Three clients in a row had outgrown their branding

In the spring of 2026 I finished a rebrand for a mortgage company. It was the third project in succession where the client asked me to update a brand they'd outgrown. They were all very different companies. They’d all been trading for years, and the branding they started with hadn't kept up with the businesses they'd become.

And halfway through that third project I realised I was in the same boat.

Eleven years in, my own brand was holding me back

I set up my freelance business, Keefomatic, in 2015. I’m a designer, and it was always intended to be a design business, but within months I was selling marketing, SEO and copywriting services as well, and by 2020 marketing retainers accounted for 70% of my work.

Then the pandemic disruption wiped most of that off the map.

In 2023 I decided to try to claw that work back, and changed tactics to build a new roster of marketing clients. But over the next three years of concerted effort, I gained one new retainer and a single one-off marketing project. Despite a heap of time, money and effort, it was a complete failure.

Fortunately, my ongoing design and branding projects kept me going.

After my mortgage client rebrand I decided it was my turn. Keefomatic represented a marketing business targeting an audience that no longer existed, so I decided to rebrand and reposition myself to create what I originally wanted – a design business – but better, more ambitious and more experienced.

The work I'm best at needs a bigger canvas

Looking back over eleven years showed that the projects I'm best at – strategic brand identity work – were outside the budgets of most of my current client base. That's not a complaint about my clients. It’s just that I’ve outgrown a lot of them, so I need bigger ones – but not by much.

I'm targeting businesses with roughly 3 to 15 staff, who have been trading for a few years, but they’re still at the point where nobody in-house is employed to do branding and marketing. My largest current client has 15 people, but everyone else is smaller. So that's the area I'm moving into – big enough to have outgrown DIY branding, and small enough for me to maintain a relationship with the owner or a director.

A domain I'd wanted since 2015 was sitting there

Next question: what do I call it? I’d registered a domain the year before with half a mind to use it for a rebrand one day. But I kept thinking back to when I set up in 2015, when I'd wanted to call the business “Keith Barker Design”. Unfortunately, an architect in Kent owned the domain, so that was that.

Earlier this year I checked again, and it was free. In fact, it had been vacated in 2019, so I could have had it years ago if I'd thought to look. I grabbed it.

Keefomatic is now gone, apart from use as “Keefomatic Studio”, which stays as my book publishing imprint. If I ever write another one, it will rise again.

I'd been undercharging for years and two clients told me so

The last thing I tend to think about is “what are my competitors doing?”, but when I researched what branding and web design actually sells for, I realised I'd been undercharging for a long time. Two clients had told me as much earlier this year, which is a slightly embarrassing way to find out.

So as part of the repositioning I now charge what the industry charges. My branding prices have roughly doubled, which goes to show what a bargain my older customers got themselves!

Then a client turned up with some pesky work

I started the process of rebranding on 29th May. June was spent making decisions, while July went on designing the new logo and the branding around it, then auditing the old website.

Seventy-two blog articles was too many to migrate, so I cut that down to twelve that were worth transferring, plus a couple I’ve rewritten. That meant leaving behind the most popular page on my old website, which attracted thousands of hits per month, but on a subject that was now irrelevant to the new business.

Writing and building the new site took me most of August. I built the site from scratch on WordPress using the Divi 5 page builder, which was a major update that I hadn't yet used on a live site. I built my new site as a training exercise. It took twice as long as it should, but it taught me everything I needed to know when I use it for client work.

Then, halfway through the month, a new client arrived with a huge project – a rebrand, a naming project, a website and (ironically) a marketing plan – all rolled into one. So I paused what I was doing for myself to get that project underway.

Finally, at the start of September, and with no fanfare whatsoever, the old Keefomatic site was retired and keithbarkerdesign.com was born.

What Keith Barker Design offers

Branding and rebranding is my lead service, and there are two packages, from £2,450. The first covers logo, typefaces, colour palette and a small style guide, which is all a lot of companies need. The second adds the essentials to start using it – social media graphics, stationery templates – and a fuller style guide you can hand to anyone doing marketing work for you later. Not a telephone directory, but certainly enough to work with.

Naming and positioning strategy (£1,450) is a new bolt-on for either branding package. Back in my employed days I worked in manufacturing where my team named products all the time, but I didn't offer naming as a separate service until fairly recently, and when I did, I threw it in for free. That was daft, because it's genuinely valuable and takes a lot of time. So now it’s a paid add-on. It suits businesses whose name has stopped working, or start-ups where they don’t yet have one.

The Brand Audit is my entry point, at £575. It's for owners who suspect their branding is holding them back but aren't quite certain. You receive a simple and honest assessment from me either way – and if you then go on to rebrand with me (you're under no obligation to), that £575 comes off the cost.

Website design used to be priced by page count. Now there are two simple packages: single-page sites such as landing pages, from £1,850; and larger business sites (usually 6 to 12 pages), from £4,950. The biggest change has been taking my previously optional copywriting add-on and including it in both packages. I will design and write your website for you – and anyone who has had a site built before will tell you it’s copywriting that holds everything up when the client is expected to do it.

There is also the option to combine branding and a website, with prices from £6,900.

My web maintenance package has been renamed as a Care Plan, and that price (£45 a month) has also risen in line with the rest of the market.

Design for print barely changes, except that I'm focusing on the complicated side – document folders, large format print, catalogues, journals, retail display – things that are too difficult to DIY. I don’t publish prices, because there are too many variables in a print quote for a shopping list to mean anything. Ask me and I'll quote. I'm still not VAT registered, which helps keep prices respectable.

What changes for existing clients

Print clients: nothing changes. Same service, same way of working, same as it ever was.

Branding and website clients: prices have gone up and they aren't coming back down. I'm selling high level professional design, and I make no apology for charging what that costs.

Care Plan customers: your current terms will remain the same. I'll speak to you individually before anything changes.

Does the brand problem sounds familiar to you?

Three clients in a row came to me with the same problem, then I noticed I had it too. If your branding has stopped keeping pace with your business, tell me about it – I can help.