Why Brand Strategy Before Design Protects Your Budget and Your Launch Date

On a Thursday morning in September, a client sent me a video that was eleven minutes long.

Eleven minutes is a long video. When someone loves the design, you get two minutes, a lot of screenshots, and the word “obsessed.” Eleven minutes means she had been staring at it since Tuesday and had a list.

I made coffee before I watched it. Piper (🐈‍⬛) sat on the keyboard the entire time, which is her way of “helping”.

The short version of the video: it still didn’t feel like her. She couldn’t put her finger on why. She had found three other websites she liked better, and one of them belonged to a company that sells something completely different to a completely different person.

This was the second round of design she had turned down. We were a month into a design phase that should have taken two weeks, on a brand and online shop for a woman who wanted her shop open before the holidays.

The part that still gets me is that she had already approved the strategy. All of it. She read it, agreed with it, told me it was exactly right and to go build it. Then design started and she went looking for something else.

Round three went back to the direction she approved in week two. She loved it. Told me it was perfect. It was, give or take a font, the same thing I showed her the first time.

The project took twice as long as it needed to, and most of what that cost her never showed up on an invoice.

The Two Ways People Skip Brand Strategy Before Design

When you hear “skipping strategy,” you probably picture one version of it. There’s a second version that costs more and looks, from the outside, like doing everything right.

The first one is the version everybody knows. You hire a designer, send over a Pinterest board and a competitor’s website you like, and ask for a logo. The designer makes something pretty. Six months later you feel exactly the same way you felt before you started, because the logo was the only thing that changed.

The second one is sneakier. You pay for strategy. You show up for the workshop. You read the document, you agree with all of it, you tell your designer it’s spot on. Then design starts and a different part of your brain takes the wheel—the part with strong feelings about serif fonts and a lingering crush on a color you saw on a hotel website in 2019—and the strategy sits in a folder on your desktop next to your 2023 taxes.

You end up in the same place, and you paid more to get there. You bought the map and then drove by vibes.

What Skipping Brand Strategy Before Design Costs You

The detour cost my client in three places. Only one of them was money, and money turned out to be the smallest of the three.

The calendar cost nobody plans for

Design rounds run on a weekly rhythm around here. I send the work at the end of the week. You look at it over the weekend, ideally with a glass of wine and a blanket on your lap (we love cozy around here). You send feedback Monday, I revise, and the new version goes out by Friday.

So one round is a week. Your project has a set number of them built into it, and that number sits on your calendar before we ever start.

Hers went sideways when she spent both of her revision rounds turning the direction down. Those two weeks were hers to use however she wanted, and that part is completely fair. What it left us with is the problem. We were three weeks into design, back at the direction she approved in week two, and we had not refined a single thing yet.

Everything after that was extra. Three more weeks of rounds that were never in the plan, plus the calls to talk through why we were going backward, plus the Friday she was at a wedding and the Monday I was at a dance recital. A three-week design phase ran seven.

Time is the thing I can’t give back to you at the end of a project. I can adjust a lot of things. I cannot adjust September.

What extra design rounds do to your budget

Every studio scopes a project with a set number of revision rounds, because otherwise a project could go on until one of us moves out of the country. Once you pass that number, the extra rounds get invoiced. That is in my contract, and it is in the contract of every designer you are considering (or…it should be…)

Her budget did not grow to meet that invoice. Budgets never do. So the money she had set aside for the additional shop pages we planned to add at the end went toward paying for rounds four and five.

She paid for three extra weeks of design to get back to the direction she signed off on in week two. The shop pages, which were the entire reason she came to me with a shop project in the first place, came off the list to cover it.

The launch date that keeps moving

She wanted the shop open before the holidays. That’s the reason we started when we started, and it’s the reason the scope looked the way it did.

We opened in January.

January is a lovely month. January is also when everyone is returning things, eating salad, and feeling weird about their credit card statement.

For a product business, the difference between opening in November and opening in January is a serious amount of money, and it’s the one thing I can’t refund or make up for on the back end. It had nothing to do with the design. It came from two rounds that went sideways in September.

Why Brand Strategy Matters Most Once Design Starts

She is not the villain of this story. She was lovely the entire time and I would work with her again tomorrow. What happened to us happens on a lot of projects, and it has more to do with the way design feedback works than with either one of us.

Design feedback only works when both people are grading against the same rubric. (Former teacher. It’s still the best word for it.)

Strategy is the rubric. It answers who this is for, what it needs to say in the first three seconds, how she should feel when she gets to the shop page, and what we agreed to leave out.

When you trust the strategy, your feedback sounds like this: “This feels softer than the understated, confident thing we said we wanted.” I can work with that. I know what to move and how far.

When the strategy gets skimmed, feedback sounds like this: “I don’t know. It just doesn’t feel like me.” There is no revision path inside a feeling. So I guess. You react to my guess. I guess again. Two rounds later we are both exhausted and the file is called homepage-v9-FINAL-final. Very Ross with the couch. PIVOT, and we are still in the stairwell.

Credit: Giphy

Round three worked because we got on a call and walked back through the strategy together before we looked at a single design. The design barely changed. She had her rubric back, and the direction she had been turning down turned out to be the one she asked for in the first place.

There’s a cost to the relationship in there too, and that one stings the most. Somewhere in round two she started wondering whether she had hired the right person. I started over-explaining every choice I made. Our easy Voxer thread got polite. Nobody was upset with anybody. The project just stopped being fun, and creative work that stops being fun gets worse every single time.

What You’re Agreeing To When the Brand Strategy Phase Starts

I have gotten more direct about this since that project. When we start with strategy, you’re agreeing to two things, and only one of them shows up on the invoice.

The first is showing up. Strategy here gets built with you. We do a Discovery Workshop, then I go read your competitors’ websites so that you never have to (you’re welcome), then we get on a Co-Create Session and build your positioning together while you watch it happen. You walk away with a one-page strategy and a 90-day roadmap you can explain to your VA without opening a single PDF.

The second is trust, and that’s the one that decides what your project costs. When you approve the strategy, you’re saying this is the direction, and design gets judged against it. That agreement is what lets me make the bolder choice. It also keeps the design phase from turning into a vote on your personal taste.

You’re allowed to change your mind. That’s a fair conversation, and I would much rather have it in week two, when changing course costs us a phone call. The expensive version is approving a direction you privately don’t believe in and waiting until you see it in a font to say something.

How Sunday Strategy Works as the First Phase of Every Project

Every project I take starts here now. Brand, website, shop, all of it. It runs three weeks, it happens before anyone opens a design file, and its entire job is to protect the money you’re about to spend on design.

You get the Discovery Workshop, the research, the Co-Create Session, the one-page strategy, and the 90-day roadmap. Some people stop there and run the roadmap themselves, which is a completely valid way to use it. If you move into a full project with me, your strategy investment credits toward it.

What you’re buying is a design phase that runs in a straight line. You get fewer rounds, feedback that has somewhere to go, and a launch date that stays where you put it, which matters a great deal when your revenue has a season.

If you’ve been sitting on a rebrand and wondering whether the strategy part is worth paying for on its own, my honest answer is that it’s the least expensive piece of the whole project and the only piece that protects everything after it.