EST. 2021 | CHELTENHAM,UK
STRATEGIC MARKETING FOR CYBER AND TECH
Inside the rebrand: from Alice Violet Creative to Violet and Partners
Alice Violet Creative is now Violet and Partners.
When I launched the business five and a half years ago, cyber and tech clients hired me to make things: films, photography, brands and content. The name described that accurately enough, even if it only ever captured half of what I was doing.
My career began in luxury travel, marketing high-value brands to people who expect the extraordinary. By 27 I was a director leading content across multiple markets, and that work taught me a great deal about the psychology of high-stakes buying: long sales cycles, several stakeholders in the room, education as part of the pitch, and trust that can matter as much as the offer itself. I moved into cyber in 2018 and went in-house at Sophos, which is where my interest in cyber security began.
From luxury to cyber the sector changed, but the buyer often did not. A CISO handing over the keys to critical infrastructure, an investor backing a round, a government buyer awarding a framework. These are long, multi-stakeholder decisions made under scrutiny, where clarity, credibility and trust decide the outcome. Making the value obvious to the person making that decision is the job, whether the answer turns out to be a strategy, a campaign, an event, a podcast or a film.
Strategy and creative had always come as a pair for me, so building a business that only named the creative half began to feel limiting fairly early on. It crystallised at London Tech Week earlier this year. We work with established and innovative companies, and in Cheltenham that is understood without me having to explain it, because our reputation, relationships and presence do much of that work for us. Outside that ecosystem it is different. "Alice Violet Creative" could sound like a freelancer or a small production studio rather than a business bootstrapped from nothing while delivering senior-level work for serious organisations. Standing in those conversations, it became obvious that the name was setting a ceiling the business had already passed.
The shift itself happened gradually. The same clients who once asked us to produce started asking me to lead: strategy, positioning, campaigns and fractional marketing direction. The balance of the work changed and the name did not.
Why "and Partners"
Violet and Partners describes the business as it actually operates today: senior, established, and built to sit alongside serious organisations.
The reality of this business is a senior partnership model. There is me, and my trusted network of specialists brought in when a piece of work calls for them. Everyone in that network is experienced, known to me personally, and chosen because they are exceptionally good at what they do.
It is deliberately not an agency stacked with juniors, and it is deliberately not a freelancer model either. It sits somewhere between the two. Clients work directly with the principal, specialists are brought in where they add value, and one person remains accountable for the whole engagement. "And Partners" is the clearest way to say that in two words.
We kept "Violet" because five years of relationships, recognition and reputation are attached to it. There was never a convincing argument for throwing that away and starting again.
"I've worked with Alice for around four years, bringing deep brand and graphic design expertise to the business. I designed the original Alice Violet Creative identity, led the evolution of Cyber Made Human and built the Violet and Partners website. Across client projects I work on everything from websites to full brand systems and high-end print, adding a senior layer of creative quality assurance."
Ken O'Hare
How it came together
The identity was designed for cyber and technology rather than for a traditional creative studio. Deep violet and green, a monospace wordmark, and a voice that is plain, direct and deliberately free from marketing theatre. The goal was simple: the brand needed to look as credible as the work it represents. That sounds obvious, and it is also where a surprising number of rebrands go wrong.
The new website is a focused six-page site replacing the old sprawl. The offer is immediately visible, the proof appears early, and nobody has to click through half a website to understand why they should trust us.
What we still do
A rebrand is a useful moment to clear something up, because a change of name can easily look like a change of service.
We still deliver creative work. Podcasting, video, photography, brand and content are all still part of what we do, and all delivered to the same standard. What has changed is the kind of relationship we are building towards. We want to be a client's long-term marketing partner, not simply the number they call when they need an ad hoc photoshoot, film or campaign. That means understanding the commercial objective first, then deciding what should actually be made.
Four ways to work together
Four ways to work together
One of the biggest jobs of the rebrand was simplifying the offer. There are now four clear ways to work with us: advisory, delivery, training and speaking. The old website asked people to work too hard to understand what we did, and the new one is designed so that the right client can see within seconds how they might engage us.
What else we set out to fix
The second objective was commercial. We want to win larger, more strategic engagements with established organisations: longer-term partnerships, larger retainers, and work where we are involved early enough to shape the thinking rather than being brought in at the end to execute it.
The third was geographical. Cheltenham's cyber ecosystem built this business and remains an important part of it, and we are not stepping away from that. But the brand also has to travel properly into London, across the wider UK, and into rooms where nobody already knows the story.
Who did the rebrand?
Us. Obviously.
I brought in trusted partners for the specialist elements including photography, web development and design, but I have personally spent months shaping, challenging and refining what exists today. We treated Violet and Partners exactly as we would treat a paying client: strategy first, ruthless editing, clear commercial objectives, and specialists brought in where they could make the result better.
That also made the process uncomfortable at times. Rebranding your own business forces you to answer the questions that are far easier to ask a client. What are you actually selling? Who do you want to work with? What do you want to be known for? And what are you prepared to leave behind? The result feels much closer to the business we have already become.
Would we recommend rebranding?
Generally, no.
Brand is a long-term trust builder. Recognition, reputation and familiarity compound over time, and abandoning all of that because a business wants something new and shiny is an expensive mistake. For most established businesses we are far more likely to recommend brand elevation: sharpening the positioning, improving the identity, refining the messaging and raising the quality of how the business presents itself, without throwing away equity it has already paid for.
That is why this decision was neither quick nor cosmetic. Alice Violet Creative had more than five years of recognition attached to it, and changing the name meant accepting that some of that familiarity would have to be rebuilt. There had to be a strong commercial reason to do it. There was. The business had fundamentally outgrown what the old name communicated, and keeping "Violet" preserves the continuity while "and Partners" gives us room to represent what the business has become and where it is going.
Most of the time the strongest brand decision is to evolve what you already have. Occasionally the gap between what the market sees and what the business has become grows wide enough to justify something more fundamental. For us, this was one of those occasions.
Violet and Partners is the marketing partner for cyber and technology. We turn complex, high-trust work into something buyers understand, trust and act on.
BASED IN CHELTENHAM, WORKING ACROSS THE UK.
Formerly Alice Violet Creative
Violet and Partners is the strategic marketing partner for cyber and technology organisations. We make complex products, technical expertise and serious ideas easier to trust, understand and buy.
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