Before you ask.

Brand Foundation starts at $3,500 and typically runs three to four weeks. That includes strategy, a full logo system, color and typography, voice and messaging, and a brand guide built to be used, not filed away. Brand + Site starts at $8,500. Brand + Site + Launch, which adds social direction, announcement content, and email rollout, starts at $13,500. If you’re not sure which tier fits, a fifteen-minute call will tell us both.

A Vagari brand guide covers your logo system and usage rules, color palette with exact values, typography pairings, voice and tone guidelines with real examples of what to say and what to avoid, and messaging frameworks for how to talk about what you do. Every brand guide is also built with documented voice parameters that work with AI tools, so when you use ChatGPT or Claude to write for your business, it sounds like you and not like a press release.

Most brand guides were built for designers: a logo file, a color palette, maybe a font. They don’t tell AI tools how your business talks. A brand guide built for AI includes documented voice rules with specific examples, the words your brand owns, the tone parameters that make your writing recognizable, and the phrases you’d never say. Every Vagari brand guide includes this layer, because a brand that can’t train its own AI tools isn’t documented, it’s decorated.

Yes, and here’s the short version of why: a website built without a brand strategy is making decisions it isn’t qualified to make. Typography, color, voice, what to say on the homepage and in what order, all of those are brand decisions. When the brand comes first, the website has something to express. When it doesn’t, you end up with a site that looks fine and says nothing specific.

Brand + Site projects run six to eight weeks. Brand + Site + Launch runs eight to ten. That timeline includes strategy, design, custom coding, copywriting, SEO setup, and analytics. It moves faster when you’re responsive during feedback rounds and slower when scope grows mid-project, which is normal and fine as long as we both see it coming.

A few signals worth paying attention to: you’re embarrassed to hand someone your card or send them to your site. Your brand made sense when you started but your business has grown past it. You attract the wrong clients, or no clients, and you suspect the brand is part of why. You’ve outgrown DIY. Any one of those is enough. A discovery call is a good place to find out whether a full rebrand is what you need or whether something smaller would do it.

Both. Some clients come in with a logo they love and everything else in disarray. Some come in with nothing. The process starts the same way regardless: strategy first, execution second. If what you have is worth keeping, we keep it. If it’s holding you back, we say so.

A marketing agency runs campaigns. A generalist freelancer makes things look good. Vagari does the strategic work that determines what to say before deciding how to say it or where to put it. Twenty-plus years of brand strategy, including eight at Macy’s building national campaigns, means the thinking behind the work is different. You get a brand that’s built to last, not a deliverable that looks great in a deck and goes quiet six months later.

Wellness practices, salons, spas, healthcare providers, and service businesses that rely on trust as their primary selling point. Mostly small businesses and independents, mostly in Buffalo and Western New York, though we work with clients beyond the 716 when the fit is right. The through line is businesses where the brand has real work to do, and the owner knows it.

It starts with a discovery call, then a brand questionnaire that asks the questions most clients haven’t thought to ask themselves. From there: strategy and positioning, visual direction, design rounds, brand guide delivery. If a website is part of the scope, it follows the brand work, not the other way around. You’re involved at every decision point and never handed something you didn’t see coming.

If you have a strong existing brand, yes. If you’re starting from scratch or your brand is unclear, the honest answer is that a website without brand strategy is an expensive guessing game. We’d rather tell you that upfront than build something that doesn’t work.

Yes. Most clients are in Western New York, and we lead with local positioning because Buffalo community matters to us. But the work travels. Wellspring Medical is in New Zealand. If the fit is right, geography isn’t the deciding factor.

Fifteen minutes on Zoom or phone. No pitch deck, no pressure. You tell us what you’re working on and where you feel stuck, we tell you honestly whether we’re the right fit and what that might look like. Book one here.

Yes. Payment schedules are built into every project contract. Typically split across project milestones rather than a single upfront payment. We can talk through what makes sense for your project on the discovery call.

Yes. Website maintenance is available from $175/month. For clients who want continued brand and content support after launch, that’s scoped project-by-project or on retainer, depending on what you need. We’re not a one-and-done studio.