The brand designer who works only with companies under twenty people.
Nine years, perhaps thirty engagements, no agency, no team. A short conversation about a working life designed in deliberate opposition to the conventional brand-design career.
The designer is based in a small town outside Bristol, works alone, and has — by her own count — completed somewhere around thirty engagements over the past nine years. The engagements are almost without exception with companies of fewer than twenty employees. She has, in nine years, turned down several substantially larger commissions for reasons that became clear over the course of our conversation.
The conversation
Marigold: Let's start with the obvious question. Why under twenty people?
Designer: The honest answer is that the brand work I am interested in doing is, in my experience, considerably harder to do well at larger companies. The work I do — the actual strategic and visual work of helping a company figure out who it is — depends on being able to spend time with the people who actually make the decisions. At a small company, that is one or two people, usually the founders. At a larger company, it is rarely fewer than four or five people, sometimes a committee of ten or more, and the dynamics that produce in the room are, for me, much harder to work in.
M: Have you tested that?
D: Yes. I worked, for the first three years of my career, at an agency that mostly did brand work for mid-stage companies. I learned a great deal at the agency. I also learned that I did not, by temperament, enjoy the part of the work that involved managing the politics of decisions made by groups of stakeholders. I went independent in 2017. The decision to work only with smaller companies took another two years to become explicit, but it was, in retrospect, the consequence of having figured out what kind of working life I wanted.
M: How do you find the work?
D: Almost entirely by referral. The thirty engagements over nine years have come from, I think, four original clients. Each of those original clients introduced me to one or two other founders. The introductions have, over the years, formed a small but steady pipeline. I have not, in nine years, marketed myself in any meaningful way. I do not have a portfolio site. I do not post on the design social networks. I have a single page on the open web that lists my name, an email address, and one sentence.
"I am, in marketing terms, almost invisible. I am also, by my own count, fully booked at the rate I want to be booked at. The two are connected. The kind of client who reaches out through a referral is, in my experience, the kind of client I want to work with."
On what the work looks like
M: Tell me what an engagement actually looks like.
D: A typical engagement runs for about ten weeks. The first three weeks are conversation — I spend a substantial amount of time with the founders, usually in person, sometimes at their offices and sometimes at a coffee shop or restaurant near where they work. The conversation is about who the company is, what it is trying to do, what kind of customers it wants to attract, and — critically — what it does not want to be. I take a lot of notes. I draw a lot. I do not, in those first three weeks, produce any finished design work.
The middle four weeks are the visual exploration. I start, usually, with several quite different directions for the brand identity. I narrow down, with the founders, to one direction. I develop that direction in considerable detail: typography, colour, logo, the basic principles of the photography or illustration, the tone of voice. By the end of week seven, the brand identity is essentially complete.
The final three weeks are application: the marketing site, the app icon, the launch materials, the templates that will allow the founders to apply the brand consistently after I am gone. The deliverable, at the end of the engagement, is a finished brand and a small guide — usually around twenty pages — that explains the thinking and gives the founders what they need to continue applying it.
M: What does the engagement cost?
D: I charge a fixed price, agreed in advance. The exact number has, over nine years, drifted upwards from around £18,000 to currently around £35,000. The price is, by the standards of comparable agency work, considerably lower. The price is also, by the standards of what most small companies can comfortably afford, considerably higher than they would expect. The two facts are in tension with each other, and I have, over the years, become more comfortable holding the tension.
On the kind of client the model attracts
M: What kind of company can comfortably afford £35,000 for a brand engagement?
D: Not, in most cases, very-early-stage startups. The clients I work with are almost all companies that have been operating for somewhere between three and seven years, that have reached a level of revenue at which the brand work makes sense as an investment, and that have decided — usually after some painful experience of trying to do without — that the work is worth doing properly. They are not, in most cases, the kind of company that hires designers reflexively as part of a launch process. They are companies that have grown up enough to know what they need a designer for.
M: Do you ever work with very-early-stage companies?
D: Occasionally, on a different basis. I have, over the years, done a small number of engagements for pre-launch companies at a substantially reduced price, in exchange for a small equity participation. I have, in three of those cases, eventually been bought out at amounts that made the engagement very economic. I have, in the other cases, made no money on the equity. The expected value of the arrangement has, over the years, been roughly comparable to my standard fee, with much higher variance. I no longer take these engagements unless the founders are people I particularly want to work with.
On the long-term relationships
M: You said you have had perhaps four original clients who introduced you to others. Are you still in touch with them?
D: Yes, all four. Two of them are still customers, in the sense that they have, over the years, come back to me for additional pieces of work as their companies have evolved. The other two have sold their companies, and are no longer running businesses I would work with, but they remain in touch and have continued to refer people to me. The relationships are, in many cases, the most valuable thing the original engagements produced. The brand work itself is finite. The relationship, if you do the work well, is not.
M: What would you say to a brand designer who was considering a similar path?
D: I would say that it is a smaller-scale path than the conventional brand-design career, and that the smallness is part of the point. The trade-off is real: I will, in my working life, do many fewer engagements than the equivalent designer at an agency. I will, on the other hand, do those engagements at a depth that the agency model does not really permit, and I will do them with founders I have chosen to work with rather than founders the agency has assigned me to. The financial rewards are modest but adequate. The professional rewards — by which I mean the satisfaction of doing the work well — are, in my experience, considerably higher than they were when I was at the agency.
M: Any regrets?
D: Almost none. The one regret, if I am being honest, is that I have built almost no public profile around the work. I have not, in nine years, written about what I do, given talks, or otherwise made my approach visible. The result is that I have probably had less influence on how other designers think about this kind of work than I might have done. I am, in my current decade, beginning to think more about whether that is a gap worth closing. I am not, yet, sure what the answer is.
What I left thinking
I left the conversation with the impression that this kind of designer — independent, deliberately small-scale, working only with founders directly — is doing some of the most carefully considered brand work in the contemporary market. The work does not, in most cases, get talked about. The designers who do it tend, by temperament, not to be the designers who write or speak publicly about their approach. The work is, accordingly, considerably more influential than its public profile suggests. The companies that benefit from it are quietly distinguishable from the companies that have hired more conventional brand operations, and the difference is visible in their marketing surfaces years after the engagement has ended.
If I had to characterise what these designers offer that the more conventional alternatives do not, I would say: the willingness to take the time to understand what the company actually is, before producing any of the artefacts the company will use to present itself. The willingness sounds, in the abstract, easy. In practice, it requires a working model that gives the designer permission to spend three weeks of a ten-week engagement in conversation, without delivering visible output. That permission is, in most agency contexts, structurally difficult. In the independent context this designer has built, it is the default. The output, downstream, reflects the difference.