Denny is the founder and creative director of Rayvn, one of the top-rated branding agencies in Toronto in Canada. 

They previously provided brand design services but extended their offering to brand strategy which allowed them to increase their rates from $4,000 to $60,000. 

With their very first strategy client, they multiplied their project revenue and the work they produced has now been nominated for multiple awards. 

Denny talks about his journey from design to strategy, working with next-level clients and how incisive questions are the key to high-impact strategies.

So if you’re interested in extending your services from design to strategy, and you want to hear from somebody who has made the successful transition, then don’t miss this article.

How To Multiply Your Branding Revenue (Agency Secrets)

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Journey To Creating A Branding Agency

Stephen Houraghan

Denny, you’ve been a student of Brand Master Academy for probably a couple of years now. I think you are probably the first cohort of students that came through. 

I remember talking to you probably in early 2020, or something like that.

Tell me about your journey to where you are today in terms of your branding strategy and agency.

How has that journey been for you from coming from university to setting up your own, talk to us about that journey for us?

Denny Kurien

I went to university to study graphic design and I graduated from my BFA and MFA in design. 

Worked in the agency world for a couple of years as an art director. Well, it started as a designer and moved on to art director and then a creative director after that. 

Then in 2018, me and my wife, we started our own little boutique branding and design studio here in Toronto called Rayvn.

When we start for this we didn’t really deal much in, we were purely designed and that too, we would take on any work that came our way. 

We allow our usual design which was not really based on strategy. It was more of filling out the questionnaire like

What is your favorite logo?

What is your favorite website look like? 

And it was noticed that the design we came up with was all based on personal preference. 

It was all about looking and seeing what is the top trendiest logo styles are up in 2010, 2020,  2018, what are the top trending kinds of logo styles that, that are on YouTube and that’s what we would basically base our designs on.

It’s like is it on-trend? is it trendy? not necessarily what was right for the client or the client’s customer. 

We were charging like $3000, $4,000 for a whole brand identity package and for us, we thought, okay, that was kind of the standard market rate, really.

Then I saw a YouTube video, I think it was Chris Do, talking about how much they charge for strategy.

I tried to get into the whole like his whole pro group because they have a pro program as well, and it didn’t quite resonate with me and then that was when I came across at

Brand Master Academy where you were talking teaching strategy.

It really simplified the way in which you taught strategy and kind of clicked for me and then we started using basically all the kinds of work that we did. 

The work that you speak off that just recently won, got nominated for the Webby award, which is a law firm branding that we did called a for Normand. It’s a law firm out in Orlando, Florida. 

They were the first clients that we applied the whole brand strategy principle and it was funny because initially, you would never have thought of charging like anywhere.

The kind of stuff that we charged like close to 25K, 30K for a brand identity design project where usually we would be charging the same, like $3000, $5,000.

Thanks to the strategy and thanks to a lot of the things that were discussed in the Facebook group in Brand Masters Academy. 

So it was extremely helpful and we delivered a really good product at the end and got accolades the cause of it.

Challenges About Brand Strategy

Stephen Houraghan

We’ll jump into that.

It’s beautiful work and we can talk about the industry that they’re in and the thinking behind the strategy. 

But before we kind of get to that point you had this epiphany that you were charging $3000 to $4,000.

And you thought to yourself there’s something more

You mentioned Chris Do was talking about how much they charge for strategy. 

When you, you had this epiphany and this realization, that strategy could be the next stepping stone to something bigger.

What was that challenge crossing that bridge and finding out more about strategy?

Where were you and what did you feel that you needed to know?

I know from my point of view when I started to look for this kind of information, there wasn’t too much about the future any of that stuff.

I reverted to books because that’s all it was there. 

Denny Kurien