Brand and design for the new Main Street

New York
Start free

Where this comes from.

Small businesses make big brand decisions with less help than large companies get. The work doesn’t need a lower standard. It needs a clearer way to begin. That’s why Mainmade exists.

Questions? hello@mainmade.co

Two sign painters at work on the clapboard side of a building: one kneeling on the ground lettering the lower line, one up a ladder on the right, between them the half-painted words PERSONAL FINANCE and a line above reading WHEN A FELLOW WANTS A FRIEND.
Sign painters · Ames, Iowa · 1940

Mainmade started with two kinds of work that never met. Our founder spent years at global brand consultancies, helping some of the world’s largest companies find what makes them different and show it. Meanwhile the family’s fire alarm company on Long Island was trusted by the people who knew it, and hard to see online. The thinking was never the problem. It just was never built for a business like that one.

So we built it. Always Secure was the first business through the process. Mainmade is for everyone building something of their own: the shop on the corner, the studio upstairs, the founder with a laptop and an idea. The new Main Street.

A hand making a V sign beside a red fire alarm bell mounted high on a white wall, under a drop ceiling.
Always Secure · Long Island

01

We started with the business we knew best

Always Secure, a decade-old fire alarm and security business on Long Island, became the first complete case. It had built trust through real work and long relationships, but a new customer could not see that clearly online.

The Brand Playbook named the truth and set one direction: Known by Name. Build turned that direction into a logo, a voice, applications and guidelines people could understand and use.

Read the Always Secure case

02

What the work believes

Understanding comes before building, every time. A business cannot fix how it sounds or looks until someone has clearly named what it is, who it serves, what it stands for and why it is the right choice.

The standard does not bend with company size. A five-client business deserves the same attention, judgment and seriousness as a five-hundred-client one.

A fabric designer seen from behind at her desk, long dark hair over a patterned blouse, her hands on a keyboard and a graphics tablet, a repeating diamond pattern filling the monitor in front of her.
Fabric designer at her computer · Paterson, New Jersey · 1994
Inside a barbershop at night: two barbers in white coats work on two customers in reclined chairs, the shop's name lettered across the mirror behind them and the street showing through the window on the left.
Barbershop · South Side, Chicago · 1941

03

How the work progresses

  • 01 Read
    Brand Assessment
    Free
  • 02 Shape
    Brand Playbook
    $250
  • 03 Build
    Brand System

Read your business. Shape your direction. Build your system.

Start your free Brand Assessment

Questions? Write to hello@mainmade.co.

Photographs: Library of Congress, Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection; American Folklife Center, Working in Paterson Project (Martha Cooper, 1994).