Britain’s brands return to growth

Posted on 24th June 20262nd July 2026 by Sam

UK brand value returned to growth in 2026, with the country’s leading brands adding £45.4 billion over the past year, according to new figures from Brand Finance. At the report launch, Mark Ritson asked the room to look harder at what really drives it.

The UK’s 250 most valuable brands grew by 12% to reach £448.9 billion in 2026, the first year-on-year growth since 2023. This is according to Brand Finance’s annual UK report published this month. Britain’s biggest brands added £45.4 billion in collective value over twelve months.

Growth was broad based, spread across the economy. Banking is now the UK’s most valuable sector, lifted in part by Revolut, the fastest-growing brand of the year at 246% to £5 billion, and a 24% rise in banking sector value overall. Aerospace and defence recorded its strongest gains since 2012, and consumer brands now account for eight of the UK’s ten strongest.

One finding drew particular attention. Brand Finance’s analysis shows the UK’s most trusted brands increased in value by 15% over the year, while the least trusted brands saw their value fall by 4%. Emotional responses to brands are difficult to quantify financially. This report shows that trust is directly associated with performance.

Can we trust trust?

Speaking at the launch, the marketing expert and Mini MBA founder Mark Ritson put a deceptively simple question to the room. Can we trust trust?

Drawing on examples ranging from Johnnie Walker to Betty Crocker, he examined how strong brands build emotional connections, and he questioned the assumption that trust alone drives growth. His argument placed salience, being the brand that comes to mind first, among the most powerful levers available to marketers. He left the audience with this question. Should brands focus on being trusted, or on being remembered?

Consistent and coherent

The answer is, of course, both. Trust and salience accumulate through the same discipline: consistent and coherent brand investment sustained over years. The brands climbing this year’s ranking are remembered because they are visible and distinctive. They are trusted because they behave consistently over time.

Shell, a brand Designhouse is proud to count among its clients, marks a decade as Britain’s most valuable brand. Its value rose 16% to £39.5 billion. Other clients, Vodafone, and British Gas both saw their brand value rise, Centrica held its position in the ranking.

The cumulative value of the UK’s top 100 brands has grown 33% since 2016, through repeated periods of economic disruption. Automotive showed the reverse, with total sector brand value down 22% as Jaguar, Range Rover, Defender and Discovery all declined.

The JLR brands demonstrate the trust and salience point precisely. In 2025 Jaguar interrupted its own identity with a controversial rebrand, and at the same time a cyberattack interrupted JLR’s ability to supply, so the brand was neither reliably recognisable nor reliably present.

Brand value is a financial asset. Brand strength accounts for 30% of a company’s stock market value according to the Economist. And like any investment, Brand when managed well compounds value.

Designhouse has spent 55 years helping clients build brands that endure through exactly these cycles. Whether the goal is to be trusted, remembered, or both, the route is the same. Strategy, applied consistently, takes shape as value.

written by Sam Steele, Marketing and Communications Director, FCIM

Designhouse has partnered with FTSE 250 companies and global enterprises for over 50 years. We also work with start ups and scale ups to create brand identities that can grow with their business. If you’d like to discuss your brand challenges, we’re ready to talk.

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The brand story behind a trillion-dollar IPO

Posted on 17th June 202617th June 2026 by Sam

What is the brand story behind the largest IPO in history, and what is stopping your organisation from getting there? Maybe less than you think…

In June 2026, SpaceX went public at a valuation near $1.8 trillion. This is a company that posted a net loss the year before. So what was driving the valuation? Investors were pricing in the strategy. And this is how it works…

The value add

SpaceX is the headline act in a wider portfolio that could hardly be more disparate. Moon rockets and inter-planetary spacecraft; satellite internet through Starlink; social media platform X; the Grok AI engine; and even facilities management.

A single stated worldview holds them all together. And that is a future that is multiplanetary, sustainable and AI-powered, framed throughout as work for the good of humanity. Starlink funds the rockets. The rockets carry the mission. Each venture earns its place by advancing the same idea, so the parts compound rather than compete. Whatever you think of Elon Musk, the clarity is the asset, and the market has put a price on that clarity.

Clarity is the gold standard. The more common business reality looks much more brassy.

The complexity cost, or when 1+1=0.25

We are often brought into complex organisations where nobody can articulate the business strategy, and thus nobody can articulate a brand strategy. When the commercial direction is unspoken, the brand has nothing to give shape to, and every decision after that is amorphous and disparate.

Brand gets treated as a cosmetic wrapper. The assumption is that audience understanding will assemble itself through repeated tactical exposure. Brand equity built like that is vapour thin. And it evaporates the moment the activation stops.

The most insidious erosion happens when an organisation sees itself as a federation of sub-brands. Each sub-brand with its own audience, culture and budget. The assumption being that a single-mission-led voice is beyond reach. Well, not according to SpaceX.

In a fragmented business, 1+1 makes something closer to 0.25. Each sub-brand spends to build its own corner, none of it accrues to the parent. Audiences see a scatter of unrelated signals where there should be one organisation worth considerably more than the sum of its parts (hello again SpaceX).

The market has started to price that cost in the open. The 2025 and 2026 wave of corporate breakups, from Kraft Heinz to Honeywell, is a public admission that brand complexity without coherence erodes value. Brand focus is what releases it.

Business first, brand second

The route through is sequential, and the sequencing is crucial.

Business strategy first, so the organisation knows what it is trying to achieve.

Brand strategy next, so that intent takes a form audiences recognise.

Then an architecture that lets each sub-brand borrow equity from the parent and give it back, so the parts strengthen the whole and the whole lifts the parts.

Scale comes from coherence, from every pound and every message pulling in the same direction.

Discipline pays

SpaceX shows what a clearly held mission allows. It can absorb disparate acquisitions because every deal is narrated back to the same idea: compute feeding models feeding applications feeding the multiplanetary, AI-powered future. That is brand discipline. And the IPO shows how it has been used to create record-breaking value.

Brand investment is a business decision, and we treat it like one. At Designhouse we can help you define your strategy, then make that strategy take shape, so you have a brand strategy and a brand that drives ROI across your entire business landscape.

The trillion-dollar insight is business clarity, not rocket science!

written by Sam Steele, Marketing and Communications Director, FCIM

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Brand architecture in the age of AI

Posted on 10th June 202630th June 2026 by Matthew Gillman

AI tools shape how prospects discover and shortlist brands. The organisations that appear accurately in those answers are the ones with clear, well-structured brand architecture. This article examines why brand architecture has become critical infrastructure for visibility and ROI, drawing on research and our work rebuilding EMCOR UK’s brand into four propositions that every stakeholder, human or AI, can understand.

The way people discover brands has fundamentally shifted. Your prospects are no longer clicking through pages of search results to compare options. Instead, they’re asking ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity for answers, and AI is making the choice for them.

And this is vitally import to you because

54% of users now start their searches with AI tools rather than traditional search engines,
47% of consumers have used AI to help make purchase decisions

For B2B marketers, the implications are profound. When a potential client or customer asks an AI assistant to “find me XXX companies in London,” your brand needs to appear in that response and be accurately represented.

Organisations with clear brand architecture achieve 3.5 times more visibility than those without it. (Harvard Business School)

And different large language models rely on different data sources and retrieval methods. Without a structured approach to how your brand and its offerings are organised and communicated, AI systems struggle to understand and accurately represent your value proposition.

Make your brand work harder to deliver ROI

Companies with well-defined brand architectures deliver superior stock returns, according to research.

Brand architecture delivers even greater advantages in B2B contexts. This is because

20% uplift in EBIT margin which illustrates how brand equity translates into greater profitability. (Mckinsey)
30% of a company’s market value comes from brand and reputation, underscoring the investor relevance of cohesive architecture. (PWC)
97% of B2B decision-makers say branding influences awareness and 95% say it drives differentiation, which is critical in long, multi-stakeholder buying cycles. (LinkedIn)
92% of buyers start with a shortlist and 41% already have a preferred vendor. To succeed, vendors must focus on building brand recognition and trust early to ensure they are on the initial shortlist. (Forrester)

Clarity over complexity

Brand architecture typically follows one of five models.

The branded house approach, used by companies like Apple, unifies all offerings under a single master brand identity.
The sub-brand system references the master brand and adds a unique product or service name, like car manufacturers do eg: the Toyota portfolio includes the Toyota Prius, Toyota Corolla etc…
The house of brands model keeps each brand entirely separate, as Unilever does with Dove and Persil.
The endorsed brand model allows sub-brands independence whilst maintaining a connection to the parent company.
The hybrid model blends these approaches based on specific business needs.

David Aaker, vice chairman of brand consulting firm Prophet, puts it simply: “The goal should be to have the fewest relevant brands needed to meet the business goals”. (Brand Portfolio Strategy, p.16) For most B2B service firms, it’s clarity over complexity every time.

Traditional SEO gave marketers clear metrics: rankings, impressions, click-through rates. AI-driven discovery operates differently. There’s no SERP position to track, no obvious signal that tells you whether ChatGPT is recommending your agency over competitors. Marketing teams are essentially blind to a channel that’s rapidly becoming dominant for discovery.

You can’t tell where your brand is being mentioned or how it’s being described across different AI platforms. You have very little insight into whether AI is reinforcing your intended positioning or subtly reshaping it.

The shift requires a fundamental rethink of brand visibility. Your brand needs to be understood by AI systems as a coherent entity with clear relationships between services, methodologies and client outcomes.

The EMCOR case study

Brand architecture is critical infrastructure. When your brand structure is clear, consistent and well-documented across all digital properties, AI models have the signal clarity they need to accurately represent you. When it’s muddled, AI fills the gaps with assumptions, or simply omits you from recommendations altogether.

We worked with EMCOR UK, a £240 million facilities services business employing 4,000 people across 14 service lines, to address exactly this challenge. Their existing brand architecture had become too complex to communicate clearly to employees, customers or AI systems.

We created coherent brand architecture by delivering a new strategic brand proposition and refining their model of 14 different services into four relatable, memorable propositions: Experience, Create, Enhance and Transform. The result: a brand structure that every stakeholder, human or AI, can understand and represent accurately.

Business impact

Following the 2020 rebrand, EMCOR UK entered a period of accelerated growth in specialist facility services culminating in the sale of the business to OCS Group for £190 million in December 2025. The 2016–2020 period had been characterised by steady, operational performance; the post-rebrand years delivered the focused strategic growth that made the business an attractive acquisition at significant value.

Read the full case study

Get AI brand ready

Start by auditing your current brand architecture. Ask yourself

Are the relationships between your parent brand, service lines and methodologies clear?
Is this clarity reflected consistently across your website, LinkedIn presence and case studies?
Most importantly, is it structured in ways that both humans and AI systems can parse and understand?

When every part of your brand portfolio has a clearly defined role and this structure is reflected consistently across all touchpoints, you create the conditions for both human understanding and AI comprehension.

For marketing leaders managing significant budgets and influencing major branding decisions, the calculus is straightforward. The brands that will maintain visibility in an AI-driven discovery landscape are those investing in clear, consistent brand architecture now.

How quickly can you audit, clarify and implement a structure that works for the AI systems rapidly becoming the primary interface between your brand and potential clients?

Audit your brand architecture – before AI does it for you

written by Sam Steele, Marketing and Communications Director, FCIM

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When The Shopper is an Algorithm

Posted on 18th March 20267th July 2026 by Sam

AI isn’t just changing how people shop. It is becoming the shopper of choice. In this post we’ll explain why that matters for your brand strategy.

Agentic commerce is when AI systems act on behalf of consumers to discover, evaluate, and purchase products. This is no longer a speculative scenario. It is taking shape now, in enterprise procurement tools, in consumer AI assistants, and in the broader infrastructure being built by the world’s largest technology companies.

If you’re responsible for brand strategy, the implications are significant. And they are arriving faster than a laser blink.

63% of global retailers agree that companies without AI agents will fall behind within two years*
58% believe AI agents will handle most customer interactions within five years*
60% of shoppers will use agentic AI to make purchases within the next 12 months**

sources: *Deloitte, **Harvard Business Review

Marketing managers must fundamentally rethink how brands, customers, and AI interact. For anyone responsible for brand, the implications are significant. Read on to understand why and what to do about it…

The AI Customer

To understand the stakes, you need to understand the process.

A personal AI agent operating on behalf of a consumer or a procurement team does not browse in the way a human does. It does not linger on a homepage, respond to a mood board, or a well-crafted headline. Instead, it queries structured data, cross-references criteria, weighs variables against stated preferences, and returns a shortlist or a decision.

Agentic commerce compresses days of human research, discovery, and comparison into instantaneous moments of evaluation. And this fundamentally changes how consumers allocate attention and make choices.

The New Criteria

The inputs AI agents use include

product specifications
pricing data
availability
reviews
sustainability ratings
structured brand data – machine-readable and consistently maintained across digital touchpoints

For example, I ask my AI agent find me options for a new TV. And then the AI agent retrieves and filters options, applying a weighting to the search based on both my stated and inferred priorities. As a result, it may present recommendations, or increasingly, simply complete the transaction. Alternatively, it may advise me to wait while it monitors price fluctuations, and then will automatically buy when the price drops. My input is minimal, the AI is doing all the leg work and, crucially a lot of the decision making.

Therefore, a brand whose product appears in the agentic search has won. The brand that does not is invisible, regardless of how compelling its creative work might be.

This shift is already happening. Adobe reported that AI-driven traffic to US retail sites jumped 670% year-on-year on Cyber Monday. OpenAI is partnering with Walmart, Shopify and payment platforms like Stripe. Perplexity is working with PayPal. And Google just released agentic checkout options. All of which means a bot will search, shop and ship your favourite goods to you, with minimal human input. (GeekWire)

In the B2B space, the pattern is equally pronounced. B2B buyers are increasingly using AI tools to conduct the early stages of vendor research. The tools filter out a significant proportion of the competitive set before the human even sees them.

If your brand is not structured, consistent, and legible to machine systems at that filtering stage, it may never reach the conversation at all.

Brand Identity that’s Visible to Both Computer and Human

Research from Pernod Ricard’s head of digital and design illustrates the risk acutely. When the company analysed how leading AI models represented its brands, they saw immediate issues of mislabelling and lack of visibility. LLM data was often incomplete or incorrect, with one popular model miscategorising an affordable mass-market whisky as a prestige product (Harvard Business Review). The consequences of that kind of misrepresentation, at scale and at speed, are considerable.

Most brand investment is built around human perception. Visual identity conveys authority. Tone of voice builds trust. Campaigns that create emotional connection. These things remain valuable, but now, they are only part of the picture.

The other part, the one that agentic systems respond to, is structural. It is the coherence and consistency of your

product data
brand architecture across digital channels
accuracy and completeness of the information that AI systems read

The disciplines of brand management and data architecture are becoming inseparable.

The Brand Coherence Advantage

By 2030, the US consumer retail market alone could see up to $1 trillion in revenue generated by agentic commerce. Global projections are estimated at as much as $5 trillion. (Microsoft)

In this new world, organisations with strong, consistently maintained brand architecture have the advantage. A brand that means one thing clearly, that presents itself consistently across every channel and system, is easier for an AI agent to assess and surface. A brand with fragmented positioning, inconsistent written content, or poorly structured digital infrastructure presents as ambiguous. And ambiguity is completely incompatible with algorithmic decision-making.

The organisations that are best placed in an agentic commerce environment will be those that have invested in brand foundations:-

clear positioning
rigorous consistency
well-structured brand architecture

Brand equity now needs to be read by the systems increasingly making decisions on behalf of your customers. If that’s not happening, your equity is quietly being eroded. Have a look at your brand architecture today and ask yourself

is it coherent?
is it consistent?
is it searchable?

The brands best placed for this shift are already asking these questions. If you are not yet, now is a good time to start. We can help.

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Case Study: Evara

Preserva: a new brand that’s more than a load of old balls

Posted on 17th March 202619th March 2026 by Sam

Young entrepreneur Freddie Bott was 23 when he looked at a dead tennis ball and thought, there has to be a better way.

The result is Preserva a brand that is as fun to look at as it is clever in concept.

from L: Design Director Matt Gillman, Account Exec Millie Regan and Freddie Bott discussing the project

Product

The product is simple and brilliant. Preserva is a fully automatic, rechargeable pressuriser that restores tennis and padel balls to their original playing condition, keeping them performing like new for at least four times longer.

With over 300 million tennis balls going to landfill every year, Bott’s solution is timely, practical and genuinely impactful.

Solution

The brand identity we created for Preserva reflects exactly what the product is: unpretentious, energetic and a little bit cheeky. The logo is deliberately soft and rounded, playful in its form. It has a squishy quality that feels at home on a court bag as much as it does on screen. Like Freddie, the logo does not take itself too seriously, and that is entirely the point.

After a detailed briefing with Freddie, the creative treatment is inspired by the pressure inside the balls and the tube. The logo’s letterforms designed to reflect that pressure.

And while many sports brand are heavily visually influenced by data and performance, Preserva deliberately is not. For example, brands like F1, Adidas, NBA, WHOOP and Oura build their entire visual identity around metrics, waveforms and performance-data.

While there is an obvious performance benefit to keeping tennis and padel ball pressure at their best, the brand isn’t truly about this. At it’s heart it’s about extending ball life, and in doing so extending play-time, as well as being more economical and sustainable along the way.

The bright, bold and confident green and orange of the colour palette are synonymous with the worlds of tennis and padel. They also pay more than a passing nod to the enthusiastic energy of the founder.

All of which make for a brand that’s hard to miss on a crowded retail shelf or a fast-moving social feed.

Underneath the playful exterior, the functional message is always present. The packaging is clean and clear, the product promise is front and centre, and every touchpoint communicates reliability without sacrificing the brand’s character.

Freddie set out to solve a real problem. Designhouse set out to make sure the world noticed. We think we managed both.

Designhouse has partnered with FTSE 250 companies and global enterprises for over 50 years. We also work with start ups and scale ups to create brand identities that can grow with their business. If you’d like to discuss your brand challenges, we’d be glad to talk.

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200 Million Dollar Lesson in Brand Trust

Posted on 17th March 202619th March 2026 by Sam

Earlier this month, when Anthropic refused the Pentagon’s demand to remove ethical guardrails from ClaudeAI, it lost a 200 million dollar contract overnight. Ouch!

Within hours, OpenAI, parent of ChatGPT, stepped in and took the deal.

Smart business move by ChatGPT’s Sam Altman? Not really.

ChatGPT uninstalls surged 295%
Social media was alight with calls to “cancel ChatGPT”
Key staff quit Open AI
Claude hit number one on the App Store for the first time ever
Claude installs rose by 51%
36% increase in revenue for Anthropic in just two weeks

Chat GPT agentic soldier created using AI

Trust Vs Profit

This is not a new story for brand equity watchers. At huge cost, Johnson & Johnson recalled 31 million bottles of Tylenol, and gained an invaluable long term reputation as the guardian of America’s public health. Patagonia told customers not to buy its products during Black Friday sales. Nike put Colin Kaepernick on its billboards while the stock was falling. In each case, the short-term loss was visible and measurable. The long-term gain was something ultimately more valuable. You can’t put a number on consumer trust.

This is the brand loyalty that comes from watching a company absorb a hard financial hit and hold its line anyway.

Consumers have become sophisticated readers of corporate behaviour. They know the difference between a brand that talks about values and one that walks them.

In the face of overwhelming consumer backlash, Altman publicly admitted his move “looked opportunistic and sloppy” and has rolled back back his Pentagon support. The damage to the ChatGPT brand may be harder to recover.

Integrity is not the enemy of growth. It is the foundation of it.

Designhouse has partnered with FTSE 250 companies and global enterprises for over 50 years. We create brand identities that are authentic and long lasting. If you’d like to discuss your brand challenges, we’d be glad to talk.

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2025 Brand Glow-ups and Blow-ups

Posted on 19th December 202517th March 2026 by Sam

The Year Digital-First Design Became Non-Negotiable

2025 marked a turning point – the world’s most valuable brands stopped designing for print and started designing for screens. The evidence is clear in the work, and more importantly, in the results.

30% of stock market value for S&P 500 companies is driven by brand strength (The Economist)
40%+ of a company’s market cap comes from brand and reputation, according to 60% of CEOs. (World Economic Forum)
56% higher total returns and 32% more shareholder return come from strong-reputation brands (McKinsey & Company).

Play with your brand equity at your balance sheet peril (yes, we’re looking at you Cracker Barrel and HBO Max)

So who were the winners and losers in the rebrands, evolutions, make-overs and muck ups of the year? We’ve listed a few below, and identified the three strategic trends that have defined 2025…

Trend 1: The Gradient Shift, Signalling Adaptability in Static Logos

Google, Microsoft, TDK Electronics, and Eventbrite all introduced gradient colour systems where solid blocks previously existed

TDK logo redesign, before and after

Microsoft’s Jon Friedman explicitly connected this shift to AI and “how AI is shifting the discipline of design.” Gradients signal continuous transformation and adaptability, critical messages when your market perceives change as the only constant. TDK’s gradient, developed by Interbrand “symbolizes TDK Transformation,” directly tying visual evolution to business strategy.

the evolution of MS icons

These aren’t aesthetic choices, they’re positioning statements that communicate organisational agility with innovation to secure ROI.

Trend 2: Screen-Native Design (The Death of Print-First Thinking)

Rounded corners replaced sharp edges across Microsoft Office, Walmart‘s spark motif, and Bentley’s winged B. Lufthansa Group removed its circular frame entirely. Amazon‘s rebrand by Koto prioritized “digital-first” colour saturation for Prime.

Simpler shapes, sharper, brighter colours all features of 2025 most successful brand redesigns

With Microsoft alone serving 400+ million Office users daily on screens, legibility at small sizes became business-critical. The Word icon dropped from four rectangles to three specifically to “reduce visual noise”, a direct response to mobile-first usage patterns.

Brands that haven’t optimized for 20px favicon displays and notification icons are actively losing recognition in the environments where engagement happens.

Trend 3: Vibrant Colour Recalibration: Standing Out in Saturated Digital Feeds

Eventbrite introduced “highlighter neons,” Alpen moved from heritage muted tones to “creams, blues and greens designed to bring vitality,” Amazon standardized “Smile Orange” after years of iterating sub brands with different colours, type fonts and inconsistent shades. And Walmart’s “spark” motif logo and yellow and blue palette were designed to be bolder and brighter than the 2008 iteration while remaining largely similar.

Eventbrite’s neons, Alpen’s colour glow-up, Walmart’s subtle evolution, with more vibrant blues and yellows

In algorithmically-curated feeds where users scroll past 300+ posts daily, colour becomes the primary stopping mechanism. Brands competing for attention needed saturation levels that registered on backlit screens, not just printed packaging.

The Billion Dollar Cost of Brand Equity

Cracker Barrel demonstrated how not to mess with your brand logo this year:

Removed 98-year heritage logo for generic wordmark
Stock dropped 10% within days (-$200M value)
Full reversal within weeks

original logo -> August 21 2025 rebrand -> August 27 2025 revert

And Cracker Barrel were not alone in what industry experts call the “corporate walk of shame”.

The HBO Max → Max → HBO Max debacle was roundly ridiculed and described as “the pinnacle of walking away from brand equity.” Having dropped the most recognisable and much loved brand element, HBO, two years ago, HBO has now been re-instated to the platform branding. The rebrand cost alone exceeded “what some streamers spend on content.”

HBO Max’s log walk of brand shame

Both brands confused modernisation with erasure. The strategic failure is the knowledge that 50+ years of consumer recognition has quantifiable value that vastly exceeds the cost of evolutionary refinement.

The New Brand Paradox: Instant Credibility Without Heritage

When Shell and Equinor needed branding for their North Sea joint venture, they faced the opposite problem: how to project 50 years of credibility on day one when entering a market where competitors were actively exiting.

The solution required encoding durability into every design decision, from the name (the A of Aberdeen + dura of durability) to the custom wordmark “deliberately designed to feel dense, as if carved out of granite.” Even the phonetics were strategic: spoken with a Scottish accent, the hard “D” softens to “Ajura,” balancing industrial authority with regional warmth.

Instant authority, Adura, Shell and Equinor’s North Sea joint venture

Whether preserving existing equity or manufacturing instant credibility, strategic design must encode the business positioning into visual systems that communicate before words do.

Designing For Tomorrow’s Digital Context

The brand evolutions we’ve seen in 2025 are infrastructure investments responding to three measurable pressures:

Mobile-first consumption: 60%+ of brand interactions now happen on screens under 6 inches
Algorithmic distribution: Brands must optimize for feed-based discovery, not destination sites
Global scalability: Multi-market operations demand systematic consistency over artisanal variation

The best redesigns came from creatives at Interbrand, Koto, Buck Design Ltd, BrandOpus, and our teams at Designhouse, all delivering work that prioritized systematic scalability over singular creative expression.

Whether unifying 50+ sub-brands (Amazon/Koto) or encoding instant credibility into new ventures (Adura/DesignHouse), the emphasis shifted from logo artistry to strategic systems thinking.

What This Means for B2B Brands in 2026

If your brand identity was designed before 2020, it likely optimizes for contexts that no longer drive business outcomes:

Print collateral that sits in drawers
Trade show booths visited by declining attendance
Desktop-first websites losing traffic to mobile

The question isn’t whether to evolve, it’s whether to do so proactively or reactively after your competitors have already captured the positioning premium.

DesignHouse has created strategic brand transformations for global leaders across telecommunications, transport, energy, and consumer sectors for over 50 years. Based in London, we combine strategic rigor with design excellence to create identities that drive business outcomes.

https://designhouse.co.uk/

How Coutts Turns a Rooftop Garden into a Brand Statement

Posted on 11th July 202511th March 2026 by Matthew Gillman

Coutts is a 330-year-old private bank. Its brand rests on discretion, quality and a relationship with wealth that goes beyond the transactional. Establishing a garden above its Strand headquarters, growing saffron, wasabi and Chilean guava for its own restaurant is more than simple horticulture.

Designhouse CEO Lavinia Culverhouse recently visited the Skyline Garden for a private tour, and it is hard to miss what Coutts is doing here. The garden yields fresh produce directly for the bank’s hospitality offering. It also hosts client events and workshops. And it sits, quite literally, above one of London’s most recognisable financial addresses. Every choice, from the global varieties grown to the sustainability credentials, reinforces the brand. Coutts wants its clients to feel the values of the institution. Considered. Unhurried. Rooted in something real.

For those of us working in strategic brand design, it is a useful reminder that the most compelling brand expressions are rarely the ones that announce themselves loudest. A rooftop garden is not a logo or a campaign. But it communicates values, provenance and a particular idea of excellence in a way that a tagline rarely can.

The brands that endure tend to be the ones that find ways to make their values tangible, experiential and consistent across every touchpoint, including the ones nobody would think to call branding at all.

Designhouse has partnered with FTSE 250 companies and global enterprises for over 50 years, delivering strategic brand consultancy that creates measurable competitive advantage. If you’d like to discuss your brand challenges, we’d be glad to talk.

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Flowers Exhibition Saatchi Gallery

Posted on 5th May 202511th March 2026 by Matthew Gillman

Finding Inspiration In Nature

Last week, the Designhouse team took a break from the studio. We were celebrating CEO Lavinia Culverhouse’s birthday with a visit to the Flowers exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in Sloane Square.

With over 500 works spanning everything from botanical roots to the intersection of flowers and fashion, it was a rich and genuinely surprising day.

It is easy to underestimate how much time away from a screen can sharpen your thinking. Exhibitions like this one are a reminder that the strongest visual language often comes from nature. Form, shapes, colour – all things that nature designed long before brands existed. For those of us working in strategic brand design, that kind of reference point matters.

The best brand work does not emerge from a brief alone. It comes from people who are curious, who look broadly, and who bring a wider frame of reference to the table. Days like this are part of how Designhouse stays sharp.

Happy birthday, Lavinia, you deserve all the flowers.

It was a bloomin’ marvellous day!

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What the Fashion Runway Can Teach Us About Brand Identity

Posted on 4th March 202511th March 2026 by Matthew Gillman

The Designhouse team visited the Lightroom in King’s Cross recently for Vogue: Inventing the Runway. It’s an immersive exhibition tracing the fashion show from the intimate couture salons of the early 20th century to the era-defining spectacles of recent decades. Narrated by Cate Blanchett, it is a genuinely compelling piece of experiential storytelling. With incredible Vogue archive featuring designers from Chanel and Dior to Vivienne Westwood and Maison Margiela,

Fashion Show as Brand Statement

What struck us was how clearly the exhibition frames the runway as a communications medium. It’s not just a vehicle for clothes. The show is where a designer’s identity is made legible. It’s where values, references and audience are declared season after season. In that sense, it is not so different from the work we do. Designers of all disciplines struggle with the question of how to make tangible something that is abstract. The challenge is to embody a vision, a set of values, a sense of who you are and who you are for, to make it visible and felt by an audience.

Authenticity is Always In style

The figure who stayed with the team longest was Patrick Kelly.

Born in Mississippi in 1954, Kelly became the first American admitted to the Chambre Syndicale du Prêt-à-Porter, the governing body of the French ready-to-wear industry.

His runway shows looked genuinely fun. Models sashaying and twirling, turning the catwalk into a party. The majority of his models were Black at a time when that was far from the norm.

His signature playful buttons were a direct reference to his grandmother, who mended his family’s clothing with mismatched buttons from her sewing basket. That detail matters: a brand rooted so specifically in personal history, translated into a visual language that was immediately recognisable, joyful and subversive all at once.

Kelly was extremely proud of his roots and culture. He actively incorporated his own background into his practice. And he merged the celebration of Black identity with a contemporary aesthetic. He built a brand with genuine conviction behind it. One that communicated something real rather than simply competing for attention. It is a lesson that transfers well beyond fashion.

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M6N – A Brand Under Pressure

Posted on 3rd February 202511th March 2026 by Matthew Gillman

The first weekend of the Six Nations delivered everything it usually promises. Kit design upgrades were in evidence across all the teams. France were imperious in Paris, Ireland edged a tight one in Dublin, and Scotland held off a determined Italy. But alongside the on-the-pitch kit and caboodle, there was a parallel conversation running, one that those of us in brand design found equally compelling.

Rebrand Reactions

The tournament rebranded to M6N ahead of its 25th anniversary in 2025. The new identity was developed by London creative agency How Now. It centres on a slanted, shiny wordmark rendered in a fiery orange gradient, chosen to channel warmth and optimism. The reaction, predictably, was split.

Fans compared it to everything from Mars bar branding to the credits of a 1996 comedy film. Others called it a necessary evolution. That kind of response is familiar to anyone who has worked through a major rebrand with a client. The logo lands first, stripped of context, and people react to a mark rather than a system.

Standing Strong In the Face of Criticism

Michael Ritson, Head of Marketing & Creative at Six Nations Rugby was clear on the intent. It is designed to create memory structures with the brand, attract younger fans, and build something that works as a digital-first identity. The men’s rebrand also aligns with the Women’s Six Nations identity launched in 2023. There is now a unified, intuitive naming structure across M6N, W6N and U6N. As a result, each stands on its own, while also remaining part of the same family.

Ritson’s response to the initial backlash was straightforward: trust the strategy, and see how it comes to life when the games kick off. That is sound thinking. A brand identity is not a logo on a white background. It is colour filling a stadium, players wearing it, broadcasters running it across millions of screens, supporters wrapping themselves in their nation’s colours. Seen in that context, across that first weekend, it worked. Brilliantly.

The Final Result

The M6N rebrand is a useful case study in one of the most consistent truths in brand design. Reaction at launch is rarely the measure of success. The measure is whether the identity holds, scales and builds meaning over time.

And this is most definitely a brand identity that earned its conversion.

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Reboot’s bold new brand identity

Posted on 27th February 202310th March 2026 by Matthew Gillman

Designhouse worked with Reboot, a nonprofit organisation dedicated to driving racial equality in the financial services sector. We created a vibrant new brand identity. The project was on a pro-bono basis, reflecting our commitment to using creative expertise in support of meaningful social change.

Background

Reboot’s mission is to educate business leaders in financial services; to provide a platform to build a more diverse and inclusive workplace. It does this by raising visibility of the challenges faced by ethnic minority professionals. Predominantly using the power of storytelling to bring individual experiences into the mainstream conversation.

Central to Reboot’s approach is its ambassador network. Support comes from senior figures from some of the most prominent names in the industry, including State Street, Numis, BlueBay Asset Management, Invesco, GIC and MFS Investment Management. These voices lend credibility and reach to Reboot’s campaigning, engaging business leaders who have the power to drive meaningful change.

Alongside this advocacy work, Reboot produces research to underpin its messaging. Its flagship annual Race to Equality report tracks and highlights trends around discrimination in the UK workplace. It offers data-driven insight that sits alongside the personal stories at the heart of the organisation’s identity. By combining lived experience with robust evidence, Reboot is able to push for progressive change in a way that resonates both emotionally and professionally.

Attention-grabbing Identity

The new visual identity created by Designhouse reflects the energy and ambition Reboot’s mission.

The brand mark symbolises positive change. Bold, punchy design choices capture attention and motivate action. At the centre of the identity is a clear call to action: “It’s time to switch the narrative”. This strapline encapsulates Reboot’s determination to reshape the conversation around race and opportunity in financial services.

For Designhouse, the strategic thinking behind the identity is as important as the visual execution. The aim is to resonate with business leaders, encouraging active involvement rather than passive observation. Every element of the design is considered in terms of how it will inspire engagement; from the colour palette to the typography and overall tone of the brand.

The partnership is a strong example of how design and brand strategy can serve a purpose beyond commerce. The right brand identity adds weight and credibility to organisations working on issues that matter. For Reboot, a compelling and professional identity helps ensure that its message is heard at the right levels. It givesthe organisation the visual authority to sit alongside the major institutions it seeks to influence.

Designhouse continues to work with clients across sectors where brand strategy and design thinking can make a genuine difference.

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