Pre-Fabricated Brand Identity For Sale!

Identity and product designer Ben Pierrat offers a complete brand identity for sale. His brand Hessian comes with a name, website, diverse style elements, many logos and all the other elements that make a good identity. The only thing the buyer has to come up with is the product or service that the brand wants to sale.

Hessian’s brand identity is priced at $18,000. The interesting question addressed by this experiment is if it will be possible to create a complete brand identity from scratch without defining the product that it should sell. Pierrat, designer and co-founder of social shopping platform Svpply, works the other way around with this idea. He does not wait for a company that asks him to create a brand identity, but he just starts and sells the complete design as a ready-to-cook product.

The Hessian brand has a great, professional look-and-feel, and offers everything a serious company needs. For $18,000 you will get the name, URL, Twitter account, Tumblr account, 20+ logo and other designs, 10+ T-shirt designs, 8 repeating patterns, 1 website theme, 1 app user interface theme, 5 app icons, a brand book with guiding principles and 30 hours custom design time (for transitioning the brand to buyer’s needs).

Recently we wrote an article about Indie Architecture’ and the trend of architects who start to design and develop without clients or assignments. What Pierrat is doing here could be considered Indie Design — he simply creates his own world in design, hoping to find some kind of market for it. Working independently from a client may be insecure, but it also offers a lot of freedom in the design process. All constraints that clients usually come up with are not there (yet).

There must be someone around who is in desperate need of a brand identity and thinks “Wow, this work represents exactly what I want my company to be”. Well, the work is already done, and for $18.000 its your identity.

The interesting aspect of this first pre-fabricated brand identity is that it already has a pretty big awareness, thanks to all the blog posts written about it. Pierrat’s initiative considers design not as a tailor-made product any more, but as pre-fabricated concept. That potentially changes the role of the designer.