Nobody can quote you a number before seeing your range. What sets the clock, and which of it you control.
Longer than the design, and most of the difference sits on your side of the table. There are 5 things that set the clock, counted from the stages a project actually waits on, and 4 of them are decisions only you can make. Anyone quoting a number before seeing your product range is quoting a shape of project rather than yours.
Why the honest answer is a range and not a number
A branding project is not one job with one duration. It is a sequence in which each stage waits on a decision, and the decisions are not evenly distributed between the two sides.
The design work itself is the most predictable part. What moves is everything around it: how many products the system has to cover, how many markets set the rules, how many people have to approve, and whether the files the work starts from actually exist. MarkaWorks will not put a week count in a proposal before seeing those four, because a number given without them is a guess with a signature on it.
Five variables, four of them yours
Read this against your own situation and you will have a better estimate than any generic answer.
| What sets the clock | Who controls it | What makes it longer |
|---|---|---|
| Range size | You | A system for 4 products is not a system for 14; the coding layer changes |
| Markets | You | Every market adds its own mandatory text, FDA or gov.uk sized, into the same layout |
| Approval chain | You | One decision maker is a meeting; four are a round trip per stage |
| Starting assets | You | Source files missing means elements get rebuilt before anything new starts |
| Print process | Shared | A process with long tooling lead times sets a floor nobody can compress |
Four of the five are yours. That is the useful finding in this article: the timeline is mostly a function of decisions you can make before the project starts.
The stages, and what each one waits on
Strategy waits on you being available, not on research time. The positioning questions need an answer from the person who decides, and a strategy stage stalls when that person is in the room only occasionally.
Identity waits on approval rounds. Each round has a natural length and the number of rounds is the variable, which is why the revision count belongs in the contract rather than in an email.
Packaging waits on the range list and the mandatory information. If both are ready, the architecture is decided once and applied. If they arrive during the project, the architecture gets decided twice.
Production waits on the printer. Tooling, plates and press scheduling sit outside everybody’s control, and this is the stage where an optimistic launch date usually breaks.
What you can compress, and what you cannot
You can compress the approval chain by naming one decision maker before the work starts. You can compress the starting position by collecting your source files, range list and market requirements in advance. You can compress the identity stage by agreeing the revision count instead of discovering it.
You cannot compress print lead times, and you cannot compress a decision nobody has made yet. A project that arrives at artwork stage without a market decision does not go faster because everyone is trying harder; it waits.
How to build your own estimate
Ask three questions and the shape appears.
- How many products will the system cover in the next twelve months?
- How many markets set mandatory text?
- Who signs off, and are they available weekly or monthly?
- Then ask any agency to quote against those three answers rather than against a generic brief. A proposal built on your numbers can be held to its dates. A proposal built on an average cannot, and the gap between the two shows up exactly when you have committed to a launch.
What we will not tell you
You will not find a week count on this page, and you should be careful with pages that give one without asking about your range. MarkaWorks does not publish a turnaround figure because we have not measured one that would hold across projects of different sizes, and a number published without that measurement is marketing rather than information.
Bring the three answers above to a first conversation, and the dates you get back will mean something.
