Elizabeth Goodspeed on what happens when design becomes prefab

A few weeks ago, I came across a company called Uvie that sells sunscreen bars you use like soap in the shower. The packaging had all the hallmarks of a trendy contemporary brand: a pastel colour palette featuring a pop of yellow, a bold, all caps sans serif logo, and a sun mascot reminiscent of the iconic Danish “Nuclear Power? No Thanks” sticker. Like many other CPG products of our time, its social media uses pithy copy alongside photos of attractive young people sudsing up and sunscreen bars floating amongst clouds (a long-maligned art direction pet peeve of mine!) The imagery is nice, if not a bit mismatched – there’s some high flash candid photos that don’t quite jive with the 3D renders of packaging – but overall, it’s a cute identity. There’s just one catch: Uvie doesn’t exist. Or at least, it doesn’t exist yet.

For £8,000, you can buy the entire Uvie brand – from the name and product concept to the logo and cloud photos – on Brands Like These (BLT), a new platform from Lyon & Lyon where designers can sell ready-made identities to wannabe entrepreneurs. The site functions like any ecommerce storefront, with brands laid out in a grid and tagged by style (“fun”, “bold”, “thoughtful”) and category (cosmetics, healthcare, etc.) Packages fall into three price brackets: Starter for 5k, Builder for 8k, or Scaler for 12k, and BLT reviews each submission to ensure it meets what they call “agency standard.” A customisation section on the PDP even allows the identity’s designer to call out what could be customised or altered from what’s presented, and what the designer would recommend against altering. Each identity is sold only once, with designers receiving 50 per cent of the fee, and Lyon & Lyon keeping the other half (the team executes all post-sale tweaks rather than leaving it to the original designer).The resulting identities are good, if not somewhat simple, sitting somewhere between Canva’s plug-and-play templates and the bespoke depth of a studio commission.

The idea of a brand marketplace may feel novel, even radical, but it consolidates practices already happening informally in the industry. In 2006, long before BLT was a twinkle in Lyon & Lyon’s eyes, British ad agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty launched Zag, a brand-invention arm that developed concepts to license or sell for revenue shares. In 2013, self-titled entrepreneur and artist Ben Pieratt pushed the notion further with Hessian: a fully spec’d identity for a TBD product that included a name, URL, social accounts, logo, t-shirt designs, patterns, a website theme, app UI, icons, a brand book, and 30 hours of design support – all for $18,000. As Ben told Wired, many designers “have concepts that we know are valid and worthwhile, and not only that but we instinctually know how they should be launched, how they should look, how they should work, and who their target audience should be.” Ben later formalised this “TK Brand” model into a service called Pre-Brand (tagline: “You don’t need a brand. You need a launch”), offering pre-made identity packages ranging from $5k–30k.

Speculative branding has been part of design culture for a while, even if the price tag is fairly new; fictional brands have filled portfolios, populated design media, and shown up as props in commercials and films for at least a decade. Just as mockups help younger designers appear more experienced, made-up projects let designers show off what they could do (even if no one’s paid them to do it yet). Even bigger, more established studios benefit from the opportunity to flex an underutilised skill. “It’s the best way for us to showcase all of our services in one project,” says Ugo LaChapelle of Caserne, who created a faux hotel as one of many self-initiated projects. Designers are, after all, constantly encouraged to make personal work; if your medium is branding, it makes sense that your personal work might take the form of a brand. Besides, what identity designer amongst us hasn’t tried to repurpose an unused colour palette or logo idea for a new client? Even Louise Fili admits in her book Louise Fili: Inspiration and Process in Design that she’s re-pitched the same fork-noodle-logo concept at least seven times since 2001. For Matt and Ben Lyon, brothers and founders of Lyon & Lyon, the power of spec work was clear long before Brands Like These. They’d often gotten emails about conceptual projects they’d made for fun (especially a faux hair care brand called Fabrica, now available for £10,000 on Brands Like These) that said, “I want that. I’ll buy it off you. Where does it exist?” BLT was simply their belated answer.

While BLT may have started with those “can I buy this?” emails, it’s pitched as more than just a way to offload old concepts. Lyon & Lyon frame it as a new commissioning model, one that recognises the flaws of the traditional process and tries to route around them. As Matt puts it, many startups are “understandably scared to drop a lot of money on a process where they just don’t know the output.” It’s easier for a founder to get excited about something already in front of them than to gamble on months of work they might end up hating. And as buyers are promised speed, clarity, and less risk, designers get something equally valuable: flexible creativity. “Create the most conceptual stuff you can, and we’ll see if we can get it on the platform,” Matt explains. What began as a way to repurpose their own archive has become a system that could scale – for independents, startups, or even agencies looking to shortcut ideation. As Ben imagines it, a studio could easily come to the platform thinking, “we’ve got this brief coming in and need a quick concept – let’s grab one.” To Matt and Ben, the site could mean more democratisation for everyone.

Not everyone is sold. Emunah Winer, co-creative director of Nihilo, calls BLT identities “a commitment to something that’s only 20 per cent you, but happens to look good.” Winer speaks from experience. After co-founding the tequila brand Casa Malka, Nihilo is now developing its own rum label, Esther, in-house – a dual perspective that makes her both intrigued by a site “for designers, by designers” and skeptical of its limits. “This is not a site for founders who have to interact with and build their brands every day,” she tells me. “A designer will know how to use these brands and evolve them; anyone else would feel extremely restricted. These kits are not designed to scale.” Though a BLT identity might cover the basics, once a company grows, the system is likely to feel rigid, even inert. An oval peg might seem closer to a round hole than a square one, but at the end of the day, neither fits. On LinkedIn, copywriter John Goddard was harsher, dismissing the whole thing as “icky.” “Buying off-the-shelf design demos and B-sides isn’t a smart way to kick off building a brand,” he wrote. To him, the industry is always trying to convince clients a brand is more than a logo, so “here’s one we made earlier” sends the opposite message. As another commenter, Stephen Smith, joked: “Isn’t there a reason these were Option C?”

If these kits feel flimsy at times, it might be because so much identity design already does. Branding has never been more central to business. At the same time, it’s started to feel more and more hollow to me. It seems like passing the sniff test has become the real benchmark for a visual identity: is the system finished enough to populate a pitch deck? Does it make something look like a “real” company, even if it’s just four college dropouts talking about “locking in” on X? Too often the goal isn’t to clarify what a company does or why it exists, but to signal legitimacy long enough to raise money or get covered in TechCrunch. Studios don’t really mind this setup either – as long as the work photographs well for a case study, people seem to care less whether it’ll hold up once the business scales. Fewer revision rounds, fewer hard conversations, and less time between paying clients.

The issue lurking in the background is how often these identities are built without a stable product or strategy behind them in the first place. A lot of tech companies have no idea what they’re even building yet when they hire a studio. Investors push founders to “build fast and break things”, which typically means pivoting to whatever seems promising in the moment. That can make any carefully considered identity obsolete overnight. I learned this the hard way as a young designer when I worked on the branding for a time-based dating app; the entire identity was based around countdown clocks and tickers and, fortunately, the client loved it. But just a few weeks later, the founders decided to pivot to video dating instead. All my hours spent wrangling clock animations in AfterEffects was completely down the drain. I was left all too aware that if my identity had been vaguer – more vibe than strategy – it would have still been usable (and, could have helped build out my portfolio, something I desperately needed at the time).

At its best, identity translates a company’s reason for existing into something people can recognise and trust. Form follows function. If the business itself doesn’t yet know what it is – what it makes, who it serves, why it matters – then the identity is basically a mirage. Even if it looks convincing from a distance, it won’t tell customers anything real about the company, because there simply isn’t anything to tell yet. As Emunah Winer puts it, “Forcing the function into form doesn’t typically work.” Nowhere is this clearer than in the explosion of AI startups. Many of them offer opaque, barely indistinguishable products, with each one promising “transformative” results via buzzwords about APIs and dashboards. The only thing that sets one apart from another is surface (if that). Friendly sans-serifs, and little butthole-shaped stars are what make a platform seem trustworthy, approachable, or “human.” In a field where the technology itself is both invisible and interchangeable, branding carries the burden of differentiation.

Consumer packaged goods work on a similar logic. New entrants rarely come from a breakthrough recipe or process; they come from spotting aesthetic “white space.” Founders look at a category – air conditioners, vitamins, even literal human bones – and decide it doesn’t look good enough yet (I blame Shark Tank for at least 20 per cent of this). Even when the product is genuinely better, branding does the heavy lifting, convincing people to pay more by framing the purchase as a lifestyle signal. White-label brands skip the pretense of innovation altogether: razors or water bottles are simply bought off sites like Alibaba, dressed up with “cute” identities, and re-sold. In the same way modern airlines are essentially credit card companies that also run flights, I like to think of CPG brands like this as packaging companies that happen to also sell, say, tinned fish.

If this cart-before-horse approach takes hold, it won’t just change how companies buy branding, but how designers make it. The skills a designer needs shift from listening and refining to cranking out polished shells that could plausibly fit anything. The most “valuable” work becomes the most ambiguous, designed for resale rather than long-term use. Instead of being tied to a company’s story, brands risk turning into interchangeable style packages – signifiers that can be bolted onto whatever needs a coat of paint. A white-label water bottle and an AI SaaS dashboard might not share much in substance, but if both buy into the same starter kit, they suddenly look like peers in the same universe. Even if sites like BLT only sell a brand once, the more ambiguous the design, the more it risks echoing a dozen others (and collapsing under trend fatigue).

These models also threaten to hollow out the middle of the industry. We’ve seen this pattern before: bookstores went from indie shops and regional chains to Amazon or your local holdout; music from affordable CDs to either $50 LPs or all-you-can-stream. Branding may be headed for the same split – prefab kits at the low end, ultra-expensive bespoke at the high end, and little in between. And if prefab becomes the norm, it’s hard not to imagine the next step: why should these kits even be designed by humans? Once clients are trained to buy a look off the shelf, there’s little stopping AI from flooding the market with pre-packaged “brands” generated at scale.

In a good design engagement, the back-and-forth between company and designer pushes the company itself to sharpen what it is; the “friction” people complain about is also the juice that makes the work exciting. Few things are more satisfying than watching a client see their business more clearly because of something you showed them – or realising that a nitpicky constraint actually pushed your work somewhere smarter. That’s why so many startups want “founding designers” on board: design shapes product and story as much as surface. On that point, Brands Like These is right: designers don’t just have good taste, they have good ideas, often marketable ones. The problem is that BLT cuts out the process that lets those ideas influence a business in any lasting way. Instead of strategy and surface unfolding together, it packages the surface and sells it outright. If design really is upstream – capable of generating concepts, traction, even whole businesses – then why shouldn’t designers get a real piece of the pie? What BLT offers is speed, but in the wrong direction. It imagines designers as entrepreneurs while denying them entrepreneurial benefit. Rather than licensing, partnering, or taking equity the way Emunah Winer and Nihilo are doing (or the way Gin Lane briefly tried with Pattern in 2015), designers on BLT are left selling the skin of an idea while someone else runs off with its body.

Ultimately, even Lyon & Lyon aren’t blind to the gamble they’ve made. “This might get us more work… or put us out of business,” Matt Lyon admits. They know BLT is risky. So does everyone else. The more interesting question is what designers are left with if this way of working takes hold – when designers trade away their best ideas as one-off surfaces, stripped of client relationship, equity, and even full authorship. As Emunah Winer points out while talking about her rum label, ownership changes everything. A brand you live with keeps evolving. A kit you sell is gone the second it leaves your hands.