A2 becoming a client of A2 this summer
This summer we treated A2 like a client of A2: a full rebrand, full refresh, and full site redesign, run quietly over the last couple of months. Here’s the view from the client’s chair, and the article you’re reading is set in the very brand system that came out of the project.
The barbershop problem
There’s an irony of starting a company that I hear from entrepreneurs all over my network, and you can insert a few idioms here: the barber is the last one to cut their own hair. The accountant is usually behind on their own taxes. The chef is the last to eat.
And the SEO and content agency? The last one to work on its own website. We run an AI marketing company that builds great websites and high-performing SEO for our clients, and we were the last ones to actually apply those tools to ourselves. Not for lack of belief. There’s simply so much client work to do, and everyone here has a lot going on.
It shows in our origin story. When Ali and I first spun up the A2 brand, it was early, early days. We came up with the name one morning in the WeWork office, found a Canva template with some color schemes we liked and a logo we could run with, and got back to work. Good enough for day one. Not good enough for the stage the business has reached.
So this summer we decided to fix it the only honest way we could: treat A2 like a client of A2. A full rebrand, a full refresh, a full site redesign, quietly, in the background, over the last couple of months. This is a look behind the scenes.
Handing over the keys
The project has been a lot of work with Jon Aaron, our head of design. We’re always in awe of how he works with clients: the brand refresh ideas, the content templates, the full brand discovery and redesigns. Handing him the keys to A2 was different. This is a brand he’s grown up with and helped define; his talent is a huge part of the quality of our client work. This time, the brand on the table was ours.
We got the same process our clients get. Brand discovery. Multiple logo concepts, each argued on its own merits. Brand components, color schemes, font families. Being in awe of your own designer hits differently when you’re the client. You say, “Jon, this is what we’re thinking about the A2 brand,” and he comes back having activated his full creative range on it.
And the scope kept revealing itself, the way it does for our clients too: new logos, new iconography, new signatures, new PowerPoint templates, new brand skills wired into our AI workflows, new merchandise (shirts and hats) in production. A rebrand isn’t a logo swap. It’s an operating-system change for how the company shows up.
“I still think there is no current replacement for a great designer who understands your brand and can bring it to life.”
Four plates from the process
These are the working documents that go into a rebrand, the part clients rarely see published. Options before decisions, decisions before applications.
This is where the client-side awe starts: multiple directions, each argued in writing. Every mark had a reason to exist. Our job, for once, was simply to react honestly, the same job we ask of every client.
Eating our own cooking
The rebrand is half the exercise. The other half is using A2 technology on A2, practicing what we preach. We built our own editorial calendar and started producing our own blog content, and we’re in the process of building out services pages, industry pages, and case studies.
I’ve been personally running every decision a client would: how we position A2, which keywords we target with the content program, how we represent data elements. Our summer associate, Caroline, conducts several interviews with me each week to source material for the blogs. Everything gets worked through Forge, and the content lands on the site.
It’s easy to take for granted how much the A2 engine actually does for clients until you’re the one inside it. Being this deep in the work has generated a steady stream of ideas to improve the product; we’ve been adding features to the product set as we’ve worked through this.
It has also changed how I sit in client conversations. Empathy may not be exactly the right word, but I can relate to their questions more now. I can anticipate when they’ll want the brand shown a certain way or content positioned differently, because I just asked the same things myself. It’s very good to have your hands in the soil.
If you’re a service provider, being your own client is the fastest route to two things at once: a better product, because using the tools from the client’s chair surfaces improvements no feedback ever will, and sharper client empathy, because you’ve now asked the client’s questions yourself.
Why design still needs a designer
Here’s the question underneath all of this, and it’s a fair one to put to a founder whose business is AI: if AI keeps accelerating, and new model capabilities make an AI-first workflow easy for a lot of projects, does it still make sense to invest in human design?
There is no substitute for a world-class designer. Design is deeply creative, especially for something like a rebrand or refresh exercise. You cannot iterate to new inspiration — it requires human intuition. There’s so much feel that goes into it, and it’s how people experience your brand. We’ve always known that; it’s one of the reasons we invest in a head of design at A2.
Getting to a point where we’ve been around long enough, and the business is doing well enough, to afford an exercise like this, using Jon’s time and talent to give the brand a fresh look, is itself a milestone from the Canva-template days. And the payoff isn’t a slide deck; it’s the brand alive in the world. You’re looking at part of it right now: this article runs on the redesigned site and blog template shown here.
Some payoffs are more fun than others. The merchandise is in process too: new shirts, new hats, the mark rendered in embroidery instead of pixels. It’s a small thing, but seeing an identity survive contact with fabric is its own kind of proof.
Be the client
The distilled recommendation, if you’re a service provider: it’s a great exercise to be the client and experience the service through your own eyes. Use the tools as the client. Schedule the haircut.
We still have a lot of work to do. The website is mid-build; the services pages, industry pages, and case studies are in process; and rebrand elements will keep surfacing in our content and social posting over the coming months. That’s fine. Being in-progress in public is part of the exercise too.
See what we run our own content through.
Forge is the engine our whole content program, including this article, moves through. The fastest way to understand it is the way we just did: as the client.