What Brand Studio produces

Two brands can sell the identical product from the identical manufacturer and one of them is worth several times the other. The difference is not the formulation. It is whether the thing means anything to the person looking at it.

Brand Studio is the part of &boom that does that work — the naming, identity, packaging and storefront design that sits between a catalogue product and a brand.

What you get

Name direction, if you need it. Options with reasoning, checked for the obvious collisions, rather than a list of available domains.

A wordmark and identity. The mark, the type, the palette, and the rules for using them. Built to survive being small on a bottle and legible on a phone, which is where most of it will actually be seen.

Packaging artwork. Designed against the container the manufacturer actually stocks — the real dieline, the real label area, the real fill size. This ordering matters and it is where most first-time launches lose a month: design first and source second, and the beautiful bottle you designed for turns out not to exist at your volume.

Product photography. Your product, shot for the storefront and for the places you will be posting it.

Storefront design. The Shopify theme built around the identity, with the product page written to set expectations properly — which is also the cheapest returns prevention there is.

How it runs

We start from the audience, not the moodboard. Who is buying, what they already use, and what they would have to believe to switch. A brand that looks good and means nothing is a more expensive version of no brand at all.

One direction, developed. Not five to choose between. Choosing between five is a way of making the client responsible for the decision they hired someone else to make. You get one recommendation with the reasoning, and it moves based on your response to it.

Packaging is checked against production before it is finished. The dieline comes from the manufacturer. Nothing is signed off on a rendering.

You get the files. Source artwork, logo in the formats you will need, the palette and type specification. Yours, not licensed from us.

What we would push back on

Worth knowing before you start, since a studio that agrees with everything is not worth hiring.

Ranges before a first product works. Designing a system for six products when one has not sold is expensive optionality. Design for one, build it so a second can join later.

Claims the product cannot support. Packaging copy is the fastest way to a returns problem and the slowest thing to fix, because it is printed. If the formulation does not do it, it does not go on the label.

Trend-chasing. The look that is everywhere in your category this year is, by definition, the look that will date your packaging at exactly the moment you have reordered it. Distinctive ages better than fashionable.

A name nobody can spell. If a customer hears it and cannot find it, it has failed at the one job a name has.

The part you keep doing

The studio produces the assets. It does not produce the brand.

What makes it a brand is consistency after launch — the same voice in the emails, the same standard on the product page, the same answer to "who is this for" a year later. That part is yours, and it is not a thing that can be handed over, because it is a series of small decisions made by whoever is running the business.

The work here is meant to make those decisions easy: a clear direction, in files you own, with the reasoning written down so the tenth decision is consistent with the first.

Related

What your Shopify store comes with covers where the storefront design ends up and who administers it.