Five fixed naming and brand-text formats, each priced from a stated basis.

Those twelve get run once against the federal trademark register, a knockout screen, not a legal clearance search. It catches an obvious conflict before you fall for a name. It does not replace an attorney, and we say that in the rationale sheet we hand you, not in fine print you'd have to go looking for.

Four finalists reach you. Each comes with a one-page rationale: what it means, why it survived, how it's meant to be said, plus a pronunciation note for anyone who'll answer your phone. The sprint starts with a thirty-minute intake call where we ask what the name has to do that your current one, or lack of one, doesn't: say it fast on a call, fit on a truck door, hold up next to three competitors you name for us out loud.

We will not hand you forty options and let you sort it out. A list that long is a studio outsourcing its editing to the client.

We start from the house name and work outward: same register or a deliberate contrast, same syllable weight or a stated reason it's shorter, same or different vowel sound depending on whether you want the two names to read as a family or as clearly separate lines. A vet clinic does not want a name that sounds like a candy bar. The same logic applies inside one company. A premium line and a budget line need names that don't quietly undercut each other on a shelf.

Card sorting is how we work this one. Every candidate goes on its own index card, and cards get grouped and re-grouped by hand against the house name and against each other until the set holds together. You get the surviving set, not the process. The process is why the set holds up under a second look three months later.

The set is: one elevator line for a stranger who asks what you do, one boilerplate paragraph for the bottom of a press release or an about page, one voicemail script written to be read aloud without sounding read, one signature line for the bottom of an email, and one line short enough to sit in an invoice footer without wrapping. Five jobs, five lines, no overlap.

We draft each on a typewriter first, on paper, before anything goes into a document. That is the fastest way to hear a line that's a syllable too long. Two survive first read for every one that gets circled and refined. We will not deliver a single "brand tagline" and call the set done; that's a different, smaller job and it isn't this one.

That last page is the one clients quote back to us most. A brand voice writer for hire who only gives you the friendly, on-brand version hasn't given you a voice guide, they've given you a mood board with adjectives on it. We write the annoyed version, the apologetic version, and the version for a customer who's wrong but needs an answer anyway. That's when a written-down voice actually earns its keep, not during the easy emails.

It ships printed as a small booklet, saddle-stitched, eight pages. We print it even when the client only asked for a PDF, because a rule read off a printed page and the same rule skimmed on a phone in a hallway land differently, and we want the version that lands.

We print your current name in large type and mark it up by hand: which syllables go soft in a noisy room, where it gets confused with a competitor over the phone, whether the trademark conflict a lawyer found is one word or the whole name. That markup, plus a short written history of how the name has performed, plus what a rebrand would actually cost in signage, domains and recognition against what staying costs in the conflict, becomes the case.

The audit ends in a written recommendation: keep it, with specific fixes to how it's used, or drop it, with a short list of what a replacement would need to do differently. We do not default to recommending a rename just because that's the bigger job. Plenty of audits end with "keep it, fix the tagline instead," and that's a complete answer, not a smaller sale.