What should a brand design brief include?

A strong brand design brief should include your business context, target audience, competitive landscape, brand values, project scope, deliverables, timeline and budget. The more clarity you provide upfront, the more strategic and effective the creative output.

How long does a brand design project typically take?

A full brand identity project typically takes 8-12 weeks from brief to final delivery. This includes discovery, strategy, creative exploration, refinement and brand guidelines. Timeline varies based on scope, stakeholders and approval cycles.

What is the difference between brand strategy and visual identity?

Brand strategy defines what your brand owns, who it serves and how it wins. Visual identity is the tangible expression of that strategy — logo, typography, colour, imagery and application guidelines. Strategy comes first; identity follows.

How much should I budget for brand design?

Investment varies by scope and studio. For established luxury and lifestyle brands, a comprehensive brand identity project typically starts from £15,000-£50,000+. The brief, stakeholder complexity and number of touchpoints are the main drivers.

Should I hire a freelancer or a design studio?

Freelancers suit tactical, well-defined tasks. Design studios bring strategic rigour, multidisciplinary teams and systems thinking essential for complex brand challenges, stakeholder alignment and long-term scalability.

From Workshop to Wrist: Rebranding an Italian Heritage Timepiece for the Modern Collector

Case Study

29 Jun

Written By Koko Aslam

Heritage can be a liability when it becomes a formula.

Costantini came to us as a respected Italian watchmaker with decades of craft behind it. The product was precise. The story was rich. But the brand identity was caught between two worlds: the workshop it came from, and the collector it needed to reach.

The risk for any heritage brand is not rejection. It is irrelevance to a buyer who sees history as expectation, not promise.

The strategic filter

Our first question was not what to design. It was what to protect.

We defined three principles that would govern every decision:

Craft must be visible, not described. In watchmaking, legitimacy is proved by detail, material, proportion, finishing. The identity had to signal that same rigour before a single specification was read.
Longevity is the product, not the metaphor. Costantini watches are built to outlast trends. The brand system had to be equally durable not fashionable, but permanent.
Premium positioning is created by restraint, not ornament. The visual language needed to earn its luxury status by what it refused to do, not by what it added.

Translating craft into identity

A heritage watchmaker does not sell time. It sells the proof of patience.

We built the identity system around a visual language that could carry that proof across every environment the brand would inhabit. Typography was selected for its structural confidence, letterforms that felt engineered rather than decorated. Colour was reduced to a disciplined palette that referenced workshop materials without mimicking them.

The result is not nostalgia. It is continuity. The identity respects the machinery and the handwork equally, giving Costantini a visual credibility that holds up in a digital environment, a retail case, and a collector’s own archive.

Digital and retail expression

A watch identity cannot live only on a dial.

For Costantini, the brand needed to translate into an online experience that matched the tactile confidence of the product itself. Every interface decision was filtered through the same question: does this feel like a continuation of the workshop, or a departure from it?

The web presence, like the physical retail language, was designed to slow the viewer down. Luxury is not about speed. It is about the confidence to let detail register.

Outcomes

[Insert 1–2 specific outcomes: e.g. market launch region, retail partnership, press placement, sales conversion shift, or qualitative collector feedback. If confidential, this section can be removed. The methodology carries the authority on its own.]

What this means for heritage brands

The brands that survive generational shifts are not the ones with the oldest stories. They are the ones that learn to tell those stories in the visual language of the current market.

Heritage is not a museum piece. It is raw material. The question is whether your brand identity can refine it without diluting it.

If your product is built on patience, precision or tradition, the answer is rarely louder marketing. It is a tighter definition of what you are willing to change and what you will not.

That definition not the campaign, the logo, or the packaging treatment is the real deliverable.

Looking to reposition a heritage brand for a modern luxury market?Start here.

Written by the Define London studio.

Koko Aslam