Brand is a powerful thing, but branding doesn’t exist for it’s own sake. It has a purpose, a context, and only creates value when it acts as a partner to a businesses value-driver: it’s product.
This is why we created our product-led brand framework. As a design agency that was born from the spirit of entrepreneurship and the belief that no challenge exists in a vacuum, we’ve come to understand how muddy the waters can seem when developing a modern business and building a brand. This has led us to two core beliefs:
- Brands aren’t just logos, nor are they simply marketing vehicles. A brand is the identity of a company, the culture of its people, and the experience it delivers.
- Products – whether physical devices, digital applications, or a set of services – aren’t just things you build and ship: they’re the frameworks through which your business delivers value and solves real problems.
By combining those two truths, we’ve adopted and refined a product-led brand approach. In other words: we build brands that grow out of product experience, and we build product experiences that are born of brand purpose. For founders, innovators and researchers, this means you’re not just slapping a brand on top of product — you’re aligning brand and product from day one, so the business you launch is coherent, distinct, and built to last.
Brand as experience, not style
When companies define “brand” merely as a palette of colors, a logo, and a style guide, they miss the full potential of what a brand actually can do. At Forma we see brand as three-dimensional: it’s the sum of how you show up in the world, the culture you cultivate inside your team, the promise you make to users, and the consistency in how you keep that promise. Your brand should live in every touchpoint and every user sentiment not just your marketing material.
This is especially true in the product-led space. If your product is the way you deliver value, your brand must reflect that value clearly. If your product lives and breathes a particular ethos, then your brand must echo that ethos so that what people see matches what people experience.
Products as solutions of value
We believe a product isn’t simply “this screen” or “this widget” it is the fullness of how you deliver a solution to someone. Whether the product is a hardware tool, a SaaS app, or a service-oriented platform, it’s the mechanism by which your business meets a need, solves a problem, and earns trust.
In our work you’ll see us asking: What is the product’s core value? Who is using it? What need does it fill now, and how will it evolve? Then we build the brand around that, not the other way around. This means that when we work with clients on product strategy, experience design, packaging or identity, those aren’t separate silos they’re part of an integrated journey.
Why building a product-led brand matters
There’s a big difference between building a brand for a product and building a brand around the product. When the brand is an afterthought, you risk misalignment: the visuals might look sharp, the messaging might sound confident, but if the product experience doesn’t deliver what the brand promises, users will feel the mismatch.
Conversely, when you build your brand around the solutions you create, you create something proprietary. You create a unique story rooted in how you deliver value (not just in how you talk about value). Your brand becomes an asset of the business, not just a marketing expense. It permeates the organization from the inside-out: from culture to operations to user experience to the customer.
For early-stage ventures, this approach is powerful. You’re not trying to retrofit brand onto an already-launched product — you’re launching brand and product simultaneously. That means clarity of direction, meaningfully differentiated identity, and a stronger foundation for growth. That’s how we’ve helped clients go from idea to shelf in months instead of years. When the process is interconnected, the path to clarity and execution is exponential.
Bridging strategy and execution with interdisciplinary design
At Forma we bring together strategists, designers, makers and thinkers. We’ve been in the trenches launching our own product lines and working with clients who’ve launched theirs.
This collaborative spirit leads us to dig in and ask the right questions: What’s the disruption? Who are the users? What’s the experience you want them to feel? What kind of brand builds trust for that experience? And then we move with purpose: brand strategy, product & UX design, visual identity, packaging and digital interface, all the way through production management.
We don’t forget the product because we know strong design is about how something works and how it looks. We don’t focus only on visuals because we know brand is more than aesthetics. This kind of integrated thinking allows us to help visionaries and leaders turn an idea into a business not just a nice logo.
How it plays out in real life
- When a new startup comes to us with a bold idea, we begin by immersing ourselves in the business, the market, and the challenge. We call that Discovery.
- Then we move into Strategy: defining the product’s value, understanding who it’s for, and establishing the brand architecture around it to seamlessly connect and scale.
- Design follows: what the product looks like, how the user interacts with it, how the brand identity works across touchpoints — packaging, UI, website, service experience.
- Finally, execution & activation: great design doesn’t matter if the design can’t be executed. We work with manufacturers, producers, and developers to successfully hand off design for production to help our clients ensure smooth and accurate end results.
Why this is especially relevant for startups & innovators
For early-stage ventures, the stakes are different: you have to prove yourself quickly, find unique territory, build trust, and scale without waste. A brand that emerges from the product experience gives you authenticity. You’re not just “another brand” in the noise — you are the brand that solves something differently and is built around that “something.”
Researchers and innovators often have brilliant ideas but need an integrated design partner to shape brand, product, and experience simultaneously. That’s where a product-led agency becomes an advantage: rather than working in silos (“brand first, then product”), you get a partner who knows how they connect.
What we’d ask you (as a future collaborator)
- What’s the core value you’re delivering?
- Who are the people you’re solving for, and what’s the experience you want them to have?
- How would you like your brand to show up in that experience?
- Are you willing to align product, brand and culture — not treat brand as a layer on top?
If you answer these, you’re already thinking product-led. And we’re here to help shape that thinking into reality.
Final thought
In today’s multi-dimensional market, brands cannot rely on a beautiful logo to achieve growth and improve user sentiment. But neither can a product be purely a functional tool. The best outcomes come when brand and product dance together: when the product delivers value, and the brand reflects, amplifies and sustains that value.
At Forma we’re committed to helping visionary teams make that happen, to partner in the messy, exciting work of shaping ideas into businesses. If you’re ready to move beyond brand for marketing and build brand for product-led growth, let’s talk.
