Before you choose an agency, decide whether you need a new brand at all. An agency that only sells new brands will find that you need one.
Reset or rebuild
A brand that looks different everywhere it shows up is usually a sound brand applied badly. The logo is fine. What is missing is the rules: which version goes where, which colors sit together, what a post or a deck is built from.
Fixing that is a reset. Ours starts at $8,500 and takes ten working days: an audit of every place the brand lives, fixed rules for the logo and the type, and color ramps with the contrast measured. It is not a new logo, new type, a strategy or a name. Those are a new brand, and that starts at $20,000.
What to look at
Judge an agency by the pieces of a client’s brand it did not make. A logo on a clean mockup tells you very little. Look at what the client’s own team has made since: the posts, the decks, the pages added after launch. If those hold together, the agency built rules. If they don’t, it built a logo.
What to ask
Ask the agency’s past clients what happened to their own ideas. David Chang at Memory House said our first draft came back “elevating my initial ideas with thoughtful details”. That is the answer to listen for: your idea, made better, and still yours.
Then ask about the money before the first call, and about the rounds. Ours are two per phase, and after that $300 an hour, quoted and approved in writing before the work starts. An agency that can’t tell you what a third round costs has not decided yet.
When it is a no
A good agency turns work down, and will tell you why. We say no when there is no budget set, and when no one on your side will own the brand after it is delivered. Below $6,500 we will point you to someone better suited.
If the brand and the site are both in question, they are one job. Here that is done together, from $45,000 over six to ten weeks.