How long a rebrand really takes

The question we hear most in first meetings is how long it will take. Our honest answer has two numbers. Designing a new identity for an established company takes us about fourteen weeks, from the first interview to the guidelines. Getting it in front of every customer takes between six months and two years, and that second number depends far more on the client than on us.

The fourteen weeks

The design part is predictable, because we have done it often enough to know where the time goes.

• Weeks one to three: the audit, interviews with staff and customers, and a one-page brief both sides sign.
• Weeks three to five: positioning and words, and a name if one is needed.
• Weeks five to ten: three routes, then one, built out in type, colour and motion and tested on real touchpoints.
• Weeks ten to fourteen: guidelines, master files, templates and a rollout plan.

It stretches in familiar ways. A new decision maker joining in week six adds two or three weeks, almost every time. So does a trademark problem with a name, or a board that meets monthly rather than when it is needed. We now ask in the first meeting who has the final say and when they are free, and their dates go into the plan before anything else does.

The rollout nobody budgets for

After that, the identity has to replace the old one everywhere it lives, and most companies underestimate how many places that is. An audit of a growing business typically finds between 180 and 300 touchpoints. Some change in an afternoon: the website header, email signatures, social avatars. Others are tied to contracts and cycles the brand team does not control: vans on four-year leases, a shopfront that needs planning consent, eighteen months of printed boxes in a warehouse, an app release queued behind three other features. For Greenwold, the family garden centres we are working with in Kent, the hardest scheduling question is not the logo at all. It is when to change the signs at nine sites without any of them looking half-dressed in spring.

The identity is finished in week fourteen. The rebrand is finished when nobody can find the old logo.

How we plan the second number

We write the rollout plan in week ten, alongside the guidelines, not after launch. It sorts every touchpoint into three groups: change on launch day, change within ninety days, and change at the natural end of its life. The third group saves the most money. There is rarely a good reason to pulp a warehouse of boxes or repaint a van with two years left on its lease, and customers cope well with a few months of overlap, provided everything they see first, the website, the app, the emails, moves together. We also name an owner for the rollout on the client side before we step back. A rebrand with nobody’s name next to it stalls at around seventy per cent, with the new identity on the website and the old one on every invoice, because finance were never in the room.

So, how long?

If you need the short answer for a board paper: fourteen weeks to design, a launch roughly a month after that, and about a year before the old identity has genuinely gone. Plan for the year from the start, and the fourteen weeks become much easier to protect.