9 Designs — Brand Growth for Unfinished Business

Brand growth for
unfinished business

9 Designs® is a strategy-led brand growth studio for established, mid-sized businesses with a rather immodest future in mind.

A business can be founded twice. Once in the paperwork, and again years later, when its people look up from the work and realise it has become something larger and more interesting than the company they first described.

Our work often begins there. We establish what the business has become and where it intends to go, then carry that understanding through strategy, identity, websites and marketing. How the brand looks, feels, speaks and behaves begins to reflect the business behind it.

Let's talk about your business → Explore our work

A successful business still has unfinished business

There comes a point in the life of a well-run company when its brand begins to belong to an earlier chapter. Nobody plans for this. It arrives gradually, through years of new work and greater ambitions, until the impression people receive no longer reflects the business they would find inside.

Sometimes growth creates that distance. Sometimes a change of direction makes it impossible to ignore. We usually meet our clients in one of six situations.

What moving forward can look like

Elite Home Staging

When we met Elite Home Staging, it was already one of South Florida's most capable staging companies. Its brand revealed only part of the business.

We started with the positioning and worked outwards, organising the offer around the audiences who buy, then carrying one direction through the identity, website, sales materials, customer systems and marketing. The experience began to reveal the expertise and commercial value that had been there all along.

“They changed my branding and elevated my company tremendously.”David Bowles, CEO

View the case study

Jewel Toned Interiors

Jewel Toned Interiors creates spaces of unusual depth and discipline. Its website needed to reveal more of the thinking behind them.

We rebuilt the platform around the way prospective clients explore and choose a design partner, drawing separate journeys for commercial and private clients and giving the firm's photography the kind of gallery it deserved. The finished experience brings the character of the studio into view, alongside the substance of its work.

“A site that truly reflects JTI's expertise, capabilities, and brand.”Joy Lynskey, Founder

View the case study

Our four objectives when working with you

Whatever the engagement looks like on paper, these are the four objectives that guide our work together.

Clarify what the business stands for and where it is going.

Good design needs something firm to lean against. We draw that direction out of the leadership, the people and the market, giving the business a clear understanding of what it stands for and where it intends to go. The decisions that follow have a foundation beneath them.

Make the business distinctive, relevant and desirable.

A business should give people something to recognise and a reason to remember it. We shape a presence of its own, drawing from the character and value already there, then expressing it with enough originality to make an impression on the people who matter.

Make the brand work consistently across the business.

The brand comes to life when it leaves the guidelines document. Its character should be felt in a proposal on someone's desk, in the website they explore and in the experience your team delivers. We give those encounters a shared direction, with room for each to do its particular job.

Turn the brand into commercial progress.

Launch day is a milestone that passes. The real test comes as people encounter the work and decide what to do next. We agree what progress should mean for the business and, through our ongoing partnerships, keep improving how the brand earns attention, supports decisions and opens up opportunities.

Strategy. Execution. Support

The thinking needs to survive the journey into the work. We keep it close as the brand takes shape and begins to earn its place in the business.

Three ways we can work together

Some businesses arrive with a strategic question that needs settling. Some are ready for a substantial change to the way customers encounter them. Others want a partner who will still be in the room years after launch.

In every case, the scope is shaped by the challenge.

Strategic engagements

A concentrated piece of thinking that works through the open questions of positioning, audience, structure and direction. It ends with clear recommendations and a practical plan your leadership team can act on.

Brand and digital transformations

An agreed direction carried through identity, messaging, websites and the wider customer experience, with the thinking kept close to the people making the work.

Ongoing partnerships

Strategic guidance, creative direction and considered improvements across the brand, website and marketing, continued as the business grows and its ambitions move forward.

One direction. Experienced people

The 9 Designs team in a strategy session

Kiki Bhaur founded 9 Designs in 2017 after seeing good strategies lose their way in handover, passed from the people who wrote them to the people expected to bring them to life.

The studio was built to keep that thinking close to the work.

More than 120 businesses have come through since. We learn how each one works, gather the right expertise around its particular challenge and keep the direction coherent from the first conversation to the experience a customer encounters.

2017Founded by Kiki Bhaur

120+Businesses across strategy, brand & web

“I worked with Kiki and his team for over a year and would highly recommend them. They changed my branding and elevated my company tremendously.”

“They are responsive and innovative, with the ability to present a variety of thoughtful solutions when challenges arise. I highly recommend 9 Designs to anyone looking for a professional, collaborative, and solutions-oriented team!”

“I received a new brand identity that was 100% aligned with my values and goals, followed by the most gorgeous website, funnels, lead magnets, social media identity, and impactful messaging.”

9 is not 10

9 is not 10 is our belief that even exceptional work has further to go. We take pride in what we create, then look closely at what could make it better. Your business keeps evolving. Our ambition for it should keep moving too.

What's your unfinished business?

You may already know exactly what needs to change. You may recognise only the symptoms, the website you hesitate to send or the explanation that takes a little too long.

Perhaps several businesses need to become one, or the next ambition has outgrown the current plan.

Tell us where the business stands and where you intend to take it. We'll give you an honest reading of what deserves attention first.

Let's talk about your business →

Brand growth for unfinished business