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A joint proposal
The brand, the pricing, the app and the site are all moving at once. A fixed scope written in August is a bet on what you need in November. One retainer covers the strategy, the design and the build, so the effort goes to whatever is actually blocking you that month. Step Change leads it. Adapt Studio builds it.
Six months on one Step Change retainer that covers both teams, committed three months at a time with a full review at each. It delivers the brand refresh and the Emsee website re-skin on fixed dates, and carries the pricing model, the documentation, the app design and the rebrand campaign alongside them.
The brand is decided but not yet moved. The pricing is a working draft waiting on research. The app and free tier are still being settled. The site still wears the old identity. All four land in the same six months, and they depend on each other.
Anything we write into a project scope in August is a bet on what you'll need in November. When the pricing research lands, or the app direction settles, a project turns that into a variation and a new start date, and you are renegotiating it in two places.
Same two projects, same deadlines, but the effort behind them shifts month to month to whatever is actually blocking you. Strategy effort can become design effort, or the other way around, without a variation and without you renegotiating with anyone. Six months from now the brand is finished, the site is live on it, and the pricing has somewhere to land.
You called about pricing recently, asking whether to go and rebuild it. The advice was to fix the small things you can fix now, get them into practice, and do the full rebuild once the research lands. That conversation doesn't appear on any scope and it isn't a deliverable, but it changed what happened next.
Over six months there will be a lot of those. The pricing model, the free tier boundary, the app direction, what to say to a pharmacy partner, whether an idea is worth the effort. A retainer means the people who already hold your strategy are on the phone that afternoon, instead of a stranger who needs briefing first.
Every dollar you spend on marketing right now lands on a brand you have already decided to change. That is the cost of an unfinished move, and it runs every month until the move is finished.
You've settled on consolidating to Emsee Menopause Centre. Until that actually lands in market, your SEO, your content, the app naming and every co-branded conversation are all aiming at something that hasn't stopped moving. Deciding it and finishing it are two different jobs.
The Emsee site holds the traffic and the search equity, and it's still wearing the old identity. It's the largest surface the brand has, and the one every woman, GP and pharmacist lands on. Re-skinning it is what turns a decision into something a customer can actually see.
A refreshed identity that stops at a guideline leaves the move half-made. What has to change is everything a woman, a GP or a pharmacist actually touches. The site, the app, the patient documents, the clinical letters, the referral collateral, the way price is presented, and the story that reaches your subscribers and referrers before they see a different logo.
Three things from the two days also still have nowhere to live. One journey, five programs is a website structure before it's a pricing decision. The four value pillars appear nowhere a customer can see them. And the Smart Choice Checklists came with their own instruction: next to price on all collateral, in the discussion guide, on the website. Right now the site talks to women only, and you named four audiences.
Two committed projects with fixed deadlines, and continuous support running alongside them. The projects are what you can hold. The support is what makes them land.
An evolution of what's there, taken to premium. Carried on from the mood boarding already underway into a refined logo suite and lockups, a distinctive brand asset, colour and type system, photography direction, and a guideline your team can use without ringing us. Then the working assets: social templates, document and presentation templates, email templates. Adapt work to this direction from the start, and your team is in the direction calls rather than only the sign-offs.
Eight to ten templates on the live URL under the refreshed brand, with serious UX and UI consideration on each rather than a straight colour swap. Structure, hierarchy and the mobile view, then high-fidelity UI, the design system and the build. The URL and the search equity stay exactly where they are.
What the rungs are, what sits on each one, and what each step visibly buys. Then how it is presented, and the same numbers everywhere they appear. We work the model with you, not just the artwork. This is not one we can do without your team.
Patient-facing and clinical documents rebuilt on the new brand, so what she receives after signing up matches what convinced her in the first place.
Where the model meets a real customer. We settle what has to be on it and how the value is argued, with Adapt on whether it holds up for each audience, then they design and build it into the template set.
We're in the conversation as the free tier and the app come together, then scope the design work at a WIP once the product direction settles, rather than quoting blind today.
One of the golds from the room, and the one people forget. Every subscriber, and every GP, pharmacist and allied health partner who sends you patients, hears the story from you before they see a different logo.
Six months in a category moving this fast will throw up work that isn't on anyone's list today. The capacity for it already exists in a retainer. It doesn't exist in a project.
A retainer buys capacity, not a fixed list. If we get through the committed work quickly, with tight briefs and small rounds of feedback, what's left doesn't evaporate. It moves to the next thing: a deeper asset suite, an extended icon and illustration set, more templates, earlier campaign work. It's earned rather than guaranteed, which is why it sits here as upside and not as a line item.
Step Change leads the engagement and brings Adapt Studio to it. You get one point of contact across two agencies, and one team in the room, including your own.
Holds the strategy, sets the direction and runs the workflow across both teams. We are the single point of comms, so the joins between strategy, brand and build are ours to smooth rather than yours.
A studio we rate and have chosen to bring to this. They own the digital craft: the Emsee website re-skin, UX and UI, all the design work and the build. They sit inside the brand work from the start rather than receiving it at the end, so it translates to screen properly.
Your team is a partner in most of this, not a recipient of it. The pricing model, the app, the audience calls and the sign-offs all need you in the room. None of it gets built at you.
One brief, one plan, one timeline. We take it into both teams so you are never repeating yourself, and the two halves of the work stay in step.
We and Adapt have already worked out how we work together. The brand thinking and the digital craft move as one piece rather than getting handed across a fence.
Go straight to Adapt whenever it is useful. We are not a filter. What we do is keep it joined up, so nothing arrives twice or contradicts itself.
Adapt come into the WIPs when the work needs them and skip them when it doesn't, so you are never sitting through a build conversation to get to a brand decision. The exact ways of working we settle together at kickoff rather than imposing them on you now.
Both committed projects are designed inside the first twelve weeks. At the month three review you hold a completed brand and a build-ready design system, and you decide then whether to commit to the next three. That second block is where the build, the campaign and the rest of it land.
Indicative and locks on kickoff. The brand and the site design run concurrently rather than back to back, which is what gets both to a finished state inside twelve weeks. The build follows in the second half.
Step Change leads, with Adapt alongside. The people who ran your two days already hold the strategy, so month one is production rather than immersion.
Leads the engagement, owns the brand and design direction, and works hand in hand with Adapt. She ran your session design and both days in the room, so nothing about your strategy needs explaining twice.
On the project across the Emsee website re-skin. Owns the digital craft with Kristy, from UX and UI through to the build. Works hand in hand with Rebecca, in the same WIP as everyone.
On the strategy calls where a decision needs the thinking behind it rather than a design opinion. The pricing model, the value argument and the go-to-market sequencing all run past him.
On the project alongside Kieren, working with us on how the brand translates to screen and on what the template set has to do for each audience.
Twenty in-house across strategy, creative, design, production, digital and client success, plus hundreds more specialists across the Step Change network whenever a job needs them. Named allocation confirms at kickoff.
The Adelaide studio we have partnered with on this. Six disciplines under one roof, which is why the brand work and the build do not have to be handed between two different suppliers. They describe themselves as an embedded partner rather than an outside vendor, which is exactly how this partnership works.
The team under Kieren and Kristy confirms at kickoff, the same way the Step Change team does.
Two track records you can go and check. Strategy tested on hard categories, and digital craft with the brands to show for it.
So far beyond any consultant I have worked with.
We now have a value proposition the team can identify with.
They have helped galvanise the team on our umbrella mission.
I now use them regularly when I have a marketing challenge.
This section is thin on your side because we built it from what is public on your site, and you do not publish much. You are a partner on this, not a supplier, so your half should be as strong as ours.
Send us whatever you have and we will build it in:
Anything you cannot share, tell us and we will leave it out rather than guess. Nothing in this document is invented, and we want to keep it that way.
Six disciplines under one roof out of Adelaide: branding, UI and UX, web design, software design, e-commerce and print.
Research, design, usability, reach. The four steps they run on every project, which is the same order we work in.
Both are real options and we'll honour either. You are not committing to six months. You are committing to three, and at three you hold a finished brand and a build-ready site whether you continue or not.
The retainer is bought in units of effort rather than a fixed list of deliverables, and the tier we are recommending carries a bonus on those units. That is the mechanism: the same money buys more work on a retainer than it does as two fixed projects, and anything unspent rolls into the next month instead of disappearing. The unit maths sits against the final figures and comes to you with them.
Set against Option A, the first part of the retainer buys the same two projects. The rest buys the pricing model, the rebrand campaign, the documentation and the app design support. Bought as projects those are four more scopes, four more approvals and four more start dates, and none of them can be reprioritised once signed.
All figures AUD, excluding GST. Media spend, licences, hosting, print and production are additional and pass through at cost. Project bands are indicative and are fixed once the work is briefed.
The strategy is finished and the brand is decided. The only open question left is whether the next six months get spent building it or scoping it.
One retainer with Step Change covering both teams. Or the two projects, defined and priced separately.
Contract and NDA, brand and web assets shared, and the first WIP in the diary with both teams in it.
Kickoff with everyone in it, your Monday board live and the brand audit underway.