Building the brands people prefer

Honestly, the answer is probably less about our service positioning than you’d expect. There are lots of brand and creative agencies out there, and the reality is there are some genuinely amazing creatives and some really amazing brand agencies doing remarkable work. We’re not pretending otherwise.

What we want to define ourselves around is being the destination for the people who want to create things that earn their place in culture. Things that can sit out there in the world and make it a bit better. We want to help brands become as much cultural contributors as the creators and creatives they work with, and that’s the same belief behind our sub-brand Sayless, which works with brands that want to act more like creators than advertisers.

The thing is, we’re creators in our DNA. Our live music tastemaker series Mood on the Roof wasn’t a client brief. Nobody paid us to build a live music series on our studio rooftop, and nobody told us to keep running it for more than half a decade. We just made it because we wanted to make something that sits out there in the world. Part tastemaker, part cultural archive, where people can discover new artists and be a part of something. Since our first concert in August 2020, we’ve been able to tap some of the most exciting musical talent out there (Benson Boone, Alec Benjamin, Griff, dodie, Keli Holiday to name a few). That impulse to make something without anyone commissioning us to, is the same one that shows up in the client work. You can see it in the team, who came up through film and documentary and music rather than other agencies. The work ends up different because the company behind it is actually a bit different.

What you won’t find is us telling you we “bring brands to life” or that we do “bold, brave design” or that we’re “human-centred” or whatever the category convention is this year. Every agency says they’re strategic. Every agency says they care about quality. We’d rather not substitute a value offer for an actual point of view. And we’d rather just show you the work and let you decide whether the company behind it feels like the right fit.

Brands with something at stake. The common thread is that the problem is commercial: pricing power, market perception, competitive positioning, or recruitment. Our best clients know something is off and they want a partner who’ll tell them what’s actually going on.

The trigger is usually a business event: moving upmarket, entering a new category, going through a merger or restructure, launching something that doesn’t fit the current brand, or realising the business has just flat out outgrown the brand. That last one comes up all the time ie. it’s a good company, but the brand’s still wearing the same fit it launched in and it’s doing them no favours.

Yep, all the time. We mostly come in for the brand and creative (the positioning, the identity, the video, the photography, the website) and we’re used to working alongside in-house marketing teams, PR agencies, or activation partners who handle the channels. We’re not a full-service marketing agency and we don’t pretend to be. Honestly, the work is better when everyone stays in their lane and nobody’s trying to be the agency that does everything.

The setup that works great is when the brand and creative are locked and loaded, and the marketing team or media agency can take that work and run it through their channels. We can give them the story, the creative system, and the assets. They distribute it. Nobody steps on anyone’s toes and the work throughout that whole chain is done by specialists rather than a ‘Jack of all trades, master of none.’

We don’t niche by category, but we absolutely niche by attitude. We’ve worked across government, entertainment, property, technology, FMCG, consumer, so pretty broad range honestly. The thing our clients have in common isn’t the sector, but that they recognise good creative and good brands are a competitive lever, and they actually care about how they show up. If the brief is just a quick and dirty churn work, honestly, we’ll point you somewhere good, but if you want to properly outmanoeuvre the competition and you care about the culture and creative baseline, we’re into it regardless of who you are.

Yeah, we’re based in Sydney and Canberra but we work internationally all the time — we’ve usually got at least one international project on the go. We’ve worked across the UK, US, EU, Japan, China, India, and Pacific countries like Tonga and Vanuatu. A lot of our work is with multinationals where the brand needs to travel across markets, and we’ve got no issues getting on a plane when the project needs us there.

Reach out through the contact page or just email us directly. Tell us a bit about the brand, what you’re trying to do, and where things are at. Doesn’t need to be a polished brief, we’d rather hear it in your own words. We’ll have a conversation, work out if there’s a fit, and if there is we’ll put together a project outline based on what’s actually going on rather than a one-size-fits-all proposal.

Depends on the scope, but the rough guide: strategy on its own is usually 3 months. Strategy through to identity and key brand assets is 4 to 5 months. If the engagement includes a website, you’re looking at 5 to 6 months end to end.

The variable is usually how quickly decisions get made on your side. Engagements with one or two decision-makers who can make calls in the room move fast. Engagements where every round of feedback needs to go through six people who weren’t in the workshops tend to drag. We’ll be upfront about that at the start so everyone knows what keeps things moving and what doesn’t.

Both. We work with established businesses and startups. Most of our work is with companies that have been around long enough to know the brand isn’t doing what it should, but we’ve done some of our favourite projects with founders who are building something from scratch.

Here’s the thing with startups though. The investment into brand and creative is proportionally a much bigger percentage of the capital than it is for an established business. And that changes the psychology of the whole engagement. When you’re an established company spending $150k on a rebrand, it’s a very small percentage in an annual budget. When you’re a startup spending $80k on a brand, that might be a quarter of your runway. That’s a different kind of decision, and the fear that comes with it is real.

The startup engagements that have worked well for us are with founders who understand two things: that brand is competitive infrastructure, and that at some point you have to try your hardest to not let investment anxiety create a self-fulfilling prophecy, and let the work become something. If that’s where your head’s at, the stage of the business doesn’t matter to us.