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A brand system your distributor in another country can actually follow
Identity work for companies whose brand has to be executed by people they will never meet: a factory in one country, a marketplace team in another, a distributor in a third.
Get a brand system quote See the country desks
- Typical duration
- 8 to 12 weeks
- Deliverable
- Identity plus a usable guideline
- Built for
- Execution at distance
- Never
- A hundred page manual
What usually goes wrong
Identity projects fail abroad for reasons that have nothing to do with the design quality.
- The guideline is unusable. A beautiful document that answers philosophy and not the question a printer in another country actually has, which is what colour value to use on uncoated stock.
- Nobody scoped the applications. The logo gets approved and then the real list appears: datasheet templates, pack artwork, certificate formats, vehicles. We scope that in week two with your team so the number I give you is the number at the end.
- The identity was designed for the home market only. Colour meanings, name pronounceability and visual conventions differ. Checking is cheap before print and expensive after.
- There is no do-not list. So every partner invents their own interpretation and within two years you have five brands.
- Positioning was never settled. The design then carries an argument nobody agreed, which is why the third round of revisions always feels circular.
What gets delivered
Everything sized for execution by people at a distance, in English, without a call back to headquarters.
Positioning first
What the brand argues, agreed before any visual work. If this is skipped the design becomes a matter of taste and the project stalls.
Logo system
Primary, secondary, mark, monochrome, minimum sizes and clear space, with the files a factory and a marketplace both need.
Type and colour
With usable values for screen, coated and uncoated print, and a note on substitutes where a licensed font is not available to a partner.
Application set
Quotation, datasheet, presentation, packaging grid, signage, vehicle, exhibition, uniform, email signature, marketplace listing.
Photography and imagery direction
What to shoot and what never to buy from a stock library, which is the rule that most protects an industrial brand.
A do-not list
The page that prevents most of the future arguments and the one most guidelines omit.
Rollout plan
Internal first, then channel, then external. In that order, deliberately.
The eight sections that matter
Short enough that a purchase officer ordering business cards will open it, specific enough that a packaging printer in another country does not need to ask.
The test is simple. Hand it to a distributor who has never spoken to you and ask them to produce a compliant one-page flyer. If they can, it is finished.
Everything beyond these eight sections is usually decoration, and decoration in a guideline reduces the chance anyone reads the parts that matter.
A brand executed by people you will never meet is only as good as the document you hand them.
Questions overseas teams ask
Do you design the logo yourself?
I own positioning, naming direction, the brief and the guideline. Visual design runs through designers I have worked with for years, or through Quiamo. Keeping strategy separate from execution stops the project being led by whichever direction looked best in the review.
We already have a logo we like. Can we keep it?
Frequently yes, and it is often the right call where there is real recognition. The work then becomes the system around it: type, colour, applications, guideline and rollout, which is where most of the commercial value sits anyway.
How many rounds of revision?
Two on direction, one on refinement, with the positioning signed off before any of them. Projects that go to five rounds have almost always skipped the positioning step.
Can our factory execute the packaging?
That is exactly what the guideline is built for. Specific values, a defined grid, and a do-not list, in English, usable without a call.
Send me your current logo files
And whatever guideline exists, even if it is one page. I will tell you whether you need a new identity or a system around the one you have, and those are very different budgets.
Get a brand system quote See case studies
Kunal Waghmare · Padmavati Hills, Mokai Vasti, Bavdhan, Pune, Maharashtra 411021, India
office@quiamo.com · +91 90216 02686 · English