Brand Development, Marketing & Launch · Texas
Being good at it and looking like it are two different jobs.
Opening, launching, taking over, or long overdue a change. Thorianne decides what the business is, then builds everything that carries it. Live and right on the day.
Aline Haladjian · Founder
The gap
Everybody handles a piece. Nobody handles this one.
Starting a business is well served. So is buying one. Both are well served right up to the point where the thing has to have a personality.
Getting there
The asset
Consultants take you through the site, the build-out, the equipment and the financing. Brokers and lawyers take you through the valuation, the diligence and the transfer. Thorough, expensive, and entirely about the thing itself.
Once you are trading
The traffic
Agencies switch on search, ads, reviews and booking the week you start. Useful, and they begin after the decision that matters most has already been made.
In between
Everything else
What it is called. What it stands for. What it looks like. Whose name is still on the van. What a stranger decides in the four seconds before they read a word. Nobody owns that, so it lands on you.
It usually gets decided in an evening, by the person with the least distance from it.
In the month you have the least time in your professional life. After the lease is signed on the suite. The week the deal closes and the business is still announcing that nothing has changed. The month before the first product ships.
So you call someone. Here is what each one hands you.
A brand studio
Gives you a logo pack and a guidelines document. Stops there.
A web developer
Needs the brand decided before they can start. Waits for you.
A marketing agency
Begins with whatever you hand them, whether you made it last month or inherited it.
Thorianne
Decides it, draws it, builds it, puts it live, and stays if you want. New or taken over.
A brand that arrives as a document is a brand you still have to build.
The domains, the store, the mailboxes, the subscriptions, the analytics. On the day it goes live you are not assembling anything. And if you took the business over, you are not inheriting the last owner’s vendors either.
The practice
From the name to live. Then kept right.
One practice owns the whole distance, including the parts between the parts. Nothing gets handed to a second vendor in the hope it survives the trip.
Before the date
Deciding it, drawing it, building it
- Brand strategy and positioning. What the business is for, who it is for, why it wins, and what it will stop doing. Everything downstream resolves against this, which is why it is never optional.
- Naming and words. Name, descriptor, the sentence you will say a thousand times, and the tone everything else is written in.
- Visual identity. Marks, palette, typography, and a system that still holds once other people start using it. See the work
- Packaging and product presentation. Structure and labelling built to survive a shelf, a courier and a photograph. See the work
- Website and e-commerce. Built, filled, tested and live. Not designed and handed over.
- Launch. The plan for the weeks either side of the date, and the running of it.
After the date
Keeping it right as it grows
- Marketing management. Running the programmes that were built, rather than explaining them to whoever runs them next.
- Brand governance. Keeping the identity correct as staff, printers, platforms and other agencies start using it. The rules were written here, so holding them is cheap here.
- Technology stewardship. Store, site, integrations and analytics kept working, and a view on what to add and what to retire.
- The next one. A second location, a new line, a new service, an acquisition. Each is its own body of work.
- Standing counsel. Monthly or quarterly, with the person who decided the positioning in the first place.
Offered, never assumed. Handover is included either way, so your team can run it without us.
The work
Brands that earned their place.
Everything below is brand identity and packaging. All of it is client work: a deadline, a budget, and somebody who had to approve it. Several of those clients came back the following year.
The positioning that decided all of them is visible in none of them. That is the nature of the work, and it is why this section is not the whole practice.
Three more projects, including three years of one seasonal range and a full wine and spirits label portfolio.
See all six projects →Who you work with
Aline Haladjian
Fifteen years of corporate marketing, branding and go-to-market leadership sit behind this practice. The kind of work where a positioning statement has to survive a board on Tuesday, a sales team on Wednesday and a launch date on Friday. Positioning that only works in the deck does not count.
Alongside it runs a background in enterprise IT, cybersecurity and digital transformation. That is not a second service on the menu. It is the reason a brand from this practice arrives live instead of arriving as a PDF.
A brand promise the systems cannot keep is not a promise. It is a problem you have agreed to have in eighteen months.
Qualified
- MBA, Quality Management
- The German Jordanian University2009
- Diploma in Digital Marketing
- Institute of Digital Marketing2012
Quality management is where the systems half of this practice comes from. The second date is the one that matters: 2012 is before most of the tools people now ask about existed.
What has not changed since is the habit: find the thing that is about to matter, learn it properly, and use it on real work before it is fashionable. AI is the current one, and it is held to the same rule. It earns its place on a deadline before it earns a line in a proposal.
Core values
- Excellence. Executive thinking applied practically.
- Integrity. We do what we said, by the date we said it.
- Ownership. One practice answers for the whole arc, including the parts between the parts.
- Durability. Built to hold up under real pressure, not just on launch day.
The name
Thorianne
Hover or tap a name.
Eight of the nine letters belong to the children. The ninth is mine, and it is there for two reasons.
It closes Thor. Thunder and storm: force that changes a thing and leaves it standing, which is the whole argument of this practice.
And it opens ianne. Said out loud the name lands like an Armenian surname, because that is what I am. Haladjian. A name I was handed, before I handed one on.
The mark is that, drawn: a T, in Armenian. The first letter of the name, and one that Trevor and Anthony both gave it.
How it goes
Positioning first. Every time.
The order is the method. Identity built before positioning gets rebuilt. Systems chosen before the go-to-market get replaced inside two years. Taken out of order, companies pay for this sequence twice.
This page is the argument for it. Every word, every colour, and the order you met them in were decided for one particular reader. If that reader were not you, you would have stopped scrolling a long way above this line.
01
Assess
A structured read of where the name, the brand and the systems stand today, against the date you are working back from. What exists and is worth keeping, what is missing, and what has to be true by the time the door opens or the product launches.
02
Position
Who you are for, why you win, what you will stop doing. Identity, messaging, stack decisions and hiring all resolve against this, which is why it gets settled before any of them.
03
Build
Identity, marketing programmes, and the technology underneath them, built in parallel against one plan and one timeline. No vendor waiting on another vendor.
04
Live
Live, populated, tested, with the documentation and the training to run it. The measure of the engagement is what your team can do the week after.
05
Keep it right
Most of what gets built starts drifting the moment other people touch it. Staying on is offered, never assumed, and priced on its own.
Questions
The things people actually ask.
Do you work with people who are not opening something?
Yes. Opening is the clearest version of it, but the same work applies when a business is putting a new product into the market, or has outgrown how it looks, or has changed hands, or has been trading for years and still sounds like it did on day one.
We already have a name and a logo. Do we start over?
Not necessarily, and the assessment tells us. Sometimes the name is fine and the positioning underneath it was never decided. Starting over is a recommendation, not a default.
Do I register the business first, or come to you first?
Either works, and plenty of people arrive already registered. But naming is part of this practice, and a name gets tested before it gets filed: available as a domain, available as a handle on every platform you will want, and not already someone else’s in your category. Come first and that check happens before anything is registered. Come after and we work with what is there, which is sometimes the right answer anyway.
What has to be decided, and the order it has to be decided in, from positioning through to everything that carries it. Free, no address required.
Can you work to my opening or launch date?
That is the job. Every engagement is scoped backwards from a fixed date, in phases you pay for on completion. If the date is not achievable at the scope you want, you will be told before you sign, not six weeks in.
Do you do the website, or do I need somebody else for that?
We do it, and we put it live. That includes the domain, the store, the mailboxes, the payments and the analytics. The point of one practice is that there is nobody to hand it to.
What happens after launch?
Whatever you want to happen. Handover is included in every engagement so that your team can run it without us. If you would rather we stayed on to run the marketing or hold the brand together as it grows, that is a separate arrangement and you decide.
I am in a field you have not worked in. Does that matter?
Less than you would think, and you should ask anyway. The work you can see is food and drink, because that is where it came from. What carries across is the sequence rather than the category: decide what the business is, name it, draw it, build what carries it, and have it live on the date. A clinic opening in March needs that as much as a bottle on a shelf does. The specifics of your trade are the part you already know better than any consultant will. What is being bought here is the part you have had no reason to learn.
What does it cost?
Fixed by phase, quoted before anything starts, paid on completion of each phase. Most engagements land between $15,000 and $26,000, depending on scope and the date. There is no retainer you have to be talked out of.
Next step
Bring the decision you have been putting off.
Forty-five minutes, no deck. You should come away with a clearer read on it whether or not we end up working together.
Sent. You will hear back from Aline within two working days.
What happens next
- Within two working days. A reply from Aline.
- Forty-five minutes. We open up the actual decision and see how deep it goes.
- A written read. What we would do, in what order, and what it would take.
Helpful to include
- What you are opening, launching or taking over
- The date you are working back from, and whether it can move
- What already exists: a name, a mark, a website, anything you have inherited