Most companies don’t start with a design founder at the helm. Tech companies are started by engineers. Healthcare, finance, and education companies are usually led by subject-matter experts. Unless you’re launching a clothing line or retail brand, design is often treated as decoration, a logo, a color palette, and maybe a brand book that quickly gets buried.
That approach works in the beginning. When you’re proving an idea, survival matters more than polish. But as companies grow, something shifts. Ten years in, what once felt fresh now feels fragmented. The startup energy has hardened into legacy, and the brand starts to show its age.
Competitors look sharper. Internal decks are a mess of old logos and clashing templates. Customers and employees start to feel the friction. The brand feels less like a signal of strength and more like a liability.
And here’s the truth: what makes or breaks a legacy brand isn’t a new color scheme or tagline. It’s design leadership.
It Matters to Customers
Customers don’t stay loyal to brands that feel careless. Post-pandemic, 75% of U.S. consumers tried new shopping behaviors, and over a third tried new brands. In other words: people are open to leaving.
When they do, the top driver is experience. One study shows 80% of customers who switch brands cite poor service. Another shows 86% walk away after just two or three bad interactions.
I saw this firsthand with payroll software. An accountant steered me from Gusto to Paychex. The experience was painful: multiple portals, endless phone calls, and a confusing tangle of inconsistent logos and outdated design. After two weeks, I canceled and went back to Gusto. The difference wasn’t just features. It was clarity, consistency, and care.
A legacy brand without design leadership shows its cracks and drifts into irrelevance. Customers notice. And they leave.
It Matters to Employees
Brand isn’t just for the outside world. Employees feel it too. Studies show they’re 2.2x more likely to stay when they’re proud of where they work, and 6x more likely to recommend it.
When the brand feels broken, employees disengage. It shows up as confusion about templates, embarrassment about sending out dated decks, or hesitation to share a campaign on LinkedIn. Over time, it becomes a culture of apology instead of pride.
If people inside the company are making excuses for how the brand looks and feels, leadership has a design problem, not just a marketing one.
It Matters to Stakeholders
Strong branding doesn’t just look good; it drives business outcomes.
B2B companies with strong branding see a 20% higher success rate.
90% of customers expect a consistent experience across channels.
Brand consistency alone can boost revenue 10–20%.
Consistency, trust, and clarity aren’t accidents. They’re the result of design leadership embedded in decision-making, not just an afterthought.
What Design Leadership Really Means
Too often, companies reduce brand work to hiring an agency for a new logo, a campaign, or a website refresh. Agencies hand over a “brand bible” that ends up collecting dust.
The data is clear:
Only 25% of organizations enforce their brand guidelines consistently.
More than half produce materials that don’t conform to their standards.
Guidelines without leadership are just documents. They don’t change culture. They don’t protect equity. And they don’t evolve with the business.
True design leadership is different. It means embedding design into the company’s goals, culture, and strategy. It means aligning how a business wants to grow with how it shows up in the world, externally, internally, everywhere.
When empathy and craftsmanship guide the brand, guidelines stop being rules and start being lived behaviors. That’s what keeps a legacy brand alive.
The Luxury of a Design Founder (and How to Get Close)
When I co-founded a software company out of a design studio, the brand was always on my mind. I scrapped what didn’t work, refined what did, and kept the brand aligned with who we were becoming. That’s the advantage of having a designer as a founder: the brand doesn’t get left behind; it’s always in the front seat.
Most companies don’t have that luxury. But they can have design leadership, someone who treats brand not as a deliverable, but as a living system that grows with the business.
Don’t Wait Until Next Year
Updating a legacy brand can feel daunting. But delaying it only makes the gap wider between who you are and how you’re perceived. Every month without design leadership is another month of erosion, of relevance, trust, and pride.
The companies that thrive are the ones that invest in design leadership early. They create the groundswell, not get buried by it.
A Quiet Invitation
If this resonates, I’d love to talk. Not about a rebrand or a quick campaign, but about what design leadership could mean for your business. Sometimes it’s embedding with your team as a fractional Head of Design. Sometimes it’s guiding a specific initiative through my studio, the Industrious.
Either way, the goal is simple: keep your brand alive, intentional, and something people are proud to stand behind.