Brand Architecture · Discipline 13
Employer brand strategy for organisations serious about who they hire over the next decade. Employee value proposition development, careers narrative, candidate journey design, recruitment marketing, internal alignment. The brand discipline most consequential to a company's long-term talent quality — and the discipline most companies leave to HR with predictable consequences.
An empty office space at the end of the day, lights dimmed, a single open laptop on a desk showing a careers page. Warm directional light through windows, deep shadows. The aesthetic of considered organisational thinking — the company seen from the inside rather than from the marketing perspective.
The Philosophy
Employer brand is what current employees say about you
at dinner with friends who are also looking for jobs.
Marketing has no control over that conversation.
HR has no control over it either.
The conversation happens regardless —
and decides which talent applies and which talent goes elsewhere.
A founding principle
The Discipline
What employees actually experience, not what HR claims they experience.
Most employer brand engagements skip this step and produce marketing fiction. The first work has to be honest internal audit: extended conversations with current employees across functions and tenures, exit interviews with recent leavers, candidate-journey interviews with people who turned the company down. The audit produces the internal truth: what employees actually experience, what they tell their friends, what made them join, what makes them stay, what makes them leave. Without the truth, the employer brand becomes recruiting theatre that the workforce contradicts.
A wall display showing employee interview transcripts with quotes highlighted — both positive and critical — alongside attribution markers (function, tenure, leaver/stayer). The aesthetic of considered honest research. Warm side light.
What the company specifically offers — beyond what every company offers.
Most employee value propositions are interchangeable: competitive salary, great team, meaningful work, professional development. These are table stakes, not propositions. We articulate EVPs that name what the company specifically offers that competitors do not — even when the specific offer is uncomfortable to articulate. "We pay 20% above market because we expect 20% more output." "We have no remote work because the work requires presence." "We hire slowly and fire quickly." The EVPs that work are the ones that repel the wrong candidates as deliberately as they attract the right ones.
A strategy document open on a desk showing two columns — "what every company says" and "what we actually offer" — with the second column visibly more specific and uncomfortable. The aesthetic of considered honesty. Warm directional light.
The story prospective employees tell themselves about working here.
A careers narrative is the story prospective employees tell themselves when they're considering whether to apply. Most company careers pages produce no narrative — just generic "join our team" copy with stock photography. We design careers narratives with the same craft as brand strategy: what kind of person joins this company, what trajectory their career takes here, what they learn, what they become. The narrative travels through every recruitment touchpoint — careers page, job descriptions, recruiter conversations, candidate interviews, onboarding materials.
A careers narrative document on a desk with a story arc visualised across multiple chapters — "the kind of person who joins", "what they learn", "what they become" — illustrated as a deliberate trajectory. The aesthetic of considered narrative architecture. Warm overhead light.
Every touchpoint a candidate experiences before, during, and after applying.
Most companies have not mapped what a candidate actually experiences. The first Google search result. The careers page. The job description. The application form. The recruiter's first email. The interview process. The offer. The onboarding. Each touchpoint either reinforces the employer brand or contradicts it. Most companies have multiple touchpoints contradicting the brand without anyone realising. The candidate journey audit surfaces these contradictions; the design work resolves them.
A journey-map document on a wall showing every candidate touchpoint sequenced — search result, careers page, application, interview, offer, onboarding — with brand-consistency notes for each. The aesthetic of considered systematic design. Warm even lighting.
How the employer brand reaches the people you want to hire.
Once the employer brand is articulated and the journey is designed, recruitment marketing is the activation. Targeted content that reaches the specific audiences the company wants to hire. Founder thought leadership in the categories where talent gathers. Conference presence and speaking engagements. Owned media — careers blog, podcast, newsletter. Strategic LinkedIn presence. The recruitment marketing programme is not separate from broader brand marketing; it operates within the same system, with explicit allocation of resources to talent objectives.
A wall of recruitment marketing artefacts — a careers podcast episode poster, a conference speaking deck, a LinkedIn post draft, an internal newsletter — all visibly part of the same employer brand system. The aesthetic of considered programmatic execution. Warm side light.
Employees who recognise the brand they're asked to embody.
A brand guideline document is not a deliverable. It is the institutional memory of the brand — the document that lets a designer in seven years\' time, in a market the founders never imagined, make decisions that feel native to the brand. We produce living guideline systems with versioning, governance protocols, and explicit decision trees for the inevitable edge cases the original system never anticipated.
A leather-bound brand guideline book lying open on a wooden desk, pages showing typographic and colour specifications, an architect\'s ruler beside it. Warm side light, museum-archive aesthetic. Should evoke the seriousness of institutional documentation.
An Italian leather workshop scene — a master craftsman\'s hands working a piece of cognac-coloured leather, surrounded by tools, thread, and finished pieces. Warm tungsten light, deep shadows, the aesthetic of Renaissance still life. Vertical composition. The atmosphere of patient generational craft.
Vestigia had operated for over a century as a respected but invisible Italian leather workshop — supplying the best houses in Milan, Florence and Paris, but selling nothing under their own name. The fourth-generation owner wanted to change that. He wanted the workshop\'s name on the bag, not just inside it.
The engagement ran 18 weeks. We conducted 47 employee interviews across functions and tenures, plus 12 exit interviews with recent leavers. We articulated an EVP grounded in specific, defensible claims: "design discipline that survives commercial pressure", "decisions made by craft sensibility, not committee", "professional development through unusual responsibility, not formal programmes". We rebuilt the careers narrative, redesigned the candidate journey across every touchpoint, and built a recruitment marketing programme anchored in the founders' published thinking.
Eighteen months after launch, the brand was being stocked by Bergdorf, Selfridges and Le Bon Marché. The premium pricing the identity system enabled — averaging 220% above the workshop\'s wholesale rates — funded the second and third European retail openings.
Words from the work
For four generations my family\'s name was inside other people\'s products. Revolutionize designed the system that finally let it sit on the outside — and made sure that when it did, it carried a hundred years of weight rather than looking like another startup.
On engagement
A comprehensive employer brand engagement — from internal truth audit through to EVP development, careers narrative, candidate journey design, recruitment marketing strategy, and internal alignment programme — typically runs €55,000 to €140,000 across a 14-to-22-week engagement.
Focused engagements (EVP development only, careers narrative refresh, candidate journey audit) typically run €22,000 to €60,000 across 6-to-12 weeks. Multi-language employer brand systems for organisations operating across markets typically run €85,000 to €200,000.
Engagements include the full discipline: strategic discovery, design exploration across multiple directions, refinement to a single chosen system, comprehensive asset production, and the guideline documentation that lets the system survive future teams. We do not run "logo only" engagements — the discipline doesn\'t hold without the surrounding system.
Every engagement begins with a free 30-minute scoping conversation to understand the brand, its commercial context, and whether we\'re the right team for the work. We decline more engagements than we accept; the engagements we take, we commit to.
Adjacent disciplines
When you\'re ready
Tell us about the brand you\'re building or rebuilding. We\'ll respond within 24 hours with an honest read on whether visual identity work is the right next move — and if it is, what an engagement might look like.
Begin the conversation →