A Challenger Brand Agency for Challenger Brands

How do I find the right branding agency for my company?

Start with the work, not the pitch. Look at an agency’s case studies and ask whether those brands feel distinctive — not just polished, but truly different from their competitors. That’s the hard part of branding, and it’s where most agencies play it safe.

Then look at the team. At a lot of agencies, the senior creative directors show up for the pitch and then hand your account to a junior team. Ask who will actually be making the work. At This January, it’s the same people — our founding creative partners work on every engagement, not just the new business presentation.

Finally, consider the relationship model. Great brand work comes from trust built over time. We believe in a combination of project-based and AOR formats where the agency becomes a genuine extension of the client team, not a vendor cycling through project briefs.

Do I need a launch campaign or just a new brand identity?

It depends on what’s broken and who needs to notice the fix.

A brand identity — your name, logo, visual system, and messaging framework — is the foundation. If your current identity no longer reflects who your company has become, or if it looks indistinguishable from your competitors, that’s the place to start.

A launch campaign is what you need when the rebrand has to announce itself. If you’re entering a new market, have raised a round and need to scale awareness, or are repositioning against an entrenched competitor, the campaign is how you make noise. We’ve helped companies like Revature rebrand ahead of a national launch and hit record conversion numbers — because the identity and the campaign were built together, by the same team, from day one.

Most of our challenger brand clients end up doing both, because a new identity without a launch is a tree falling in an empty forest.

How do I know when it’s time to consult a branding agency about my brand?

There are a few reliable signals. The most obvious: your company has outgrown its brand. Maybe you started as a scrappy startup and the visual identity still feels like it was made in a weekend (it probably was). Or you’ve expanded into new markets and the original brand doesn’t stretch to cover what you’ve become.

The less obvious signal is competitive. If your brand looks and sounds like everyone else in your category, you’re making your marketing team’s job harder than it needs to be. Every dollar of media spend works less efficiently when the brand behind it is forgettable.

One practical note: a good time to consult an agency is before you need one urgently. The best brand work takes 3–6 months, and rushing that timeline almost always means compromising the thinking.

How do I start the brand redesign process?

At This January, every brand engagement begins with a stakeholder workshop — a structured session where we get the founders, leadership team, and key stakeholders in a room together to align on what the brand needs to become. This usually surfaces disagreements that have been simmering for months (or years), and it’s better to surface them in a workshop than in round three of revisions.

From there, we move into brand strategy: defining your positioning, your audience, your competitive differentiation, and your messaging framework. Only after the strategy is locked do we begin design — because a logo without a strategy is just a drawing.

The typical timeline for a full brand identity engagement is 8–12 weeks, from kickoff to final brand asset library. For projects that include a launch campaign, add another 10-18 weeks for creative development and production.