The Challenge

At Naru we kept meeting the same person: a founder with a genuinely good idea and no budget for a full branding process. In 2018, Brazil's economic crisis was pushing a wave of people into entrepreneurship out of necessity. They needed a brand to start, but traditional branding was too long, too expensive, and built for businesses that already had stability. The honest options were bad ones: turn them away, or hand over a cheap logo with no strategy behind it. I wanted a third option: keep the strategic foundation intact, but make it affordable and fast.

My Process

I built a modular methodology that treated the brand as an MVP. Clients chose a package of one to four deliverables with fixed scope and fixed price, and every project ran in exactly one week, with defined deadlines for discovery, approvals, production, and delivery. Instead of presenting finished work for sign-off, I built the client into the process through structured workshops: they created moodboards, made positioning decisions, and shaped direction before any design was produced. The logo allowed a single adjustment, with no revision rounds, because co-creation removed the need for them. As the business grew, the brand was built to grow with it.

Key Decisions

Productise without dumbing down. Every constraint (one adjustment, one week, fixed scope) was communicated upfront as a design principle, not a limitation. Clients who chose Naru Express chose that structure on purpose. But I refused to cut the strategic foundation, the part that actually makes a brand work.

Make the client a participant, not a spectator. Building participation into every stage meant founders left understanding their own brand, with the confidence to run it themselves, instead of a set of files they couldn't explain.

Results

20+ founders served across Brazil and Portugal, with projects delivered consistently in a single week and near-zero revision requests across the client base, direct validation of the co-creation model. Several clients came back to expand their brands as their businesses grew. The studio is still active, and the methodology became the foundation for the AI branding workshops I later delivered in entrepreneurship programs in Portugal.

What Made This Different

This is the same instinct that drives my work today: don't just make the deliverable, build the system that lets someone else keep going without you. Naru Express was design operations before I had the words for it.