Nobody is loyal to good enough.

Nobody is loyal to good enough.

Brand strategy, identity and websites for founders in categories where everything looks the same.
Brand strategy, identity and websites for founders in categories where everything looks the same.
Brand strategy, identity and websites for founders in categories where everything looks the same.

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Some categories were never designed. They were copied.

Open your competitors' sites.

Six tabs, six versions of the same brand.

One of them is yours.

One company launched something that worked and everyone matched it.

Your designer is still using those same sites.

Someone tried something different.

It lost half a percent in the first week and went in the bin.

None of that was stupid. It's what happens when everyone optimises against the same thing.

Buyers can't tell you apart, so they pick on price.

Attention costs you more because four other companies are saying the same thing.

Nobody's loyal, because there's nothing to be loyal to. You were the one they found, not the one they picked.

BE PICKED NOT JUST FOUND

BE PICKED NOT JUST FOUND

WORK

PreFrame

Charity fundraising everyone in the category looked built by committee in 2011. First event within a week of launch. More in the pipeline.

PreFrame

Charity fundraising everyone in the category looked built by committee in 2011. First event within a week of launch. More in the pipeline.

PreFrame

Charity fundraising everyone in the category looked built by committee in 2011. First event within a week of launch. More in the pipeline.

Vampire Records

Independent music A decade of catalogue and nothing to show for it. 8 events and 12 artist tour dates since launch.

Vampire Records Montage

Vampire Records

Independent music A decade of catalogue and nothing to show for it. 8 events and 12 artist tour dates since launch.

Vampire Records Montage

Vampire Records

Independent music A decade of catalogue and nothing to show for it. 8 events and 12 artist tour dates since launch.

Vampire Records Montage

Entr Tech

Entr Tech’s brand had been assembled the way most bootstrapped businesses build theirs. Some AI-generated assets. A freelancer for the website. A different freelancer for emails. Another for social. The result was a visual identity that felt inconsistent and gave potential students no reason to trust that this was a serious investment.

Entr Tech Lead Magnets and landing page

Entr Tech

Entr Tech’s brand had been assembled the way most bootstrapped businesses build theirs. Some AI-generated assets. A freelancer for the website. A different freelancer for emails. Another for social. The result was a visual identity that felt inconsistent and gave potential students no reason to trust that this was a serious investment.

Entr Tech Lead Magnets and landing page

Entr Tech

Entr Tech’s brand had been assembled the way most bootstrapped businesses build theirs. Some AI-generated assets. A freelancer for the website. A different freelancer for emails. Another for social. The result was a visual identity that felt inconsistent and gave potential students no reason to trust that this was a serious investment.

Entr Tech Lead Magnets and landing page

SEE MORE WORK

What founders say

  • Brand, website, print. Done as one thing rather than three, which mattered more than I expected. Everything lines up. Nothing looks like it was bolted on afterwards.

    Jake Ireland, Co-Founder

  • Owen cooked.

    Josh Williams, Co-Founder

  • Reviving a label means convincing people who were there the first time that you haven't ruined it, while pulling in people who weren't. Owen got the vision immediately. The identity feels like it belongs to the label's history without being nostalgic about it.

    Phil Source, Founder

  • Owen has been our design partner for 6 months now. Identity, print, web, whatever's needed that week. The value isn't any single piece, it's that I've stopped having to explain the gallery every time. He already knows what it should look like.

    Olesya Bean, Founder

  • Our industry has a trust problem. Everyone says they're reliable, everyone's website looks the same, and customers have no way to tell the difference until it's too late. Owen understood that was the actual brief not "make us look nice," but make us look like the ones you can believe. That's a much harder thing to do and he did it.

    Tim Waterlow, Co-Founder

  • Brand, website, print. Done as one thing rather than three, which mattered more than I expected. Everything lines up. Nothing looks like it was bolted on afterwards.

    Jake Ireland, Co-Founder

  • Owen cooked.

    Josh Williams, Co-Founder

  • Reviving a label means convincing people who were there the first time that you haven't ruined it, while pulling in people who weren't. Owen got the vision immediately. The identity feels like it belongs to the label's history without being nostalgic about it.

    Phil Source, Founder

  • Owen has been our design partner for 6 months now. Identity, print, web, whatever's needed that week. The value isn't any single piece, it's that I've stopped having to explain the gallery every time. He already knows what it should look like.

    Olesya Bean, Founder

  • Our industry has a trust problem. Everyone says they're reliable, everyone's website looks the same, and customers have no way to tell the difference until it's too late. Owen understood that was the actual brief not "make us look nice," but make us look like the ones you can believe. That's a much harder thing to do and he did it.

    Tim Waterlow, Co-Founder

Two ways in.

Four Working Days

The Assessment

£950

Request an assessment

Your competitors, pulled apart.

Six of them on screen, side by side, with the things they all do marked up as I go. This is where you find out what your category has quietly agreed to look like.

Your brand, assessed the same way.

Logo, type, colour, tone. What it signals to someone deciding between you and four others, which is rarely what you think it signals.

Your website, page by page.

What a buyer understands in the first ten seconds, where they lose the thread, and what's costing you enquiries.

Where the gap is.

The opportunities nobody in your category has taken, and which one I'd take first.

A written document and a recorded walkthrough. Delivered by email. No call to sit through first. Yours to keep whatever you decide. Go ahead with the full engagement inside 60 days and the £950 comes off the price.

OR

Six to Eight Weeks

The Full Engagement

£6,000

Chat Now

What you say and who you say it to.

Your positioning, the words for your homepage, your pitch, your emails.

How you look.

Logo, type, colour, and the rules so your next designer doesn't undo it.

A website, live.

Designed, written and built in Framer or Webflow. Up to six pages. Yours to edit after.

Everything handed over.

All the files, guidelines anyone can follow.

You see the work twice and can change it twice. 40% to start, 30% at the identity, 30% before it goes live. If the first round misses, I fix it free.

There's an authority that says look at what's working and do that.

Pick the layout everyone's converged on. Nobody gets fired for looking like the market leader. Test it, and if it doesn't win in a fortnight, put it back.

Every one of those is reasonable. Follow all of them and you end up in a category where six companies are indistinguishable and buyers pick on price, because price is the only thing left to compare.

The Grey Standards Board calls that compliance. It's the safest way to be forgotten.

Badfish Labs exists to fail the inspection.

More about this

Run by Owen.

I built and ran a K-pop retail brand, won the South Bank Ignite Spark Award for it, then watched it fail for reasons that had nothing to do with the branding. So I won't sell you a logo as a survival plan, and I'll tell you if the brand isn't your problem before you've spent anything.

One point of contact. Nobody hands your project to a junior, because there isn't one. It also means a queue.

The Grey Standards Board has issued 14 standards this year.

Every one of them is about looking like everyone else.

A monthly argument against that. What the shortcut costs, why the hack stops working once everyone runs it, and what the companies who ignored all of it did instead.

Most people arrive knowing something's wrong without being able to name it.

They leave with the diagnosis, the scope and the price on one page.

Request an assessment

Or just message. No form, no call. Everyone else makes you book a call first, and I'd rather you just text. Less pressure, faster, and you don't need it worked out beforehand. Send a half-formed idea, a voice note, or "my brand's a mess" and you'll get a straight answer on what's falling flat and what it'd take to fix.

Chat Now

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Brand strategy, identity and websites for founders in categories where everything looks the same.

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