5 Signs It’s Time to Rebrand
Branding. Visual identity. Brand guidelines. All nerdy words for the visual and non-visual cues that make up your business beyond just what you sell. On a surface level, a brand is a logo, a color palette, and some typography. On a secondary level, it's everything those things touch: business cards, websites, signage, merch, menus. But on a deeper level, a brand is a story, a persona, a reflection of the people behind it. When that emotional depth is missing, brands tend to feel flat, generic, and eventually, irrelevant.
So how do you know when your brand isn’t cutting it anymore? Here are five signs it might be time to rebrand.
It Doesn’t Excite You (or Your Team) Anymore
You started your business to sell the best coffee in town. And a good coffee doesn’t need a good logo to taste good, right? Totally. Some of the best culinary institutions in the world have branding that looks like it was designed on Microsoft Paint. But here’s the thing — that is branding, whether they intended it or not. Their anti-branding becomes part of the story.
If you’re in a different position — a newcomer trying to stand out in a saturated market — you don’t have the luxury of relying on legacy. That doesn’t mean you need to be over-the-top for the sake of virality (because once the TikToks stop circulating, you’re just left with a bad logo). Instead, branding should feel personal.
If you look at your logo, your colour palette, your merch, and it doesn’t excite or inspire you anymore, or worse, it makes you cringe, it might be time to take a step back.
Sometimes the lack of branding IS the brand.
Your Business is Evolving, But Your Branding Isn’t
Businesses aren’t static. Your model will shift, your offerings will expand, your audience might even change. A strong brand should anticipate these shifts, not get in the way of them.
Maybe your cafe is launching a night service, but your branding is giving "morning rush" when you need it to give "sexy date night." Instead of forcing an awkward fit, it might be smarter to evolve your branding to reflect your new direction. And that doesn’t always mean a full rebrand — sometimes, it just means refining what you already have so it grows with you.
You’re Seeing Too Many Similarities with Other Brands
Ever walked into a new cafe and immediately thought, "Wait... have I been here before?" Yeah, us too. Chances are, you've just seen the same Pinterest board come to life multiple times. This happens a lot in today’s design landscape — especially when businesses pull from the same handful of overused references.
Platforms like Pinterest and TikTok are great for inspiration but terrible for originality. They flatten creative industries by recycling the same aesthetics over and over until every new brand starts looking like a slight variation of the last.
A good test: If you can swap your brand visuals with another business and no one would notice, it's time to rethink things. The most memorable brands borrow inspiration from unexpected places — not from other businesses in their industry, but from cinema, architecture, old books, weird packaging designs from the 70s. If your brand isn’t standing out, it’s probably blending in.
MáLà Project by Jingqi Fan: A glittering spectacle of 90’s nostalgia reimagined for a Chinese restaurant brand in New York.
Your Branding Feels More Like a Rulebook Than a Toolbox
A good brand identity isn’t about rigid rules (“The logo must always be exactly 14.2mm wide, aligned precisely 3.5mm from the left margin”). It’s about setting a strong foundation that leaves room to play.
At B!Lab, we like to argue that the future of branding is "Non-Branding" (more on that in another article), meaning that great brands aren’t locked into strict formulas — they’re adaptable. You shouldn’t feel trapped by your own design choices. Instead, your brand should give you enough creative tools to experiment, evolve, and expand without losing its core identity.
If you feel boxed in by your branding rather than empowered by it, that’s a problem.
A brand is a name, a story — not a logo.
Your Brand Just Doesn’t Feel Like You Anymore
At its core, branding isn’t about logos and color palettes. It’s about personality. Before we ever design a single thing, we ask our clients to imagine their brand as a character: What would they wear? How do they carry themselves? What are their quirks? What’s their favorite movie? Favorite food?
Once you can answer these questions, design decisions start to feel obvious. It’s not about picking trendy fonts and colors — it’s about telling a story in a way that feels natural.
Take Rendez-Vous, one of our recent projects. Before touching a single design element, we built a backstory: "She’s running through the rain in a tight dress, covering her hair. He’s waiting for her under a streetlight, sharp as ever. They kiss each other on the cheek and step into a smoky bar."
From that simple mental image, the whole brand took shape: the walking feet in the logo, the rich 60s color palette, the typewriter font on the menus, the postage stamp icon nodding to old-school love letters. None of these choices were random — they were intentional.
If your brand doesn’t have this level of depth, it might be time to rethink it.
So, Now What?
You don’t have to wait until your branding makes you physically ill to consider a rebrand. Sometimes, even the feeling that something is off is enough to start asking questions.
One of the best ways to take your brand's pulse? Ask people you trust — business partners, loyal customers, friends. See how they perceive your brand. Is it how you want to be seen? If not, it's probably time for a change.
A full rebrand can feel overwhelming, especially when budgets are tight and the to-do list is never-ending. That’s why we offer one-on-one consultations to help businesses figure out what needs to change, what can be salvaged, and what direction makes the most sense.
Sometimes, all a brand needs is a little facelift. Other times, it needs a Queer Eye-level transformation. Either way, we’re here when you’re ready to sit in the chair.