There are many reasons a company might want to rebrand. Jaz Fenton and Jamil Bhuya, the cofounders of design and branding agency Otherhalf Studio, have encountered a variety of good reasons while working with clients. Updating your company name, logo, messaging, and overall brand personality can support business strategy changes or help you stay relevant. In Jaz and Jamil’s experience, business owners are also sometimes managing trademark issues, meeting retailer expectations, or simply in need of a refresh.
But what’s the impact on your budget? The cost of rebranding can vary depending on factors such as scope, the type and number of products you sell, and other considerations. Here are the common factors that influence rebranding costs and how to budget for a rebrand, with advice from Jaz and Jamil.
Top reasons to rebrand
The most common reasons to craft a rebranding strategy include:
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Outgrowing your original assets. Some founders are great at solving problems, but not the most creatively minded. This means they might have used beginner-friendly design tools like Canva to create their initial brand elements and now need professional help to refine their visual identity.
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Staying relevant. Even if a brand is “killing it,” they should always evolve, Jaz says. She explains that it’s necessary to stay relevant as your audience expands or the market changes, so you don’t fall behind.
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Accommodating big retailers. As you scale and work to get your products placed with retailers, they may ask you to do a brand refresh to align with their own brand or product catalog, as Jaz and Jamil experienced. They did a brand refresh with a more minimal look to accommodate big retailers.
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Resolving trademark issues. A new brand may not be aware that their name or look is too similar to another brand’s until legal issues arise, requiring a rebrand. When Jaz and Jamil encountered naming issues with one of the brands they worked with, they had to update both their name and product packaging.
Factors that influence rebranding costs
Your costs will depend on the scope of your rebranding project. For example, it generally costs less to update a logo than your entire brand architecture. The following are common factors that can impact the cost of a brand reboot.
Scope
The level of your rebranding efforts directly impacts the cost, Jaz says. When Otherhalf Studio takes on such projects, a complete brand overhaul can include new brand guidelines, brand research, and brand strategy. A project with a smaller scope, like a brand reboot or refresh, on the other hand, typically updates elements like a logo or website, and therefore costs less than changes that involve new strategy and guidelines.
As a general rule, branding costs can range anywhere from a few thousand dollars for a more DIY approach using tools like Canva or hiring freelancers through a service like Fiverr to over $70,000 for a full brand audit and high-end, comprehensive branding packages. Jaz and Jamil explain that Otherhalf’s costs scale with the scope of work, but they start at around $10,000 to $15,000.
Research and strategy
Before any rebranding design work, you need to understand your target market, customers, and competitors. That can mean audience persona development, stakeholder interviews, market research, competitive analysis, and building out brand guidelines. If your positioning is unclear, your messaging is inconsistent, or you’re trying to reach a new customer segment, invest in research. It can help you identify audience insights to guide updated brand messaging and design, ultimately making your rebranding investment more effective.
That said, not every brand needs the comprehensive research and strategy treatment. Many of the ecommerce businesses Jaz and Jamil work with already know their audience well and just need the design work. “A lot of clients want to skip that part,” Jamil notes, “They just want visual improvements.” If your brand foundation is already solid, you can scale down new strategy work or eliminate it entirely, aligning with your existing strategy.
Number of deliverables
Deliverables are end products when you’re working on a project. In the case of rebranding, they include elements like a new logo, marketing materials, or brand guidelines. Jamil explains that for Otherhalf’s clients, reworked visual identity deliverables can include printing blueprints for updated packaging and updating fonts. The duo works with clients to tailor the number of deliverables to match the budget, since more deliverables often lead to higher costs.
Types of deliverables
It’s not only the number of deliverables you need to consider, but also their form. Packaging design, for example, is a separate discipline from email templates. As Jamil explains, “Packaging has a completely different goal—standing out on shelves—and there’s a lot more production involved, like setting everything up for print.”
Different types of deliverables can impact your costs. Photography, video production, and motion design deliverables are all part of marketing collateral. Product photography ranges from $50 to $350 for each product shot, or anywhere from $500 to $3,000 per day for a photographer.
Revisions
Every round of client feedback takes time, and for many traditional design agencies, that time is billable. The more open-ended the revision process, the more the budget can spiral. Jaz and Jamil handle this by building guardrails directly into their process. “How many directions are you going to get? How many revision rounds do you want? That stops us from racking up the billable hours,” Jamil explains.
Lock in the number of concepts and revision rounds upfront, rather than leaving it open, to keep a rebrand within budget. When you work with an agency, agree on a set number of revisions and inquire if additional rounds would incur extra fees.
Timing
How fast you need something done has a direct impact on cost. Compressed timelines with a high number of deliverables can add up, so it’s key to consider what you really need within a realistic timeframe.
At Otherhalf, a brand refresh typically runs four to six weeks. A full brand overhaul requires three to five months, minimum. “Branding is just more back and forth,” Jaz says. “And it can extend farther out, so the cost reflects that.”
If you have flexibility on timelines, use it. Starting the rebranding process before you’re in crisis mode gives you the space to do it properly and at a pace that keeps costs reasonable.
How to manage rebranding costs
- Determine your deliverables and timeline
- Build lean brand guidelines
- Map how your brand touches the full customer journey
- Prioritize a digital rebrand
To help clients factor a successful rebrand into their marketing budget, Jaz and Jamil implement several core principles to ensure the investment is sustainable and translates to business growth. Here are their top tips for building a realistic, high-impact rebranding budget:
Determine your deliverables and timeline
Work with your agency partner to align on what you actually need. The final cost is driven by your deliverables list, whether that be just a logo or website design, or a comprehensive visual identity design and rebranding strategy.
Jamil explains, “It’s all based on the deliverables, and the number of line items and what comes with them.” It can be helpful to go into a conversation with an agency with specifics in mind, but Jaz and Jamil work with clients to help them determine what they need. These conversations are also the point at which you want to agree on the number of concepts you’ll review and how many revision rounds you have before the work starts.
Build lean brand guidelines
A comprehensive brand book sounds thorough, but an exhaustive document with too many rules can end up being overwhelming and difficult to implement. If you’re working with an agency, ask for tight, functional guidelines, such as a 10-page document with simple brand messaging and a digital style guide in a tool like Figma rather than a 50-page document that makes internal brand training time-intensive and complex. “We try and keep it as lean as possible,” Jamil says. “Just what people need versus this exhaustive brand book that you would spend a lot of money on.”
The same logic applies to research deliverables. Audience personas, category research, and a full brand story add real value in the right context. However, if you already know your customer and just need the visual work done, limiting the project scope to simple design rules can help you save money.
Map how your brand touches the full customer journey
A successful rebrand considers more than just design and brand personality. It ensures brand consistency that builds trust and a brand promise that comes through in every customer touchpoint. Jaz and Jamil say they take an audit of multiple touchpoints when considering a rebrand.
“There are so many clients that have a six-figure Instagram following, but you don’t see that community anywhere on their website,” Jamil points out. “We go into their different channels and ask: ‘How do their customers find them?’”
If new customers discover you through a TikTok video and land on a site that feels completely disconnected from what they just saw, they could get turned off. Before you engage an agency, map your customer journey and make sure your rebrand investment accounts for consistency across all of those channels. If your marketing emails drive more revenue than social media clicks, for example, don’t forget a few updated email templates in your excitement over new social media assets.
Prioritize a digital rebrand
If you sell a physical product, a rebrand could impact your packaging and printing costs. Jamil and Jaz emphasize that a full brand identity overhaul might require you to invest more in packaging work, from mockups of the design to printing blueprints, all before physically producing updated packaging.
“We have a lot of cases where merchants love the idea of doing a brand refresh, but they don’t want their packaging to be affected because they already have thousands and thousands of boxes in their warehouse,” says Jamil. If you want to avoid a massive expenditure on production, consider a partial rebranding that maintains your current packaging but elevates the digital experience.
How much does a rebrand cost FAQ
How much does a rebrand typically cost?
Rebranding costs can run from several thousand dollars for small businesses to hundreds of thousands of dollars at the enterprise level. Otherhalf Studio cofounders Jaz Fenton and Jamil Bhuya say small to medium-sized businesses can expect to spend between $10,000 and $15,000 on the lower end when hiring an agency and over $70,000 on the higher end.
How long does a rebrand usually take?
A full brand overhaul that includes a new brand launch and refreshed marketing campaigns can take several months to a year, according to Jaz and Jamil. You can accomplish smaller-scope projects, like a brand refresh and updated visual elements, within a month.
Is rebranding a good idea?
Rebranding is a good idea if you aren’t meeting your business goals and suspect your brand design is the reason why, or if you need to change your brand for legal reasons. Otherwise, a complete overhaul may not be necessary, and simply updating individual aspects of your brand, like fonts and color palette, can be sufficient.
