How to brand a start up business - Strut and Fibre

When you are looking to start your own business it’s easy to put your brand at the back of your list of things you need to do. Money can be tight and most of your investment is probably being used to get your product to market. Of course you can't really have a brand without a product but it’s very difficult to establish a product without a brand. Competition is tough and you need to stand out in the market. When you look at the brands you admire, their product and brand are seamlessly integrated. Their message is clear and consistent and their product delivers on that message. This doesn’t happen by accident. 

Of course that's easy for a branding agency to say, so at Delight we decided to put our money where our mouth is and create our own start up brand - Strut and Fibre, a premium online digital print service for business cards, postcards and poster prints.

Before we had a name or created our brand identity we began with the same strategic process we use to position our clients brands. 

• Identify what the key attributes of the business are. What is it our business does?
• Identify what the personality of the business is. How do we want to be perceived?
• Identify our source of authority is. What gives us the credibility to operate in the market?
• Identify our promise is to the customer. What impression do we want to leave the customer with every encounter with our brand?
• Identify the heart of our brand. What is the core emotional value and motivation of the brand?

By asking these questions and building a brand model from the answers we were able to achieve the following.

• Establish what our tone of voice should be.
• Provide a route to finding our brand name.
• Understand and start to explore what the visual direction and brand identity should look like.
• Create a brand blueprint document that would not only provide us with our creative brief but also a tool to communicate to our partners and suppliers how we were looking to position the brand.

We launched Strut and Fibre in September. It’s not easy starting a brand and because we’ve done it ourselves, we understand the pressure you are going through. If you’d like to find out more about Delight, how we started Strut and Fibre and how we can help your business, you can contact us here.