What a rebrand actually costs in year one

The design fee is the number clients focus on and rarely the largest one. Here is the full first-year sheet we walk through before anyone signs, because a rebrand that runs out of budget in month seven is worse than no rebrand at all.

Design and strategy

For a company of fifty to three hundred people, expect the identity work itself to land somewhere between twenty and sixty thousand euros depending on scope. This is the part everyone budgets for.

The parts people forget

Website rebuild. Almost always required, almost never in the original number. Signage and premises. Uniforms and vehicles if you have them. Print reprints — business cards are trivial, but packaging, forms, and regulatory documents are not.

Then: photography, because a new brand on old photos looks like a new brand on old photos. Legal — trademark searches and registrations across your operating markets. Internal rollout, which for a large company means a real programme, not an email.

The invisible line

Staff time. Somebody in marketing will spend three months mostly on this. That salary is a real cost even though it never appears on an invoice, and pretending otherwise is how rebrands stall.

A working ratio

As a rough planning figure: whatever the design fee is, budget two to three times that for everything else in year one. If that number is impossible, we would rather narrow the scope with you now than deliver a beautiful system you cannot afford to roll out.