Discovery — listening before deciding
Weeks 1–8 — 202442 customer interviews, stakeholder mapping, and a competitive read. The finding: customers already used platform language the brand refused to.
Case study · 2024–2025
Rebuilding the brand from the inside.
Fourteen months with a 200-person enterprise SaaS: new positioning, new identity, new site. Outcome: +38% inbound, +14% close rate.
01The projectClient anonymised by agreement
Four chapters, fourteen months.
A nine-year-old B2B platform had outgrown its internal-IT-tool positioning. This is how the rebuild ran, in order.
Strategy — the platform-of-record position
Weeks 9–162024Identity — a system, not a logo swap
Weeks 17–342025Rollout — six months, zero whiplash
Weeks 35–602025
The outcome
+38%
Inbound demos per month
+14%
Sales close rate
-22%
Cost per acquisition
$8.4M
Incremental ARR, year one
What actually moved.
The numbers a rebrand is usually too shy to publish. Measured across the two quarters after rollout against the two before discovery, same sales team, same pricing.
PositioningIdentityDesign systemWeb
Before and after
What actually changed
Measured across the two quarters after rollout against the two before discovery. Same sales team, same pricing, same product.
| Feature | Before the rebuild | After rollout |
|---|---|---|
How the company described itself | Internal IT tool | Platform of record |
Inbound demos per month | 61 | 84 +38% |
Sales close rate | 18% | 21% +14% relative |
Cost per acquisition | $4,100 | $3,200 −22% |
Time to first sales conversation | 3 calls of explaining | Starts at the price |
Marketing site templates | 4, hand-built each time | 11, tokenised, owned in-house |
Who could ship a new page | Agency, 3 weeks | Their team, same day |
“They renamed what we already were. That sounds small. It changed how every deal conversation starts.”
VP Marketing, the client
02The engagementOne team, end to end
What this project included.
01
Positioning + voice
Research-led positioning, message architecture, and a voice guide with before/after rewrites for every core page.
02
Identity + system
Mark, type, colour, tokens, and a documented component library the in-house team now owns.
03
Website + rollout
Marketing-site templates, in-product copy refresh across 200+ surfaces, and a six-month phased rollout plan.
03How we workedWeekly written updates
Slow start, fast middle, careful end.
Research first
Eight weeks before a single visual. Every later decision traces to something a customer said.
Decisions in writing
Positioning, scope, and trade-offs live in shared documents — the client could always answer "why is it like this."
Ship to their team
Everything handed off documented and tokenised. The measure of the system is what they built with it after we left.
Phase the rollout
Six months, three phases, no big-bang. Customers experienced continuity; the market experienced news.
A note
A note about publishing this,
Most rebrand case studies stop at the logo. That is because the numbers usually are not there, and when they are, the client rarely lets you print them.
This one let us — anonymised, but real, and checked against their own dashboards before it went up. Fourteen months is a long time to be inside a company, and the honest summary is that the identity was the smallest part of it. The work was getting two hundred people to say the same sentence about what they sell.
If that sounds like where you are, the first conversation is free and usually short. I will tell you if a rebrand is not the thing you need.
The studio
Founder + lead, on every project
The client is happy to take a reference call once we have agreed a project shape.
04One project at a time
About engagements like this
- How long does a project this size take?
- Twelve to sixteen months for a full reposition + identity + site. Smaller scopes — identity only, site only — run three to six.
- What does it cost?
- Fixed fee, quoted after a scoping conversation and paid by phase. This engagement was six figures; smaller scopes are not.
- Do you work alongside in-house teams?
- Always — the handoff is the deliverable. Everything ships documented, tokenised, and owned by your team at the end.
- Can we talk to the client?
- Under NDA, yes. References are arranged once we've agreed a project shape.
Got a project like this?
A paragraph about where your brand is stuck is enough to start. I reply within two business days.
One project at a time · currently booking next year
Tell me about it
Where the brand is now, where the business is going, and what's in the way.
- studio@example.com
- Brooklyn, NY
- Within two business days