ly get used, or tools that make imple­men­ta­tion effort­less for a non-spe­cial­ist team.

We start with the real­i­ty on the ground: your time­lines, your team’s skills, your oper­a­tional pres­sures. For some, that means design­ing for speed and min­i­mal exter­nal input. For oth­ers, it’s about cre­at­ing depth and breadth, the asset libraries, tem­plates, and deci­sion-mak­ing tools that turn a sin­gle logo into a brand with longevi­ty. What­ev­er the start­ing point, the goal is the same: a brand that works in your world, not just ours.

Kuoni

Mak­ing brand work day to day

We rebrand­ed Kuoni dur­ing their busiest sales peri­od, with a small, stretched team and no mar­gin for error. The chal­lenge was two-fold: inte­grate the new yel­low brand into a tra­di­tion­al­ly red sales sea­son, and give the design team tools to deliv­er high-vol­ume con­tent at speed — all while ensur­ing the shift would rip­ple through prod­uct and ser­vice, not just marketing.

From day one, we pulled in mar­ket­ing, design, prod­uct, retail, and ser­vice, not just to inform them, but to inspire them. Through work­shops, we explored how brand prin­ci­ples could shape every­day deci­sions, from the way sales teams spoke with cus­tomers to how retail and ser­vice teams cre­at­ed experiences.

Avan­ti

Sim­pler. Faster. Unmis­tak­ably Avanti.

Their in-house team was pro­duc­ing vast amounts of con­tent week­ly, and with insuf­fi­cient assets they had to rein­vent the wheel with every brief. We worked close­ly with the team to evolve Avanti’s brand to be faster, sim­pler, and more distinctive.

By get­ting close to the way the brand and teams actu­al­ly worked, we found the sweet spot: how to make the biggest dif­fer­ence with the least change and out­lay. Work­ing across mar­ket­ing, oper­a­tions, and comms, we pilot­ed our think­ing through small­er live projects like Super­fare and Club Avan­ti before rolling them con­fi­dent­ly into the masterbrand.

Which?

Joined-up brand, joined-up teams

In-house teams had been pro­duc­ing huge vol­umes of con­tent in iso­la­tion, cre­at­ing incon­sis­ten­cy with­in the brand and forc­ing them to start from scratch on every brief rather than work­ing from a sim­ple, stream­lined system.

We began with a clear new brand idea, then dug into the com­plex require­ments, from the imme­di­a­cy of sales and cam­paigns to the longer hori­zons of prod­uct and ser­vice, to define what the brand tru­ly need­ed to deliv­er. From there, we replaced a patch­work of siloed approach­es with a uni­fied brand and iden­ti­ty, anchored by a full redesign of the logo and brand world. The result was an iden­ti­ty built not just to look dis­tinc­tive, but to work seam­less­ly across every chan­nel, team, and moment.

What suc­cess looks like

- Your team cham­pi­ons the brand, not just man­ages it

- The brand feels usable, not just beautiful

- Roll­outs are stress-test­ed and adopt­ed quickly

- The busi­ness is aligned, inside and out

A brand that doesn’t land isn’t just a missed cre­ative oppor­tu­ni­ty, it’s a missed com­mer­cial one. If your team can’t use it, believe in it, and adapt it under pres­sure, it will fade faster than it took to reveal. The brands that win aren’t the ones with the biggest unveil­ing. They’re the ones built to thrive in the every­day, where the dead­lines are tight, the inbox is full, and the cus­tomer is watching.

Because a brand isn’t some­thing you launch. It’s some­thing you live.