About Marc Cross
I'm Marc Cross. I build brands for founders in hospitality, food and drink and lifestyle, and I've been doing it for sixteen years.
How I got here
I was the kid who spent entire weekends at the kitchen table drawing. That never really stopped. It turned into art, then graphic design at A level, then a degree at Ravensbourne, where I found branding and worked out it was the thing I wanted to do.
From there I co-founded a branding agency in Shoreditch called Klinical and spent fifteen years as its creative director.
That period taught me most of what I know. We worked with businesses at every scale, from first-site startups to Sainsbury's, Marriott and Vespa, across the UK, Europe and the Middle East. I learnt how to run a project, how to hold a room, and how to tell a founder something they don't want to hear in a way they can act on.
I also learnt what I didn't want. Agencies grow by adding people, and adding people means the person who sells the work is rarely the person who does it. The founders I most enjoyed working with wanted the opposite. They wanted one senior person who understood the business, stayed close to it and was still there a year later.
So I left, to work closer to founders and be more hands on with the actual building of brands.
What I actually think
Most branding problems aren't design problems.
A business with a clear answer to why anyone should choose it can make good decisions about almost everything else. A business without one ends up with a nice logo, a nice website and no particular reason to be preferred over the place next door. That's why every project I take on starts with positioning, whether the client came for a strategy, an identity or a website.
The other thing I believe is that brands are built in the details of the real world rather than in a document. The way a menu reads. What the packaging feels like. Whether the shopfront makes sense from across the street. Whether the first post on the day you open sounds like the place you've spent two years building. That's the part I like most, and it's why I stay involved through launch rather than handing over a logo file and disappearing.
What genuinely interests me, and has for years, is the psychology underneath all of it. Why people become loyal to one place and indifferent to another that does much the same thing at much the same price. That's the question every project is really trying to answer.
What I'm like to work with
Collaborative, and deliberately so.
You'll have a say at every stage, because a brand built without the founder in the room is a brand about a business I've imagined. I'll bring the thinking, the direction and an honest opinion, and I'll tell you when I disagree with you. But it should feel like we're building it together, and by the end it should feel like yours rather than something that was delivered to you.
I'd also like you to enjoy it. Branding is one of the few parts of opening a business that's genuinely good fun, and founders who are excited about their brand tend to end up with better ones.
How I work
Keeping the number of projects low is the whole point of working this way. It means I can stay properly close to each business rather than managing several at arm's length.
Where I work
I'm based in London and work across the UK, with a significant amount of my work in Saudi Arabia and the UAE. I've also worked in Europe, Africa and the US.
I've worked with Fresko for four years (London & Greece), KAB Holding for six across three hospitality brands, and Town Hall Hotel for five. Those relationships weren't planned at the start of a project. They're what tends to happen when the strategy holds up.
Outside of work
I spend a lot of my own time in the industry I work in. New restaurants, hotels, places worth travelling for. Some of it is research and most of it isn't, but it does mean I'm usually a customer of the sort of business I'm being asked to build, which turns out to be more useful than it sounds.
The rest of it goes on two small children and a Cavapoo called Jett.
Tell me what you're building
If you're opening something new, rethinking an existing concept or preparing for growth, I'd like to hear about it. Tell me where you are and I'll come back to you within a working day.