Briefs about looks, and what each one was really asking
Lip Loi Creative is a creative and brand studio, at liploicreative.com. Since 2022 I have held its fractional CRO seat, running go-to-market strategy, and the studio now works under the Common Ground umbrella. This report is not about the seat. The case for the seat, and for making a concept better before anyone funds it, is told in Lip Loi Creative: fix it before you fund it. This one is the work itself: what the studio built, engagement by engagement, for an Olympic champion, a golf creator, a golf venture of mine and the apparel brand that grew inside it, a developer and its build partner, a deep-tech company, and the studio's own concept.
The split on every engagement is the same. The studio does the design and the production. I set the direction and the narrative, and on every engagement but the first I was the one who brought the work in.
Each client arrived holding a brief about how the brand should look. A champion fresh off the Games wanted an identity. A golf creator leaving his group wanted a new look for new sponsors. A science company had a deck written for reviewers and two visual identities fighting each other. What each one actually needed was an answer to who the brand was for, and a document someone could act on at the last page: a sponsor who could book, a buyer who could call, a backer who could see the plan.
What we decided, every time, was to build the brand from its reader. The audience comes before the subject. One spine of questions runs across the top of the pages, so a reader always knows which one is being answered. Every color and typeface carries a reason a client could repeat. And the last page asks for something.
What happened is below, one engagement at a time: three brand identities in clients' hands, a golf venture with a show brand, a management company and a product brand under it, one deck that sells a developer and a builder as a single offer, a deep-tech brand system that now runs the client's public site, and the studio's own concept, still in development.
Every brief came in as a question about looks
Every one of these briefs came in as a question about how the brand should look. Every one of them turned out to be a question about who it was for.
Number one is listening. If the fix were obvious, the client would have made it already, and it is almost never what they think it is. The champion thought the medals were the brand, and the medals were the one thing every sponsor already knew. The creator thought he needed a new look, and what he needed was a sentence about why a generation tired of untouchable heroes would follow him. The science company thought it needed better collateral, and what it needed was one sentence a buyer gets before the physics.
In each case there was one rock in the stream, the thing that, once moved, lets everything else run. It was almost always a person: the reader the brand serves, and the human it is built around. So the studio's work starts in the same place every time, before any design, with the client talking about themselves rather than about the brand. The answers become the middle of the deck, in the client's own words. Then the design has something to answer to, and a reviewer can ask of every color, typeface and page what it is there to do.
How I came at this one
The first question on every engagement was who this brand serves, and what that reader has to be able to do on the last page. It fit because each client came in with a brief about looks, and a brief about looks has no test, while a brand built for a named reader does. Listening to the person first is how we found the reader.