Without wasting six months and most of your budget.
Most briefs we receive at the studio are not briefs. They are wishes.
A wish reads like this. “I want a clean, modern brand that feels luxurious but approachable. I love what brand X did, I love what brand Y did, and I want something timeless.” A brief reads like this. “I sell A to B, my closest competitor is C, my budget is D, my deadline is E, and the three decisions I need this engagement to settle for me are F, G, and H.” The first one produces six months of going in circles. The second one produces a brand. This post is about how to write the second one.
A studio cannot solve a problem you haven’t described. The brief is the description.
Why most briefs are wishes
Founders write wishes for two reasons, both understandable. The first is that they have been told, by Pinterest, by other founders, by trend pieces, that the brief is where they express their taste. So they show up with moodboards, references, phrases borrowed from other brands’ About pages. The artefacts are aesthetic, which is not the same as strategic.
The second is that they are worried about being too directive. They think that if they tell the studio exactly what they want, the studio won’t bring its own thinking to the table. So they keep the brief vague, and hope the studio will fill in the gaps with brilliance. Both habits are well-intentioned, and both cost the founder time and money. A studio cannot solve a problem you have not described. A brief is the act of describing the problem clearly enough that the solution becomes findable.
What a real brief contains
A real brief, in our experience, is two to four pages long. It is written in plain language, and written by the founder herself rather than by a consultant. It answers nine questions. Most of the answers will already exist if you have done the work in the founder interview and the three audits.
Start with what the business does, in a single sentence. Resist being poetic. “We make skincare for the woman who has stopped chasing trends” is a sentence. “We craft transformative experiences for the modern soul” is a fog with punctuation.
Describe the customer in three paragraphs. Demographics in the first paragraph. What she does and how she lives in the second. What she is trying to do in her life (that your business fits into) in the third. Naming her is allowed.
Say what you are trying to achieve with this specific engagement. “A better brand” is not an outcome. “An identity that holds up across packaging, retail, and digital” is. “A brand position that filters the right customers to me and the wrong ones away” is. “A web presence that reduces the number of pre-sale questions I get by half” is.
Say what success looks like at month six, at year one, and at year five. Founders rarely answer this in writing, and doing so changes the engagement, because the studio will work backward from year five rather than forward from today.
State the budget honestly. “R20,000 to R25,000 total” is more useful than “flexible.” Flexible reads as either evasive or a little naïve. Real budgets shape what is possible, and honest budgets earn honest advice about whether the studio is the right fit.
State the timeline. “Launch by November” is a timeline. “As soon as possible” is not one. If there isn’t a real deadline, say so. An engagement runs better against a real one.
Name the three to five decisions this engagement needs to settle. This is the question that separates founders who have done the work from founders who haven’t. A founder who has run the three audits can name the specific decisions she needs settled: the position, the name, the typography system, the photography direction, the architecture of products. A founder who hasn’t done the work will ask, in effect, for everything.
List what is non-negotiable. Constraints are kindnesses to a studio. “The name has to work in three languages.” “The palette has to include this one colour, because it already exists in our retail space.” “The logo can’t use a serif because our partner business uses serifs.” Real constraints sharpen creative work.
Finally, answer why this studio. This question is for you, not for us. Why are you considering this studio rather than another one. If you can’t articulate the reason in three sentences, you are choosing on price, on availability, or on aesthetic affinity. Any of those can be defensible reasons, but you should know which one you are choosing on.
Three things to leave out
A few common inclusions that hurt rather than help. Don’t include sketches of what you think the logo should look like, or say “I want something like X’s logo but more like Y’s.” Describe the brand, not the logo. The logo is the studio’s craft to make.
Moodboards are useful as references for visual taste. They are dangerous as instructions. A moodboard with twenty images, no captions, and no rationale tells the studio “these all feel right to me,” which the studio already assumes. If you include references, caption each one with what specifically about it you respond to. The caption is the useful part.
Resist writing the brand’s future About paragraph inside the brief. That will be written by someone else, after the work. The brief is for diagnosis, not for marketing. Plain language only.
How to use the brief once it is written
Send it to the studio before the first call, not at the end of it. The first call should be a discussion of the brief, not the writing of one. Studios that ask thoughtful questions about your brief on the first call are studios that have read it carefully. Studios that ignore it are studios that will treat your business as a template.
Ask the studio, on the first call, what they would push back on. A studio worth its rate will have at least two pieces of pushback within the first ten minutes, and that pushback is the start of the work. A studio that agrees with everything is selling, not strategising.
What the right brief earns you
Three things, all valuable. A faster engagement, because discovery becomes a conversation rather than an excavation. A better fit, because the studio can say yes with conviction or no with respect, and both outcomes are useful (whereas a vague yes almost never is). And often a better price. Studios price partly on uncertainty, and a clear brief reduces the studio’s risk, which usually reduces the studio’s quote. The work is still the work. But the padding that comes from not knowing what the studio is walking into goes away.
If you remember one thing
A brief is a document of clarity, not a document of taste. The founders who write the clearest briefs end up with the brands they described. The founders who write the most beautiful briefs end up with what the studio guessed they wanted. Clarity is the rare gift you can give a creative team. It is worth giving.
If you’d like to loop back to the piece that comes before this one, The Three Audits Every Founder Should Run is where the raw material for a good brief comes from. The Founder Interview Every Brand Should Start With is one step earlier again.
