http://buildabrand.com

By Basheera Khan at TechCrunch.

Every now and again, you come across a service that promises to disrupt and change the entrepreneurial landscape for good. Buildabrand could do just that.

The service provides high quality “strategically correct” branding for your startup for about the same price as domain registration, effectively bypassing what is a traditionally expensive and time-consuming process.

Answer a few questions about your business and buildabrand will provide a selection of brand identities: logos, fonts and so on. You can then apply that branding (after customising it, if you choose) to downloadable graphics, stationery, website templates and even – eventually – merchandise like pens and beach towels. You just pay for the items you order or download. The service requires no creative skills from users.

How does it work? Well, once you’ve entered a bit of information about your company at the “create” stage of the process – your “brand values” – buildabrand’s algorithm will exclude all the brands, including logos, in its extensive (and ever-growing) catalogue that aren’t appropriate or relevant and just show you the ones that are right for your business. You can choose from the selection it gives you, tweak the logo a bit – say, if you want it in a different colour – and you’re good to go.

CEO and design director Justin Champney was formerly head of brand innovation for McCann Worldgroup. Justin brings 15 years’ branding experience to the start-up, but he’s going to need every year: buildabrand must get the algorithm right, because it’s the quality of the recommendations that will determine whether buildabrand stands or falls. If Champney pulls it off, buildabrand has the potential to be one of the most disruptive elements in the start-up ecosystem for years.

buildabrand was formed in 2008 and completed a round of angel investment from a sole investor last November.

Selected Comments:

“Sounds like an amazing concept for an often too-expensive process.”

“It sounds like it will save a lot of time in getting an initial brand built without having the pain of explaining everything to a designer.”

“It’s one more example of how the web is making it cheaper and easier than ever to start-up and compete on a level playing field with much bigger companies.”

“Build creation is sometime an extenuating time-consuming process, so some nice tool in the area is always welcome.”

“This could save us thousands … we are always needing brand creation.”