A new platform has launched which hopes to “break the traditional designer-client cycle” by selling off-the-shelf brands.
Brands Like These (BLT) is the brainchild of Sheffield-based agency Lyon & Lyon. It came about after they shared an unused design concept from a client project on Pinterest, and someone got in touch asking to buy it. That, BLT’s founders explain, “was the lightbulb moment.”
BLT, which went live yesterday, is a marketplace for personal design projects and unused commercial routes.
It’s aiming to give designers opportunities to, “sell their best unpublished brand concepts, free from creative constraint” and offer entrepreneurs, “a curated collection of agency-standard brand kits, ready to launch.”
Brands Like These
Co-founder Ben Lyon hopes the platform will help designers make money in a new way, and fix some issues in the branding industry, which the BLT team believes is “broken.”
“With clients, there’s often a massive amount of trepidation because they’re about to drop X amount of budget, and they don’t know what the outcome is going to be,” Lyon explains.
“On the flip side, lots of designers knock out concepts to keep their creative juices flowing, or there are things from client work that don’t get used. We thought there must be a way to sell some of those things.”
How it works
Any designer can submit work to BLT, but Lyon says the brands that make it onto the site are carefully curated. “We want to set a high bar, with work that feels agency-standard,” Lyon says.
Designers can sell brands in three tiers – a starter pack, which costs between £2,500 and £5,000, a builder pack, which costs £5,000 to £10,000, and a scaler pack, priced between £10,000 and £40,000.
These tiers reflect the amount of assets included, so while all three feature logos and typography, only the two higher tiers include packaging designs for physical products.
Fabrica, one of the concepts on Brands Like These
The money will be split 50/50 between the designer and BLT, although Lyon says he “hopes and assumes” the platform’s cut will come down over time.
Each concept can only be bought once, and after it’s been purchased, the buyer can have it tweaked to meet their specific requirements. This will obviously include changing the name, but may also extend to type and colour changes. Brands can also be adapted to suit a different product or industry.
These changes will be carried out by Lyon & Lyon, to ensure the final branding can be delivered on time.
BLT launched with six brands available to buy, including Uvie wash-on sunscreen bar, Fabrica haircare and hotel brand Cove.
Lyon explains that the target buyers are “serial entrepreneurs who spin out new businesses on the regular” but also established brands who may want to trial a new product or service without investing in a full end-to-end branding project.
“We might also put live briefs out, if clients are asking to see more stuff in a specific space, like the AI SaaS space, for example,” Lyon says.
Brands Like These
He thinks BLT will attract clients who aren’t willing or able to spend huge amounts on branding projects. And by providing designers with a new income steam, he sees it as win-win.
The platform may also, Lyon hopes, help address some of the homogenisation seen across the branding world in recent years, as samey briefs create similar-looking client work.
“We hope it’s going to be a place where there is some real experimentation,” he says. “What do designers create when there isn’t a client on their back? It could give people this ultimate creative freedom.”
By unleashing this “human-led creativity”, Lyon hopes BLT will help designers fend off some of the threats from generative AI.
Fed up with the rollercoaster
The BLT team says the platform will develop in the coming weeks and months. Lyon says legal and IP issues may prove tricky, especially around unused client work, and they need to see how it works with Lyon & Lyon tweaking another designer’s concepts.
“Honouring the original creative will be quite a challenge, because we’re going to be custodians for a brief amount of time,” he explains. They may in some instances commission the original designer to make the changes.
They also want input from the design community, to ensure it becomes an attractive place to sell and showcase their work. There are plans to let designers create profiles on the site, a bit like Behance, and Lyon hopes to run events as part of BLT’s community engagement.
So far, Lyon says feedback from designers has been very positive, with many sharing the frustrations which led to BLT’s launch.
“We were a little bit fed up with the whole roller coaster ride,” Lyon says. “We’ve been out here for 11, 12 years and we know all about the peaks and troughs of work.
“What if we didn’t have to rely on clients in the same way, and we could put all this stuff out there, and it could be bought while we were doing other creative work?”