What stage of the start-up journey are you at?
Pre-Seed Seed Early Stage Growth
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A professional identity helps legitimise the organisation, communicate ambitions, and promote the core innovation at all stages.
As the business develops, having access to a branding toolkit will help you create impressive pitch decks, stand out from competitors, and build trust. In time, it will attract customers, enable you to catch the best hires’ attention, and give you the foundations to show that your product or service can compete with other start-ups and established market leaders.
A memorable and bold visual treatment ready before you go to market will make your limited marketing budget go further.
As a start-up, your time is stretched thin creating and testing business models and value proposition designs, researching your market and taking your idea through to proof of concept stage. Plus, there is an endless circuit of pitches and presentations as you seek financial and expert support.
Up to now, you will likely have ignored the branding and visual presentation, missing an essential way to control how you want to be perceived.
Our strategic design process brings fast-growing organisations like yours on a structured, positive, and collaborative journey to discover their Brand’s Purpose, Objectives, and Personality. We work straight from your LEAN models and plans, adding a brand strategy layer.
A new logo is just one component of a comprehensive suite, including typography, photographic or illustrative media, core messaging, and marketing assets.
On completion, you will have all the foundations of your brand in a simple toolkit, allowing your team to tell your story confidently and consistently for the next 3-5 years.
Our services fit in at all stages of the start-up process.
The start of your journey. You’ve identified an idea with commercial potential through your research and begun sharing details with mentors and support organisations. Your University Technology Transfer Office has been involved and provided guidance on the next stages.
Using pre-seed funding support and accessing Research Innovation programmes, you will develop and test different business models, analyse your potential market, and create a Proof of Concept. Protectable IP now needs to be registered.
Add-on Service.
Suppose your new venture still has no marketable name or has a confusing one. In that case, we can use design strategy tools to develop relevant and trademark-ready names that uniquely express your company’s offerings.
Discover our Business Naming process.
You will build out your start-up team with experienced and influential board members. Finding and convincing them to join will require proof of the business’ potential.
All the initial product and market research will help you validate your business model and build a working prototype. The scale of the commercial opportunity becomes apparent, and people outside your organisation get introduced to the company.
At this stage, you must have a distinctive brand visual identity to effectively communicate your brand vision and personality and give yourself the best chance of success against other competitive start-ups and market leaders.
Complete our Start-up Brand Foundations Service, a six-week intensive process to create everything you need.
Successful seed funding applications need a clear and convincing business plan validated by data from your prototype. Seed funding may come from grant-awarding bodies, individuals, or organisations.
Building professional presentation materials, including pitch decks, business cards, and leave-behinds, will legitimise your business idea and create trust.
Our in-house Graphic Design expertise can create anything you need.
Getting to a minimum viable product is likely only possible with seed funding, but launching it and then building a sustainable revenue stream requires capturing the attention of customers and building trust.
You must develop a ‘minimum viable website’ simultaneously with your product. The site will be your platform to engage in further funding rounds and to attract customers.
A professionally built site legitimises the business and forms a transparent communications channel that updates as your plan evolves.
Find out about our Website Design process.
To get through the Early Stage, you will need to demonstrate consistent growth over an extended period of time. Your business will start to rely on marketing rather than networking.
If your idea has high start-up costs associated with scale-up, your focus will be on securing Venture Capital funds, but to do this effectively, you’ll be running the business while networking with start-up accelerators and incubators.
Your website must expand to meet your customers’ needs, adding sales and support tools and integrating with your content marketing plan. To do this right, you will also need to have a comprehensive Brand Strategy in place.
A detailed strategy facilitates consistency of message and tone across all touch points. It guides graphic design and interactions from short-term sales messaging to long-term brand reputation content.
See what’s involved in a Brand Strategy project.
Seed funding pitches earlier in your journey required a demonstration of your plan, communicated clearly. As you move towards Series A funding, pitches to Venture Capitalists will need a more detailed and convincing case, presented powerfully and memorably.
They will want to understand your idea and business plan, and expect to see evidence of a professional team who are well prepared and have invested in the brand’s development to generate momentum.
We build on your brand’s foundations to ensure you stand out amongst other start-ups and competitors, show how you will compete and eclipse them. Your VC pitch deck combines the strongest brand visual language and messaging elements to communicate your value proposition and achievements.
Alongside the main ‘Golden VC Pitch Deck’, you will also have a separate ‘Teaser VC Deck’ with all the confidential and sensitive information removed.
Our Graphic Design services will create everything you need to feel confident when pitching.
Established businesses have very different needs and processes than early-stage start-ups. Fast-growing companies may need help aligning their teams behind a coherent vision, supported by a well-defined visual identity.
Disrupters entering the marketplace or groundbreaking new technology can lead to a strategic change of direction, which requires effective communication.
Companies committed to innovation often develop new internal projects alongside the typical day-to-day operations, which need to be aligned with the core brand architecture.
Our strategic approach, creativity and experience enable us to untangle complex problems and respond with clarity and flair.
We have a suite of four distinct service categories for established businesses:
We can guide them through a Strategic Brand Transformation to more clearly express their purpose.
We can apply our approach to Product or Service Branding to speed up their development process.
We can build a custom Brand Enhancement design package to fix a specific issue.
We can help project management to Deliver Internal Projects under development effectively.
Brand for a Biomedical Healthcare Science company creating Genomics testing kits for cancers.
We transformed the Brand for an innovative, science-led food security business.
A new name for a medical diagnostics firm working in the field of male reproductive health.
Bag of Bees delivered us a new look that completely captured us as a company and has given us the tools to grow our presence with confidence
Working with David and Lewis has been a godsend; their patience is unparalleled, and the work is top quality, so I couldn't ask for more. We'll keep working together for as long as Bag of Bees have me, building the brand and expanding our horizons.
We have produced successful brands for early-stage spin-out companies for over ten years. Our experience working alongside research academics, technical inventors, and innovative entrepreneurs has refined our methodology, allowing us to consistently deliver the most impact with fixed resources and limited time. We look forward to hearing your story…
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