Discovery is the part clients want to skip and the part that saves the rest of the fee. We protect it. Ten days, sometimes a little more, in which nobody opens a typeface and everybody reads.
Who we talk to
Not only the founder. The person who answers the shop. The clinician who will use the product. The wholesale partner guessing at the brand in their own window. If the work has to live in their mouth, it has to start in their sentences.
We also read the archive: old sites, old decks, the language that has already been tried. Companies are often trying to escape a sentence they wrote themselves three years ago. It helps to see it on the page.
What we will not do yet
Moodboards. Logo traces. A “direction” that is actually three colourways. Discovery ends with a point of view we can argue with — usually a short note, not a workshop mural. Then strategy. Then design. In that order, on purpose.
If a brief arrives with a Pinterest file attached, we will look at it. We will not start there. The interesting brands do not look like their market. They look like themselves, and that takes a week of listening before a week of looking.