There’s a problem every founder faces at the start.
You know what you’re building is real. You’ve done the thinking. You understand the market. You believe — with good reason — that this is going to work. But the people you need to convince don’t know you yet. All they have is what they can see.
Which means your brand isn’t just a logo or a website at launch. It’s evidence. It’s the thing that tells investors, potential partners, and first clients whether to take you seriously before you’ve had the chance to prove yourself.
This is the story of how one start-up used brand strategy to close that gap — and what happened when they got it right.
The brief
Jon Holden came to me at a critical moment. Iterum, a London-based start-up, was preparing to launch. The business had real substance behind it — a clear proposition, a strong founding team, and a market that made sense. What it didn’t have was a brand that reflected any of that.
The challenge wasn’t unusual. Founders at launch stage often prioritise product over presentation, and understandably so. But it becomes a problem the moment you need to put your business in front of investors or clients who are making judgements based on first impressions.
Jon’s brief, in essence, was this: we need to look like a business worth taking seriously, before we have the track record to prove it.
Starting with strategy
The instinct for most founders at this point is to brief a designer on a logo and get moving. The brief lands, the work starts, and a few weeks later something looks the part — but doesn’t quite feel right, and nobody’s entirely sure why.
The reason it doesn’t feel right is almost always the same. The design started before the thinking was finished.
With Iterum, we started where I always start — not with the logo, but with the questions. What does Iterum actually stand for? Who is it for, and what do those people need to believe about this business before they engage with it? What’s the specific impression — the sense of confidence and credibility — that the brand needs to create at first sight?
These questions sound simple. Answering them properly takes time and honesty. But working through them gave us something that most start-up brands don’t have: a clear brief for the design work, rooted in what the business genuinely needed to communicate.
The identity
The visual identity that came from that strategic groundwork was built to do one job — signal credibility and substance without overstating where the business was in its journey.
That’s a careful balance. Overclaim and the brand becomes a liability — it will look wrong the moment the business evolves. Undersell and you lose the room before you’ve had the chance to speak.
The work had to feel considered, modern, and proportionate to the ambition rather than the starting point. It needed to hold up in a pitch deck as well as a proposal, to work one-to-one as well as it worked at an industry event. That’s the standard I hold identity work to: not how it looks in isolation, but how it performs across every context where the business actually shows up.
The outcome
Jon’s own words are better than anything I’d write here.
“Bob started with our logo and branding — work we believe significantly contributed to our initial investment and early success.”
That’s not a design claim. It’s a business outcome. The brand didn’t close the investment — the team, the proposition, and the market timing did that. But the identity meant they arrived at those conversations looking the part. It removed a friction that often kills deals before they start: the quiet doubt that forms when a business can’t look you in the eye.
When a start-up looks coherent and confident from day one, it changes how people engage with it. It signals that the founders have thought things through. That they understand what they’re building. That they’re serious.
That impression — formed in a fraction of a second — carries real commercial weight.
What this tells you
The Iterum project is a clear example of a brand doing more than representing a business. It actively enabling it.
That’s the argument for taking brand strategy seriously at launch — rather than waiting until you’ve got traction, then trying to retrofit a coherent identity onto something already growing in several directions at once.
Getting it right at the start costs less, takes less time, and creates a foundation you can build from confidently. Getting it right later — after the brand has been compromised by early shortcuts — costs more on every count.
The questions to ask early are the same ones Iterum asked: what do we need people to believe about us, and is our brand currently making them believe it?
I’m based in Surrey and work with founders and growing businesses across the UK. A good proportion of the start-ups and SMEs I work with are London-based — Iterum, Inbeeo, Atomex, and Promote Consulting among them. Geography rarely comes into it. What matters is whether the brief is right and the timing is real.
If you’re building something and you need it to look the part from day one, that’s the conversation to have sooner rather than later.
