Plate 01
Identity & Packaging — DTC, Skincare
Quarry & Bloom
An apothecary-grade reset for a heritage-leaning DTC skincare line that needed to feel more shelf than scroll.
Read the caseChapter One—Established 2017
A 14-person studio that builds brands people actually remember.
By Mara Lemoon & Theo Hood — Brooklyn, New York
Book a Studio CallStudio by the numbers
§02By the numbers
- 220+ Brand systems shipped since 2017, across nineteen countries.
- 14 Full-time strategists, designers, and writers. No contractors on the work.
- 92% Client retention since founding, with four engagements converting into co-founder roles.
- 4.7× Average project ROI, measured twelve months post-launch across the last sixty engagements.
Cited in Brand New, The Dieline, PRINT Magazine, and Eye on Design. 9.4/10 average across 63 verified Clutch reviews.
§03Selected work
Four plates from the archive, 2017–2024.
A curated contact sheet, not the full two-hundred-and-twenty. Each project is founder-led from kickoff to ship — no account-manager hand-offs, ever.
Plate 02
Identity & Digital Flagship — B2B SaaS
Northbound Atlas
A category-of-one identity for a Series-B logistics platform, built to outlast the dashboard it sits inside.
Read the casePlate 03
Identity & Packaging — DTC, Beverage
Halverson Roasters
A third-wave roaster's flagship system: bag, tin, brew guide, and a wordmark that earns a second look at the grocery shelf.
Read the casePlate 04
Identity & Product System — Consumer Electronics
Linework Audio
A sound-first hardware brand whose wordmark, type system, and product etchings were drawn from the same grid.
Read the case
Chapter Three — The Method
A documented 5-phase method, taught at three design schools.
Every engagement runs the same five chapters — a quiet, repeatable rhythm that turns a founder's instinct into an identity built to last longer than the launch press cycle.
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01
Sour
Two weeks of interviews, audits, and competitive terrain-mapping. We listen for the thing the brand already is — and the gap it has not yet claimed.
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02
Slice
We commit to a single positioning sentence and a three-word tonal anchor. Everything downstream is judged against this carving.
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03
Sketch
Eight to fourteen distinct identity directions, drawn by hand first, rendered second. Founders keep the one that feels inevitable.
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04
System
Wordmark, typography, color, packaging, motion, voice — built as one interlocking system, not a stack of disconnected deliverables.
The fifth phase, Ship, runs alongside — rollout, guidelines, and the handoff that makes the system outlive the engagement. The full method is taught at RISD and two partner schools. Average project duration: 11 weeks end-to-end.
Read the full method
Chapter Five — A Note From The Founders
On turning down eighty percent of the briefs.
The studio began in a fourth-floor walkup on Wythe Avenue in 2017, with two desks, one shared iMac, and a folder of rejection letters we kept as a kind of north star. Eight years later we are fourteen people, two hundred and twenty brands shipped, and we still turn down roughly eighty percent of the briefs that reach our inbox. Not because we are precious, but because the work this studio makes is built on a specific kind of attention, and attention is the one resource we refuse to dilute.
Every project at Lemoon & Hood is founder-led. Mara or Theo — and usually both — sit in the first conversation, the second conversation, and the final review. There are no account managers passing notes between rooms. If we cannot put one of our names on the work, we will tell you in the first call, and we will happily recommend a studio better suited to the brief. This is the only way we know how to keep the standard that earned us a 9.4 on Clutch, the V&A shelf, and the loyalty of founders who come back for their second and third companies.
If the way we work sounds like the way you would like to be worked with, the next step is a thirty-minute studio call. No deck, no pitch — just a conversation about what you are building and whether we are the right room for it.
— Mara Lemoon & Theo Hood
Chapter Seven — Book a Studio Call
A studio that designs brands people actually remember.
Book a thirty-minute studio call.
A conversation, not a pitch. Mara or Theo will read your brief beforehand and arrive with two questions and one honest opinion. If we are the wrong studio for the work, we will say so on the call and point you somewhere better.
Book a Studio Call