A brand sprint is a fixed two-week engagement that produces a complete brand identity. Strategy and positioning in week one, full visual identity and a launch-ready asset kit in week two, files handed over on day fourteen. We run it with a small senior team and fixed pricing, so there's no open-ended exploration and no scope-creep invoicing. At Proof of Work Studio the sprint is $15,000 fixed and you talk directly to the two people building your brand. Scope, constraints and how to start sit on the brand sprint agency page.

The term has an older meaning worth separating out before you compare quotes. The original brand sprint is a three-hour workshop designed at Google Ventures, and it produces alignment rather than a brand. If a quote says brand sprint and the deliverable is a workshop summary, you are reading that one.

Two weeks works because we've stripped out the parts of a traditional brand project that don't add anything. No account-management chain. No junior designers learning on the job, and no fortnightly committee. The research that used to take a strategist a fortnight gets gathered and synthesised with AI in a day, then a senior strategist interprets it. What's left is the actual work, and the actual work fits in two weeks. We've shipped 60+ startup brands this way, including Hemi, Datagram, OSMI, and Gala Games.

This is the week-by-week account. What lands on which day, what we need from you, where the timeline breaks, what it costs, and two named clients that shipped on it.

Why a two-week brand sprint is possible

It comes down to three things.

AI-powered research. The competitive audit, the market context and the positioning analysis that used to take a strategist two weeks now take a day. We use AI to gather and synthesise the research, then a senior strategist interprets it and builds the positioning off the back of it.

Senior team only. Everyone working on your brand has done it dozens of times. Nobody's learning on the job, nobody's waiting on a creative director to sign off. The people doing the work are the people making the decisions.

No committee. Traditional agencies stack account managers, project managers, junior designers and creative directors in a chain, so every decision passes through four people. We have two, and you talk to them directly.

It starts before the kickoff

Most agencies open with a workshop. We open with a questionnaire. Before anyone gets on a call, your founding team fills out an async discovery document covering positioning, audience, competitive set, visual preferences and brand ambitions.

Those 30 questions force clarity before anyone spends a minute in a meeting. We ask things like "describe three brands you admire and why", "what's the one thing a competitor does better than you visually", and "if your brand walked into a dinner party, who would it be and what would they talk about". Strange questions, but they reach things a two-hour workshop never does.

We do it async because founders give better answers when they have time to think. In a live room the loudest voice wins and the nuance gets lost. When each co-founder answers independently we get the real picture, disagreements included, and the disagreements are the valuable part. If the CEO wants the brand to feel premium and the CTO wants it to feel developer-friendly, that's a tension to resolve in week one rather than discover in week two.

By the time we're on the kickoff call we've read every answer, mapped the competitive space, and formed a preliminary positioning hypothesis. The 90-minute session is a focused conversation, not a fishing expedition.

Is a brand sprint workshop the same as a two-week brand sprint?

No, and the difference is the deliverable. Jake Knapp's three-hour brand sprint, the one most of the search results point at, is six exercises run internally by the founding team. A 20-year roadmap, a what-how-why, your top three values, your top three audiences, personality sliders and a competitive map. You finish with a two-page guide to what the company stands for. You do not finish with a logo, a colour system or a typeface.

A two-week brand sprint takes that kind of input and ships the rest of it. The positioning framework, the visual identity, the guidelines and the asset kit, made by a senior team rather than by the founders with sticky notes. If your question is "how do we agree what we stand for", run the workshop. If your question is "we need a finished brand before the launch", you need the sprint.

A brand design sprint usually means something narrower again, the identity work on its own in a week or ten days with no strategy in front of it. That's week two of ours, and it only holds up because week one settled the positioning first.

We don't run the workshop live. The 30-question discovery document above covers the same ground, for the reasons in that section. Miro and Figma both have free three-hour brand sprint templates if you want to run it yourself first. Bring the output to the kickoff call and week one starts further ahead.

Week one - strategy and positioning

Week one gets the strategy and positioning foundations right. We run a 90-minute kickoff with your founding team covering your market, your competitors, your audience, and where you want the company in 12 months.

From that we build your positioning framework. Who you are. What you do. Who it's for. Why it matters. How you're different. Not a 40-page strategy deck, a sharp framework your team can actually use when making decisions.

It usually runs three or four pages, and that's deliberate. The longer a brand strategy document is, the less likely anyone reads it. Ours gets pinned above desks, pasted into onboarding docs, and pulled up in standups when someone's writing landing-page copy and needs to check the messaging hierarchy. If it's too long to use, no one uses it.

By Friday you've approved the strategic direction. No ambiguity going into design.

Week two - visual identity

Week two is the visual identity, built straight off the approved strategy. Logo and logomark, a colour system, typography and layout principles, plus illustration or photography direction if it's needed.

You see concepts Monday. We refine through the week on your feedback. By Friday the identity is final and the assets are in production.

The week has a rhythm that matters. Monday is presentation and first reactions. Tuesday and Wednesday are refinement, usually two rounds, occasionally three. Thursday is finalisation. Friday is production and export. Every day has a clear purpose, so we never drift into the open-ended "let's keep exploring" cycle that kills traditional brand projects.

And the design never runs separate from the strategy. Every visual decision traces back to the week-one framework. If the positioning says trustworthy and precise, that rules out whole colour families and typefaces before we've opened a file. The strategy sets the constraints, so we're solving a defined problem rather than chasing options. That's why it moves fast.

What surprises clients most

After doing this 60+ times we've clocked a few things that catch people off guard.

How fast the strategy comes together once the committee's gone. Founders expect strategy to take six weeks because they've only seen it inside organisations with six layers of approval. When the people deciding are the people doing the work, it crystallises in days.

How useful the positioning framework turns out to be. Most clients arrive expecting the visual identity to be the main thing. Six months on, the positioning doc is what they reference most. It becomes the source of truth for how the company talks about itself, on the site, in sales calls, in investor updates. One client told us it saved them three weeks of back-and-forth every time they briefed a freelance copywriter, because they could hand over the document and say "this is who we are".

How much faster everything downstream moves. Product marketing, content, hiring pages and partnership decks all get easier once there's a clear brand system to work inside. The two-week brand sprint gives you a brand and a decision-making framework. Everything that follows moves faster because of the second part.

The pushback, and why it's wrong

"Two weeks isn't enough time."

We hear this from people who've only known traditional agency timelines. What they're really saying is "I can't imagine getting alignment in two weeks", and in their world they're right. If your brand project runs through eight stakeholders, three rounds of internal review before the agency sees anything, and a committee that meets fortnightly, two weeks is impossible.

That's a process problem, not a timeline one.

Strip out the layers. Founders in the room, strategist already done the research, designer senior enough to decide without an approval chain, and two weeks is generous. We've done it across AI platforms, DeFi protocols, fintech products and enterprise developer tools. Two weeks holds regardless of sector.

DeliverableTraditional agencyBrand sprint
Research and audit2-3 weeks1 day (AI-powered)
Strategy and positioning3-4 weeksWeek 1
Visual identity4-6 weeksWeek 2
Brand guidelines1-2 weeksIncluded in Week 2
Asset kit and templates1-2 weeksIncluded in Week 2
Total10-16 weeks2 weeks

The other version is "we need time to sit with it". That comes from a reasonable place, but it usually means the team hasn't been given enough context to decide with confidence. When the rationale is on the table, founders sign off in the room. The hesitation usually means the case wasn't made.

How is a brand sprint different from a logo project?

A logo project produces a logo. A brand sprint produces the system the logo lives inside. If a quote says "$5k for a brand identity", what is being sold is a logo plus some colour and type choices. That's fine at pre-seed, but it won't survive a Series A hire's first month or an enterprise sales conversation. A real brand sprint costs three times that because the deliverables are three times what a logo project includes, and because the work goes wrong without senior judgement at every step.

What you get at the end

A complete brand system, ready to use. Specifically -

Naming or rename exploration sits alongside that list where the round comes with a new name. Shortlist, rationale and a trademark sense-check, not a four-month naming project and not legal clearance. More on why founders overthink naming.

Built to be used from day one, not parked in a Drive folder.

What does a brand sprint not include?

This is where most contracts get tested. A brand sprint covers strategy and identity. It does not cover a full marketing website build (that's the Web Sprint, two to four weeks more), product UI design, long-form website copy beyond headlines and the messaging framework, launch campaign assets like ad creative and sales decks (those sit in the Growth retainer), trademark search and registration, or internal brand rollout and team training. If you need any of those, you should hear it on the first call. A sprint that pretends to cover all of it produces a worse version of every line item.

What happens after the sprint

The sprint stands on its own, but most clients move straight into a web build. The natural next step is taking the brand system and building a site that puts it to work, and because we designed both there's no translation gap. No re-briefing a separate agency, no "that's not quite what we meant". The team that built your brand builds your site.

Our Web Sprint runs two to four weeks depending on scope and picks up exactly where the sprint left off. The positioning becomes the copy framework, the visual identity becomes the design system, the guidelines become the implementation rules. Everything connects.

For teams that want the same people on hand after launch, the Growth retainer picks up where the sprint stops. A senior creative team in your Slack, from $7,000 a month, covering product marketing, social, campaign assets, sales materials and motion, all inside the system we built. Sprint first, then ongoing design and marketing support from the team that already knows the brand. That's the order most clients take.

Is your company a fit for a two-week brand sprint?

It works best for two kinds of company. Post-raise teams who need to look the part now they've got capital and a timeline. And companies outgrowing their MVP brand, where the product has matured but the brand still looks like it was built in a weekend.

If you're pre-product or pre-revenue, it's probably too early. If you're post-Series B with a 50-person marketing team, you might need something more involved. For everyone in between, two weeks is plenty. We work from London with clients across the UK, the US, Europe and Singapore, and the two-week clock runs the same wherever you are.

This is the practical test we run on the first call. Six questions. Four or more yes answers and the two-week format will work. Fewer, and one of the longer formats below is the safer buy.

Two weeks, four weeks or six weeks?

Some studios argue for four, and the case they make is that two weeks ships a logo rather than a system. Most of the studios in the six-week listicles run four to six. The extra fortnight buys reflection time for the founder and a second concept round for the designer. It doesn't buy more strategy, because strategy is decided in week one in every version of the format.

Where two weeks fails is on decision speed, not craft. A founder who needs to sit with a direction for a week should book four. A founder with a raise closing and a decision-maker in the room should book two. The deliverables at the end are the same list. The difference is who has to move fast, the studio or the client.

Brand sprints we've shipped

The clearest test of the timeline is what happens after the sprint ends. Two named cases from the last twelve months.

Hemi - two weeks to a launch-ready brand for Bitcoin yield infrastructure

Hemi came to us pre-mainnet with a developer-facing protocol and a technical story the rest of the market couldn't read. Two-week sprint covering positioning, identity, and the launch-ready brand surface. Strategy in week one, identity in week two, hand-off on day fourteen. Within months of going live, Hemi had secured $1.2B onchain, and the brand held through the launch announcement and the press cycles that followed before they moved into an ongoing Growth retainer for continued creative.

The constraint that made the timeline possible was one decision-maker, three-day feedback cycles, and a positioning hypothesis ready on the kickoff call. Most rebrands stretch because the client can't move at the pace the work needs. Hemi could.

Datagram - rebrand and launch positioning in five weeks

Datagram is decentralised infrastructure for developer and node-operator audiences. We ran the Brand Sprint into the Web Sprint back-to-back and finished in five weeks. Within four weeks of launch the rebrand had carried 100,000-plus network signups, into a $4M raise. The full pre-Series-A playbook lives on our post-Series A rebrand page, but Datagram is the live test of it.

This one changed how we work. We now build the announcement assets into week two of the Brand Sprint by default, so the press kit, social cards and partner notification copy ship with the brand rather than as separate scope. The sprint and the launch are one engagement.

What it costs

The Brand Sprint is $15,000 fixed, and fees are GBP or USD from a UK Ltd, so UK founders pay in sterling with no exchange surprise. The Web Sprint runs $10,000 to $20,000 fixed depending on scope, so brand and site together run $25,000 to $35,000 over five to six weeks. The Growth Retainer starts at $7,000 a month and scales with launch and product cadence. All fixed scope, fixed price. No hourly rates, no scope-creep invoicing. For Series B and enterprise rebrands the range moves to $60-150k.

Those are Proof of Work Studio prices, and the market spread around them is wide because the term brand sprint is contested. The funded startup brand benchmarks report has the market ranges by stage, from $10-25k at pre-seed to $150-400k at Series B.

Brand sprint FAQ

What is a brand sprint?

A brand sprint is a fixed-scope, fixed-price engagement that takes a company from positioning to a finished visual identity in a set number of days. Two weeks in our case. It replaces the two to three month agency rebrand with a small senior team, one decision-maker on your side and no committee rounds. You finish with strategy, logo system, colour, type, guidelines and a launch-ready asset kit.

How long does a brand sprint take?

Two weeks at Proof of Work Studio. Week one is strategy and positioning, week two is the visual identity and the asset kit. Some studios sell four to six week "sprints", which is closer to a compressed rebrand than a sprint. If the website follows, add two to four weeks for the Web Sprint.

What is a brand sprint workshop?

The three-hour Google Ventures exercise, run by the founding team, that produces a short written guide to what the company stands for. Six exercises, sticky notes, no designer. It doesn't produce an identity. If you've already run one, bring the output to kickoff and week one starts from a sharper brief.

Is a brand sprint the same as a design sprint?

No. A design sprint is the five-day Google Ventures method for prototyping and testing a product idea, so what you hold at the end is a tested prototype rather than a brand. A brand sprint borrows the time-box and applies it to identity instead. If you've been quoted a "brand design sprint", check whether strategy is in scope, because it usually isn't.

What is a brand strategy sprint?

The positioning half of a brand sprint, bought on its own. Most agencies run it in about five days and hand back a positioning and messaging document with no identity attached. If you've been quoted four to six weeks, that's usually the full identity, not strategy on its own. Ours is week one of the two-week sprint and we don't sell it separately, because a positioning document with nothing to express it tends to sit in a shared drive. Brand strategy vs identity covers what you'd be buying.

What does a brand sprint cost?

$15,000 fixed for the Brand Sprint, fees in GBP or USD from a UK Ltd. That covers strategy, positioning, the full visual identity, guidelines, and a launch-ready asset kit, with no hourly billing and no scope-creep invoices. If you carry straight on into a website the Web Sprint runs $10,000 to $20,000 fixed. Series B and enterprise rebrands run $60-150k depending on scope.

How is two weeks even possible?

Because the overhead is gone, not the work. AI does the research gathering and synthesis in a day, a senior team makes the calls instead of routing them through account managers, and there's no committee to slow decisions down. The "Why a two-week brand sprint is possible" section above breaks it down in full.

What do I actually get?

A complete, usable brand system. Positioning and messaging framework, full logo suite in every format, colour system, typography, brand guidelines, a website-ready asset kit, social templates, and a pitch deck template. Naming or rename exploration sits alongside it where the round comes with a new name. All built to be implemented from day one.

Brand sprint vs a full rebrand. What's the difference?

Scope and stakeholder count. A full rebrand adds user research, multi-product architecture, internal rollout and a launch campaign, spreads the work across two to three months, and costs three or four times as much. A brand sprint is the narrower scope most funded startups need between Seed and Series B. Brand sprint or full rebrand has the five questions that tell you which one you need.

Can the brand sprint include the website?

Yes. Most clients run the Brand Sprint straight into our Web Sprint, two to four weeks depending on scope. Because the same team designs both there's no hand-off gap. Datagram did exactly this and finished the brand and the site in five weeks combined.

Can the brand sprint run as a four to six week engagement?

Close. Run the Brand Sprint into the Web Sprint and the pair takes five to six weeks. The Brand Sprint is two weeks and $15,000 fixed, the Web Sprint is two to four weeks and $10,000 to $20,000 fixed, so together that's $25,000 to $35,000 for positioning, a full visual identity, brand guidelines, the asset kit and a marketing site deployed live. If another agency quotes you a six-week sprint, check whether the site is in scope, because it usually isn't.

Can we keep the team on after the sprint for product and marketing design?

Yes. The Growth retainer starts at $7,000 a month, three-month minimum then rolling, and keeps the same senior team on your ongoing brand, content, product marketing and campaign work, all inside the system the sprint built. Hemi went from the two-week sprint into an ongoing retainer after launch. The order matters. Sprint first, so the retainer runs on an approved positioning and identity rather than working it out month by month.

What should a Series A or B founder ask before buying a brand strategy sprint?

Five things. Who exactly does the work, named people rather than a team page. What the fixed price covers and what costs extra, especially the website, motion and copy. Whether the timeline is committed to a date. What the handoff includes, working files and templates rather than a PDF. And what the agency needs from you, because a sprint fails when feedback takes a week instead of 48 hours. At Series B, also ask whether multi-product architecture is in scope. If it isn't, you need a rebrand rather than a sprint.

What results have brand sprint clients seen?

Three named cases. Hemi went from a pre-mainnet protocol to a launch-ready brand in fourteen days and secured $1.2B onchain within months of launch. Datagram ran the Brand Sprint into the Web Sprint, finished in five weeks, and carried 100,000-plus network signups into a $4M raise. OSMI ran a full identity rebuild into $2M in launch revenue and 800% market value growth.

Related reading

Most teams book the sprint just after a raise. If that's you, the rebrand after funding page covers the timing, and the startup branding agency page covers the offer for earlier-stage teams.

Got a launch coming? Let's talk.