Branding studio, Rotterdam and New York
Kite is nine people who take twelve engagements a year. Positioning, identity, campaigns and the systems that keep them intact once we have gone.
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We take twelve engagements a year. Each one gets the founder, the design director and the strategist in the room, which is the only reason the numbers below exist.
Halberd was pricing at the top of the market and speaking like a supermarket own-label. We rebuilt the identity around the roast log: a numbered, dated system that puts the evidence of care on the front of the bag.
Result
Subscription sign-ups up 62% in two quarters
Nine competitors were selling the same interest rate. We moved Northbank off the number and onto the habit, then built a campaign platform that survived four markets and two product launches without a rewrite.
Result
Qualified demo requests up 41% across the Series B raise
Every frame arrived in a box that told the courier nothing and the buyer less. One structural system now covers eleven SKUs, prints in two colours and doubles as the assembly instructions.
Result
Returns down 18%, and a Dieline award for the carton system
What we do
We do not have departments, and we do not hand a project between them. The same five people carry an engagement from the first interview to the launch film.
Category audit, customer interviews and one sentence you can defend in front of a board. Written before anything is drawn.
Logotype, type, palette, motion and sound, built as a system with the twelfth application designed rather than the first.
One idea structured to run eighteen months across markets, with adaptation rules your in-house team can follow without us.
Structural and graphic design specified to the plant, with production sat in by Dov so the first run comes back right.
A rhythm before an animation. Freya cuts the launch film and writes the motion language the rest of the system inherits.
The site, the booking flow, the component library. Designed against real content and handed over as code-ready specs.
Why Kite
We could take thirty. These are the four things that would quietly stop being true if we did.
No handover to a delivery team. Ivy, Sun-woo and Callum are on your project from the first interview to the last file.
Every engagement produces one sentence and the evidence behind it. If we cannot write it, we have not finished the strategy.
Rules, components and edge cases, handed over in a two-day session. Fourteen Hills has shipped forty releases without calling.
Production is owned by a director, not a spreadsheet. We have moved one launch date in three years, and we moved it early.
Before you write
Full identity engagements start at $65,000 and most land between $65,000 and $140,000 depending on naming, motion and how many markets the system has to serve. The brand sprint at $18,000 exists for founders who are not there yet, and it is a real piece of work rather than a taster.
Ten weeks from kickoff for a full identity, three for a sprint, six for a campaign platform. Those dates assume one decision-maker with the authority to approve. If approval runs through a committee, tell us on the first call and we will build the extra fortnight into the plan rather than discover it in week six.
Three, in a single session, with an argument attached to each and a recommendation. After that session we take one route forward and stop showing alternatives. Studios that present nine routes are distributing the risk of the decision, not doing more work.
Most of our engagements have one, and it is the reason the handover is two full days rather than a PDF. Your team joins the system phase, argues with the rules while they can still change, and leaves owning them.
It has happened twice in nine years, and both times the fault was in the strategy rather than the design. We go back to the positioning at our cost, because a fourth round of visuals against a brief nobody believes is how a project dies slowly.
No. We have tried it, it distorted the advice we gave, and we stopped. Fees are invoiced in three stages against agreed milestones and there is no media commission anywhere in our model.