Martin & James
Est. 2017 · Brooklyn
Eighteen engagements a year. No more. The archive below is the working evidence of what that cap buys a founder: partner-level attention, a written verbal identity in every shipment, and a measured average of 3.4× unaided brand recall six months after launch.
Eighteen engagements a year, sorted newest first. Each entry links to the published case study, the verbal-identity excerpt, and the measurement we agreed on at kickoff. Names shown with the client's permission; thirty-one of these companies closed a round above $25M within twelve months of launch.
A verbal identity and full system for the corporate-card platform's post-unicorn chapter. From wordmark to internal pitch deck.
Unaided recall rose 4.1× within six months of launch. New brand crossed into household-name territory among Series B+ operators.
Verbal identity and visual system for the company's first public-facing hardware line. Nine-week window from kickoff to launch.
Launched ahead of analyst day; press coverage framed the sub-brand as the company's most accessible chapter to date.
Naming, verbal identity, and full visual system for a permanent carbon-removal company entering a noisy category.
Aided recall among procurement leads rose 3.8×. Closed a $58M Series B within eleven months of public launch.
Wordmark, type system, packaging guardrails, and a 40-page verbal-identity playbook used across creative and growth.
Became the most-shown beverage brand on grocery-endcap creative in 2024. Founder-to-founder referrals drove the engagement.
We maintain a deliberate ceiling of eighteen active engagements per year. The cap is not a marketing posture; it is the operating mechanism that lets two partners — and the two former creative directors on our core team — sit inside every kickoff, every type review, and every launch. No work leaves the studio without a partner's name on the signature line.
If you are scanning this page and wondering whether your company fits the work above, the honest filter is this: you have revenue or meaningful funding, you are between your first million and your first hundred million, and you are prepared to trade headcount for judgment over a nine-week window. The companies in the archive arrived at that filter on their own; the ones we did not take generally arrived a year too early.
Six months after Martin & James shipped the new system, unaided recall among our buyer had nearly quadrupled. We closed a $90M Series C two quarters later and the deck our investors saw was, almost page for page, the verbal-identity playbook Daniel and Sofia handed us at kickoff.
A short list, stated plainly. We would rather lose the call than start an engagement we are not built for.
We do not buy media, run paid social, or operate as a holding-company vendor. We build brand systems; activation sits with partners we trust and will introduce you to.
There is no line-item deliverable called "logo." Every engagement ships a written verbal identity, a messaging playbook, and the visual system that supports it — a 40-page document, not a Figma file.
Average engagement window is nine weeks from kickoff to public launch. We do not promise rush turnarounds, and we do not waive rush fees to win the work.
The minimum engagement is calibrated for companies with revenue or meaningful funding. If you are pre-revenue and pre-funding, we will happily recommend three studios better suited to that chapter.
Thirty minutes with a founding partner. No deck, no sales team, no junior between you and the decision. We will tell you within the call whether the engagement is a fit and, if it is, what the next nine weeks would look like.
We answer every qualified enquiry within two business days. The studio is headquartered at 68 Jay Street, Suite 415, Brooklyn — and we work with one client at a time inside the room.