A conversation. You can book one at calendly.com/pato-1/let-s-gel. No deck, no brief required — just tell us what your challenge is.

Yes — the client list includes entertainment, travel, and tech work alongside food, beverage, beauty, and wellness. Our discovery and brand development process: understand the audience, define what makes the brand distinct, and ensure the design actually says that, whether your product is consumer goods, or launching a restaurant.

Strategy and full brand identity: three to five months, sometimes longer if there are many stakeholders or the problem is more complex than it first appeared. Packaging design for an established brand with clear positioning can move faster—often 8 to 12 weeks. What slows things down most consistently is internal decision-making, not the work itself. We try to understand that early. We’ve taken products to market in as little as 90 days from a business plan to launching at major shows such as ExpoWest and DEMA. See in our portfolio Good Grains and FreeBreathe.

Brands that are serious about doing it right. That sounds obvious, but it rules out more than you'd think. We work with founders launching their first product and with teams inside P&G or Danone. The common thread is that they're well-funded enough to invest in strategy, not just design, and they understand the difference. A startup that's raised real capital and wants to compete at retail is a great fit. So is an established brand that needs a genuinely fresh perspective, not just a facelift.

With some uncomfortable questions. The US isn't one audience, and translation — cultural, not just linguistic — is where most international brands stumble. A brand that's been the market leader in China, Mexico, or France for decades still has to earn trust here, often with consumers who have a complicated relationship with their country of origin. We've helped brands navigate that, and it's rarely just a packaging problem. It's a positioning problem that shows up in the packaging.

Rarely. Most brands that come to us have something worth keeping — equity, recognition, a loyal customer. The question is usually why it's not working as well as it should. Sometimes the packaging is dated. Sometimes the brand was built for a different consumer and hasn't caught up. We start by figuring out what's broken before we recommend what to fix. That said, occasionally the answer really is to start over, and we'll tell you that too.

Honestly, the best answer to that is a conversation. But here's what we hear most from clients who've been through it before: the work looked good, but it didn't solve the actual problem. That usually happens when strategy gets skipped in favor of getting to design faster. We're slower at the front end than some agencies because we think that's where the real work is. If you already have clarity on your positioning and just need execution, there are faster and cheaper options. If you're not sure what the real problem is yet, that's where we tend to do our best work.