Cassidy and Britt walked in as two coaches. Each had their own clients, their own way of training, and their own ideas about what the new studio should be. By the end of the day they had one brand, and a name for it: PERFORM.
That day was a brand strategy workshop. It’s the most valuable thing I do and the least understood, because most people have never been in one. Here’s what actually happens in the room.
If two founders give two different answers, you don’t have a design problem. You have a strategy problem.
The dig
Britt and Cassidy were both good at what they did. That was never the question. The question was what happens when two coaches, each with their own approach and their own following, open one studio together. Whose voice does the brand speak in? Who is it for? What does a new member feel walking in the door?
They didn’t need a logo yet. They needed to know what the studio was. Designing before that’s settled just gives you a nice-looking argument.
The room
It was a long day, and a good one. No slides. A lot of questions, a wall that filled up as we went, and my job was to make sure both of their voices got heard while keeping the conversation on what PERFORM needed to be, not on who was right.
Cassidy put it better than I could in her review afterward: the session helped them put words to things they knew about their business but hadn’t been able to say yet. That’s the whole point. The answers are usually already in the room. The workshop gets them out and onto paper.
Who is this for? Not everyone. The specific person who drives past three other gyms to get to yours.
Why did you start this? The real reason, not the mission statement. This is where the story shows up.
What won’t you do? The lines you won’t cross say more about a brand than anything you promise. PERFORM refused to be intimidating and refused to be one-size-fits-all.
What would your best client tell a friend about you? In their words, not yours.
What’s different about how you do it? Not better. Different. For PERFORM that was individualized coaching in a small-group setting.
What has to be true in three years? A brand built only for opening day gets outgrown by year two.
None of those are hard to ask. They’re hard to answer honestly with your business partner sitting next to you, which is exactly why they work.
The find
A written brand strategy: purpose, values, personality, who you’re for, where you sit in the market, and the language to say it. For PERFORM it also produced the name, which came straight out of the positioning, and the structure for naming their classes.
Then the strategy becomes the brief for everything else. The logo was designed to feel premium without feeling intimidating because that’s what the strategy said. We went through revisions until it felt like both of them, not one. And today, Cassidy says the brand still guides the language in their programming, their signage, and how their social media looks and feels. That’s what a strategy is for. It keeps making decisions after I’m gone.
You need one if different people describe your business differently, if you’re merging, partnering, or launching something new, or if the business is strong and the brand still feels vague. You don’t need one if you can already say what makes you different in one sentence and your whole team says the same sentence. Then the story’s settled, and we can go straight to building.
The answers are usually already in the room. A workshop gets them out of your heads and onto paper, so the logo, the website, and the marketing all have something true to be built on.
Want to know if your story’s settled? Send me your website and I’ll tell you whether two people would describe your business the same way, and what I’d settle first. No charge, takes me a day, and it’s me doing it, not a tool.
The full PERFORM case study shows what came out of that day, and the services page shows where the workshop fits into a brand build.
GiddyBrands is a senior-led branding studio in Charlotte, North Carolina, working with founder-led businesses across the US and abroad. No account manager layer, the person you talk to builds the work. The portfolio shows what that looks like in practice.
A focused working session where founders and a strategist answer the questions a brand has to settle before design starts: who it’s for, why it exists, what makes it different, and how to say it. The output is a written brand strategy that guides the name, identity, website, and marketing.
Usually one full day, in person when possible, followed by about a week to write up the strategy. At GiddyBrands it’s the first step of every brand build and can also be booked on its own.
Who the brand is for, why the business started, what it refuses to do, what its best clients would say about it, what’s different about how it works, and what has to be true in three years.
Yes, if the business has partners, a new offer, or a story that different people tell differently. It’s the cheapest point to fix a brand, before the logo, website, and marketing get built on top of it.
You can pan every bend in the river, or you can know where the gold sits.
Or call or text 704-457-9132
Branding and marketing for founders who want to be the obvious choice.
