No solutions, only trade-offs: branding

Every branding option we put in front of you has a shadow side. Here they are, out loud.

Seventeen minutes of me walking through all three, if you’d rather watch than read.

“There are no solutions, only trade-offs.”

I picked that line up from Jocko Willink about a year ago and it has quietly restructured almost every conversation I have. Client calls, team decisions, even personal stuff, it is one of those sentences that highlights something you knew all along but couldn't articulate.

Here’s why it lands so hard:

We don’t hold solutions in our heads as improvements. We hold them as endings. The new brand, the new site, the new hire, the new tool: whatever it is, we work it up into the thing that closes the loop and makes everything downstream of it easier. Not better, solved.

That is never what happens. Not once, in ten years of doing this, have I watched a decision arrive without a bill attached.

What I can actually guarantee you is this: the option you’re leaning toward has a shadow side you have not counted yet. Nobody’s hiding it from you, you just haven’t looked, because when you’re excited about a direction you become blind to the possibilities ahead.

So the useful question isn’t which option is right.

It’s which pain you’d rather live with, because you’re getting some either way.

Where this shows up in branding

Founders come to us wanting their brand fixed and I put three routes in front of them. Revolution, evolution, optimization. They don’t compound on each other, they decrease in involvement, and the honest version of each one has a cost sitting right next to the upside.

Here’s the shadow side of all three, said out loud, which is not how anyone normally sells you a service.

1. Revolution

Total overhaul. Two to four weeks. This is the route when you’ve got no uniform visuals, nothing worth keeping, no daylight between you and your competition, and you’re competing on price because your visuals aren’t cueing enough legitimacy for anyone to believe you’re worth more.

It starts with a brand blueprint, which is a set of exercises built to tease out what actually inspires you, plus what your user is going through and how their life is different because of you. Out of that come the muses, and out of the muses comes a creative direction: typography, color, pattern, texture, the whole foundation that every future asset gets built on top of.

The reason that matters is that the inspiration comes from outside your industry, so the result is genuinely unencumbered. One founder’s direction came out of a cabin floating on a lake in Michigan. Another came from a pub in the UK with vibrant red walls, flowers hanging out the windows, and a seashell texture running through the whole building. My favorite came from Erebor, because the founders were enormous Lord of the Rings fans, and we pulled the color and the geometry out of a Dwarvish city and built a brand on it.

Tandem came out the other side with a different name and a different position in the market. Ruya too, a new name, new logo, new palette, new identity, built to make enterprise contracts with hospitals feel plausible coming from them.

The upside:

It’s yours, nobody can hold a candle to it, and your team actually believes in it. That last part gets underrated constantly. An aesthetic that came from the founder’s own head is one the whole company will defend.

The shadow side:

Everything you have ever made is now out of date. Every deck, every ad, every page, every PDF a salesperson emails. The two to four weeks is the part people focus on, and it’s the smaller number. The real cost is the retrofit queue behind it, and the queue is longer than the project.

Additionally, if you are an established brand, this weighs heavier. There is a reason Amazon and Coca-Cola go through "rebrands" that don't feel like tectonic shifts, they would lose more than they would gain. Less so with a brand that has just gained product-market-fit or is not yet a household name.

Evolution

One to two weeks, at least to nail the direction. This is the route when you’ve got some pieces worth keeping and a lot of gaps around them. Usually a logo and a color, sometimes just the color.

HOALife is the clean example. They loved their logo, flat out did not want to change it, and the orange was different enough from everyone else in their category to survive. What they didn’t have was anything else: no graphics, no visual distinction, nothing doing intentional work around the logo. So we kept the two things and built the rest.

Practically, the direction gets developed against the website instead of against a muse. We take the existing site and play with type, icon, color, a little shape, and pull three distinct directions out of it.

The upside:

Less time up front, and you keep the equity in the thing people already recognize while refreshing the visuals.

The shadow side:

A bit subtler and it’s the one I’d want you to sit with.

Because we’re not pulling in outside inspiration, you don’t get that collision between something from another world and your product. It’s the design team looking at your site and going “here are some ideas I have,” which is a polite way of saying I’m winging it with taste instead of building from a source. It’ll probably be different from your competition and nicer than what currently exists, but it won’t be unrepeatable.

And there’s a second cost, which is that evolution can be a half measure dressed as a decision. You keep the existing assets because keeping them feels responsible, and sometimes those assets are genuinely not good. I see the reverse-order version of this a lot: the product got redesigned first, so now the marketing is being retrofitted to match the product’s aesthetic, when the brand should have set the direction and the product should have followed.

Then the kicker: you still have to update everything else anyway, because the type and the graphics changed. You paid less up front and got most of the same retrofit bill.

Optimization

This is the route when your assets are actually good and the execution is the culprit. Sometimes a designer built you something solid years ago and it’s held up, but it never made the jump to the marketing site, the ads, or the email creative.

Sensible was exactly that. Great visual language, a strong palette, genuinely unusual patterns, good typefaces. All the foundational pieces were sitting right there, just not being used well. So we came in, refined what was already theirs, and added a little on top: some custom illustrations, some finesse on the palette and the patterns.

The upside:

Put simply, speed and an immediate jump in perceived value, as well as a serious structural advantage: it can ship alongside what already exists. A new homepage built out of your existing assets won’t look completely alien next to your other pages, your live ad campaigns, or your email sequences. Nothing marketing related has to be paused or reconfigured en masse.

The shadow side:

Doing one page well makes every page next to it look worse. I have watched this happen more than once. We take the homepage as far as it can go using nothing but their own assets, and the pages beside it don’t just look older, they look neglected, and the effect is louder precisely because they’re sitting in the same navigation.

The bigger cost, though, is the one nobody wants to hear. Optimization can be a way of delaying an overhaul you already know you need. If the assets don’t line up with your positioning anymore, don’t fit the segments you’re going after now, or never got built for the form factors this job requires today, then polishing them is just a nicer-looking version of putting it off.

Nobody sits perfectly in one bucket

There’s real spillover between these, and you should use it. Love your logo, hate everything else? Go revolution and carry the logo in, as long as it survives the chosen direction. Want a new mark but your assets are fine? Then we just draw the mark.

The three routes aren’t cages. They’re a way of asking how much change you’re actually here for, and what you’re willing to pay for it, in time, in retrofit, in uniqueness given up.

Neither one is the wrong answer. They’re trade-offs, the real mistake is picking one and pretending it doesn’t have a cost.

— Zach 😎

PS. Reply and tell me which bucket you think you’re in. I’ll tell you if I agree, and I’ll tell you what it’s going to cost you.