Most brand studios work for clients. Laufwerk works from inside them — learning how they operate before designing how they look.
Laufwerk is built by Richard Laufenburger — decades spent inside the organisations that brand studios typically work for. The difference between work that performs and work that just looks good is understanding what the company actually does before you decide how it should look.
That's not a philosophy. It's a practice. Every Laufwerk engagement starts with learning the operation — its clients, its competitive reality, its internal language, its ambitions. The brand system that comes out of that process isn't a design exercise. It's a precise translation of what the company actually is.
Based in Munich, Germany. Working with founders, executives, and investors who need their brand to match their operational reality — and their operations to work smarter.
Every engagement starts with understanding — not with a brief, but with a genuine assessment of where the company sits, what it's competing against, and what the gap is between its operational reality and its brand presence.
Richard works every engagement directly. There are no account managers, no junior designers handed the brief after the first meeting. The person you talk to at the start is the person who does the work.
Nothing is designed in isolation. The business card, the website, the pitch deck, the email signature — every touchpoint is part of a coherent system. Not a collection of assets. A brand.
By the time a brand is built, we understand the operation intimately. That knowledge becomes the foundation for the intelligence work — finding where AI tools, automations, and systems can make the company run smarter.
Most brand studios approach an engagement from the outside — they read the brief, do the research, and make their best judgement about what the company should look like. That's a reasonable approach. It's not the Laufwerk approach.
Laufwerk comes in. We sit with the founders, talk to the team, understand the clients, map the competitive landscape, and learn what makes the operation work before we decide what the brand should say. The result is a brand system that doesn't just look right — it communicates with the precision of something built from the inside out.
And because we've been inside, we know where the friction is. Where time is lost. Where intelligence could change how the company operates. That's what makes the identity and intelligence work inseparable — one leads directly to the other.
One conversation. No pitch, no proposal until we've understood your situation and confirmed we're the right fit.
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