The First 90 Days of a Brand: What Happens Before Any Design

Project research insights derived by the Project Management Institute says that 47% of failed projects are due to poorly defined requirements, showing why skipping early discovery leads to costly rework later.

Anyone who has worked with Hashtag Designs will tell you that the first conversations rarely involve design at all. No mood boards are pulled up. No logo sketches are floated. No colour palettes are suggested. What happens instead is a series of questions some straightforward, some uncomfortable about the business itself.

This is deliberate. And it is one of the things that most distinguishes how the studio approaches brand work.

“The biggest mistake in branding is to start designing before you understand the problem,” says Madhushree Kulkarni, who leads Hashtag Designs. “Design is a solution. Before you can propose a solution, you need to know with clarity what you are solving for. That sounds obvious. In practice, it is the step that gets skipped most often, usually because clients are in a hurry and designers are eager to get to the creative work.”

The Pune-based studio’s first 90-day framework a structured phase of discovery that precedes any visual output is built around three core questions. Who is this brand for, and what do those people currently believe about the space this business operates in? What does this brand need to make users feel at every stage of their journey? And where does the current brand if one exists fall short of those goals?

Answering these questions properly requires more than a briefing call. It involves conversations with the business’s actual users, a review of every existing touchpoint, and a competitive analysis that goes beyond visual references to understand how other brands in the space are communicating and where the gaps lie.

“By the time we start designing, we should already know what the design needs to do,” Madhushree Kulkarni explains. “Not in vague terms specifically. This brand needs to feel approachable but credible to a user who is skeptical of new financial products. This brand needs to signal craft and care to a consumer who associates Indian food brands with low production quality. These are design briefs. Everything before them is research.”

The first 90 days also involve what the studio calls a brand audit a systematic review of every way the business currently presents itself. Website copy, social media tone, customer emails, packaging, pitch decks, sales materials. Each of these is a brand touchpoint, and together they form a picture of what the brand is actually communicating, as opposed to what the client thinks it is communicating. The gap between those two is almost always where the work begins.

Clients sometimes find this phase frustrating. The desire to see something tangible is understandable, especially for founders who have been waiting to bring a brand to life. Madhushree Kulkarni is empathetic but firm on the point.

“We have learned the hard way that skipping the discovery phase costs more than the time it saves,” she says. “You might produce work faster, but you will spend twice as long revising it, because the brief was never clear enough to aim at correctly. The 90 days is not a delay. It is the thing that makes everything after it accurate.”

The first 90 days also establishes the foundation for the client relationship itself. The conversations that happen during discovery honest, exploratory, sometimes uncomfortable set the tone for how the studio and client will work together throughout the project. Clients who engage fully with this phase almost always produce better outcomes. The ones who rush through it almost always wish they had not.

Great design is not the output of great instinct alone. It is the output of great understanding. The first 90 days at Hashtag Designs is where that understanding is built before a single pixel is moved.

Strong brands are not built by rushing into design. They are built by understanding the problem deeply before solving it.

If your company is ready to build a brand with intention from day one, visit Hashtag Designs and discover how a structured approach can set the foundation for sustainable growth.