Nobody Funds A Placeholder Logo
What Hiccup carried into the room before it had anything to sell.
In 2023, three founders raised a pre-seed round for Hiccup, a fast fashion startup that had not yet shipped a single garment. No product in the market, no revenue. What they had was a team that had just made its name scaling food delivery startup Gorillas and a compelling new brand identity. Nothing about Hiccup said placeholder. The investment came from Bek Ventures, the former Earlybird Digital East fund whose early bet on UiPath became one of European venture's biggest ever wins. Funds like that do not write sentimental cheques.
Let's be clear about the order of things. Investors backed Hiccup's people first. A fund does not wire money because it likes your logo. But watch what they'd already put in place. A pitch deck is a set of claims about decisions you intend to make. A market-ready brand strategy and visual identity is proof of decisions already made, and at pre-seed, with no revenue to inspect, decisions are most of what there is to look at. Brand, at that stage, is due diligence.
We were brought on board as a partner virtually from the start. The strategy picked its ground early. Hiccup makes hyper-fast fashion and would say so plainly, making a virtue of the fact that they could get trends to the market at the precise time they broke. The naming took longer, and the first round failed. We presented strong contenders, we had favourites, and none of them landed. That's the process working, pushing, testing. A name that doesn't resonate is off the board, and going away to dig again is what earns the right one. The second time we brought a longer shortlist, distilled from a couple of hundred, five highlighted, each one already checked for trademark conflicts and domain availability. Around the table were Hiccup's three founders, our strategy director Paul Young, our creative director Chris Land, and me. While the rest of us debated pros and cons, Şükrü, the CEO, went quiet. He was running his own process. Then he smiled and said, "This is a unicorn, this is it." He'd identified that hiccup, with its six letters, two syllables, lack of any IP conflict and cheaply available dot com, not to mention its nothing-and-everything meaning, was a word that he could build his business around. Discussion around the subjective likes and dislikes of our shortlist immediately evaporated. The whole thing clicked into place.
“Brand, at that stage, is due diligence.”
The naming took four weeks. The identity took another eight, about twelve in all, and it grew its system out of an intentional accident. Keeping a small 'i' in the otherwise uppercase wordmark as a nod to a mistake, a hiccup, gave the logo a conversational tone, opening with "Hi" which could then be used independently and rolled out across app icons, patterns, packaging and social avatars. By the time any investor saw it, none of this was an argument waiting to happen. It was settled.
That's what a brand does in a fundraise. It converts "we will figure out who we are" into "we know exactly who we are, here it is." Investors call that founder clarity, and they fund it all day. We heard almost nothing about the investment process itself, but we didn't need to. From minute one their decks looked complete. The brand looked like it already existed, like something alive, and you could feel it was more than half the battle.
The round was never announced, which tells you something too. Bek says it stays silent 95% of the time. Hiccup has passed 150,000 shoppers, and still moves from concept to wardrobe in under four weeks. The brand work is a story of its own, and it's in the case study.
After years of naming brands, the surprise is that unicorns still exist. A word that's familiar and friendly, graphically beautiful, able to mean lots of things or nothing, with the trademark and the URL still free. The seam has been mined for decades and the nuggets are still in it. You just have to push through to find them.
If you're a founder heading into a raise, your brand will be read as evidence whether you built it deliberately or not. A working title and a logo marked "final_v2" tell the person across the table the thinking isn't finished. Finish the thinking. It's the cheapest line on your cap table. And a brand is a flag of intent that you plant in the ground of belief.
