shane
seventeen years shipping inside complex organisations. builds the products that carry the brands, including ours.
built, not branded.
bmkrs is a brand company founded by a builder. seventeen years shipping real products inside organisations where failure is expensive, now pointed at the thing most good products never get: a brand that does them justice.
the short version of a long story.
i have spent seventeen years building products and delivery teams inside organisations where things have to actually work: public sector, utilities, infrastructure, regulated industries. real stakes, real scrutiny, no marks for decks.
and the whole time, one pattern kept ruining my week. brilliant products, built by brilliant people, losing. not to better products. to better-told ones. a sharper name, a clearer story, a tighter site, and the worse thing wins. i watched it happen so many times i stopped calling it unfair and started calling it a gap in the market.
bmkrs is me closing that gap. brands built the way good products get built: strategy before pixels, one accountable team, shipped and measured instead of presented and abandoned. and because i never stopped building products of my own, some of the work on these shelves is ours. we live with the consequences of our own advice, which keeps the advice honest.
“the better-told brand wins. i got tired of watching it happen to the wrong side.”
four things we refuse to budge on.
a brand is a promise.
so we will not design one your business cannot keep. if the work and the words disagree, we fix the work or change the words.
design does a job.
if we cannot say what a thing is for, it does not ship. beautiful and pointless is still pointless.
proof beats noise.
we would rather show one number that moved than ten adjectives that did not. we measure, and we tell you what we find, even when it stings.
one team, all in.
no handoffs, no account managers, no whoever-is-free-on-friday. the people in the first meeting are the people doing the work, because they are the only people there are.
a partner team, not a payroll.
around the studio is a small group of partner collaborators. all of them are multiskilled. each of them leads the thing they are scary-good at. you meet the people who do the work, because there is no one else to meet.
marcus
came up through broadcast, where nobody owes you their attention. every line he writes has to survive being said out loud.
sarah
builds visual worlds from positioning outwards, never the other way round. will tell you when you do not need a rebrand.
george
would rather find the one right journalist than blast a hundred wrong ones. angle first, always.
melissa
ships the sites, apps and campaigns that turn brand work into revenue. one primary metric per campaign, no exceptions.
no account managers. no chain. just us.
2013
4
1
1
what is on the bench this month.
- 2 briefs out, 1 trial running
- a content and positioning overhaul for a recording studio with broadcast standards
- shipping seo landing pages for freelance near me
- writing: you cannot performance-market your way out of a weak brand
built to stick around.
the work we are proudest of comes from relationships, not transactions. the longer we know a brand, the better the work gets: we move faster, skip the posturing, and say the hard thing because we have earned the right to.
we keep the same team on your brand. we learn it, look after it, and treat it like ours. the only scoreboard we really watch is who comes back, and who they bring with them.
got something worth building?
tell us what it is. we will tell you what it needs, including the parts not to buy from us.