Building brands that work
Visual and verbal brand services for bold B2B businesses that want to professionalise, defy convention, and unify teams and clients.
*We build brands that:
exist beyond the guidelines
permeate into everyday life
are deployable and easy to implement
add value to your business
*Who’s ‘we’? Maddy and Ebony-Storm. Scroll down to meet your business brand builders.
For brands that want to be bold—not semibold.
Professionalise
It’s okay to be scrappy at the start. But once you start growing, you need clarity about your identity if you want to scale a purposeful business.
We build brands that match the quality of what you sell, and levels the playing field between you and big, established companies. We take you from scrappy to scalable, with a brand that gives you the credibility to land your next client strategically – not by chance.
Defy convention
‘We’ve always done it this way’ isn’t in your dictionary. You prefer ‘disrupt’, ‘challenge’, and ‘defy convention’. And if you’re challenging preconceptions in a legacy industry, your brand shouldn’t fade into the corporate noise.
We build brands that help you stake your claim as a disruptor, making the old school new school. Because every brand has a personality – even the ones that are stereotyped as dull, dry, or boring.
Unify teams and clients
Humans thrive together. The financial benefits of a unified brand matter, but so does having a unified team. Brand is an inside and outside job that shows your people and clients who you are and what you stand for.
We build brands that give you a shared sense of identity, and the conditions for teams and business to thrive. We can build you a brand that tells new clients and potential hires exactly who you are, so you can find your crowd and grow with them.
Business branding services we offer
Creative workshops
Brand creation
Brand development
Web design and copy
Brand and marketing consultancy
Brand project management
How a strategic brand identity project helped this boutique tech consultancy land its next client
You’re small. Your peers are huge. The contracts you’re pitching for are massive. You’re up against corporates with big brand names, dedicated sales teams, and sizable marketing budgets. How do you stand out, position your differences as strengths, and prove you have the talent, skill, and service to deliver at the highest standard? For Toucanberry Tech, a boutique consultancy building tech solutions for the reinsurance industry, the answer was a Curiously Different brand.
Bhishma Patel, Co-Founder - Toucanberry Tech
“The brand had a big part to play in securing us a client. That’s as good as it can be, right?”
Brand identity pricing packages
Clarify
For those still figuring out what they need. We deliver a personalised creative workshop that draws out brand personality and gives you direction. Afterwards, we send a next steps document containing our suggestions, recommendations, and ideas for taking your brand further.
Deliverables:
In-person 4-hour creative workshop tailored to your business
A next steps document with suggestions, recommendations, and ideas based on our decade of experience in brand services and marketing
£1,000 – subject to travel costs
Consolidate
For those ready to solidify their brand identity in visual and verbal guidelines. We deliver a personalised creative workshop and turn our findings into a brand identity and complete set of visual and verbal guidelines.
Deliverables:
Everything in the Clarify package
Two brand concepts to choose from – so you decide the direction
Visual brand identity
Verbal brand identity (tone of voice)
A set of visual and verbal brand guidelines
£8,250
Cultivate
For those that want to keep their brand working hard for the business with ongoing support. We deliver everything in the create package, plus continued brand and marketing consultancy that covers visual and verbal content.
Deliverables:
Retained monthly time for Maddy and Ebony to work on the brand and marketing – this can include:
Templates for assets you create regularly
Sales decks, RFPs, reports, and other business-critical documents designed and copyedited for you
Internal workshops, training, and support with maintaining the brand
Building on your website with content marketing services (content strategy, content writing, SEO optimisation)
STARTING FROM £900 pcm
Create
For those that want a defined brand and the website to showcase it. We deliver a personalised creative workshop, and turn our findings into a brand identity and set of visual and verbal guidelines. Then, we design and write the copy for your website – taking it from sitemap to wireframe then mockup. When you’re happy with the result, we work with our trusted developer to deliver a fully functional website that embodies your brand identity.
Deliverables:
Everything in the Consolidate package
Site map and wireframe for your website (the bare bones for your approval)
Website design – and two rounds of revisions
Website copy – and two rounds of revisions
Website development – taking your from static designed pages to fully-functional website
STARTING FROM £12,500
Why invest in your brand, and not something more commercial?
The thing is, brand is commercial.
We’ve seen up close and personal the difference a strong brand makes for our clients. We’re not talking about pretty sales decks – we mean our clients’ customers close the deal without lengthy tendering processes. Here’s proof of our brand services work.
Working on your brand can seem like an upheaval, but the right team and expertise makes a huge difference. You don’t always have to start fresh – instead, we can evolve your existing brand so that it fits your current business better.
“There was lots of dreaming in that room. We could probably bottle it up and use it beyond branding. And you could see the evolution of our thinking throughout the workshop – I think we needed that to cement our understanding of what the business does. You can sit on Zoom for an hour and you won’t get the same output.”
Benefits of building a bold, brilliant brand
Land clients and new business
Attract top talent
Enhance team unity
Improve brand awareness
Foster community
Create a sense of belonging
Introducing your brand identity builders
Ebony-Storm is a freelance copywriter working across B2B tech and software, small business finance, and startups. You can find her words on SaaS company websites (like Xero), tech publications, and in reports, whitepapers, and ebooks for B2B businesses (under NDA – as you might expect.)
Ebony-Storm has a decade of digital marketing and editorial experience, spread across startups, agencies, and major software companies. Her specialism is making technical stuff more human, and coordinating unwieldy copy projects to make them run smoothly.
Maddy is an award-winning creative designer living and working in Norwich. With eight years in the industry, Maddy is passionate about helping businesses connect to their brands’ spirit and show the world who they are, through thoughtful and courageous branding.
Maddy has worked across multiple industries including health and wellbeing, FMCG, education and tech, and many more. A keen collaborator, Maddy loves working with likeminded creatives to help bring projects to life, believing that our best work is done when we put our heads together.
Together, we bring thoughtfulness, intention, and a human view to all of our branding services. We balance this by challenging each other, pushing and questioning ideas, and distilling them so that they’re as sharp, focused, and as impactful as possible. It’s a frank, honest relationship – one we know you’ll find valuable too.
We’ve built our businesses in tandem; we started them at the same time, in the same city. We’ve even lived in the same flat – not at the same time, though. We’ve seen the peaks and troughs that come with a pandemic, motherhood, technological disruption, and sustaining a company of one. No doubt, obstacles and opportunities you’ll recognise in your business, too. And though we’ve grown our businesses separately, we come together for projects where our skills align – through Brands that.
How we work
We’re not an agency – we’re two freelancers. What that means for you is:
No stale ideas. We’re both working on other projects individually and separately, which means we’re bringing fresh perspectives to every branding and design project.
You pay for two freelancers, not an entire agency. You get direct contact with the humans doing the work. You get a deep, direct, and strategic relationship with both of us. Basically, you get the best you can get for your money.
You still only receive one invoice for the project – like an agency. We take care of paying each other because it’s less admin for you.
You still only need one port of call. Update Maddy, and she’ll keep Ebony looped in. Message Ebony, and she’ll pass the details onto Maddy. Keeping each other clued in is our job, not yours.
We love working together. We’re energised by opportunities to collaborate, and that enthusiasm filters through to client projects. We approach every single one with intention, energy, and fresh eyes.
Why choose us – two freelancers, not a branding agency
Traditionally, businesses head to an agency when they’re ready to create their brand. We’ve both worked in agencies, but we’ve also delivered branding services as independent freelancers.
Here’s why our set-up works (and what you get out of it):
Handpicked talent – we can add more skills to the project, courtesy of our network of brand, marketing, and other specialist freelancers
You work directly with us – that’s Maddy and Ebony, and we’ll have a clear line of communication with you throughout
You know who’s executing the work – a senior designer and a senior copywriter, not a junior, and not an outsourced third party
We’re specialists in our fields – Maddy, a strategic brand identity designer, Ebony, a copywriter for the biggest and smallest technical brands
We’re agile and flexible – you’re dealing with two people, not an entire agency
Obviously, we’re cheaper – you pay for two freelancers, and there’s no management fee or hefty overheads to cover
We manage projects to minimise the work for you – we keep each other updated, and we have systems and tools in place that make the process transparent for you, and us
Bhishma Patel, Co-Founder: Toucanberry Tech
“It was almost a network effect of engaging you. We started with branding and design, but we also got copy, tone of voice, and web development. It took away all the extra thinking we had to do.”
Tired of boring and ready for bold?
We love brands that aren’t afraid to claim space in their clients and customers’ minds.
We work with brands that bring fresh thinking to old industries and challenges.
For people who want to build bold—not semibold—brands