Strong enough to hold history. Flexible enough to grow with the business that protects it.

Propstore is the world’s leading entertainment memorabilia auction house. When they came to us, they were already handling multi-million-dollar artefacts and competing with the centuries-old auction trade – but their brand still looked and read like the niche specialists they’d been a decade earlier.

We rebuilt the brand to match the company they’d become. 4 years on, that work is still doing its job: setting the stage for record-breaking auctions, anchoring a global expansion, and providing the foundation for a partnership that has since deepened into multi-year product and engineering work.

The first move was the name.

“The Prop Store” was where Propstore had come from – a specialist with a faintly nostalgic ring to it. The company had outgrown that name on every measurable axis: scale, sophistication, the seven-figure lots now passing through their auctions. We collapsed it to a single word – Propstore – and gave them a positioning to match: the Custodian’s Custodian.

It was a serious claim and a true one. Propstore doesn’t broker objects; they authenticate, document, and preserve them. They are the institution other institutions trust. The line gave the company something to stand on internally and a position to defend externally, against both newer entrants and the centuries-old houses they were now genuinely competing with.

Once we knew who Propstore were, we built a brand designed to behave like one.

The visual system walks a line that mattered: premium without distance, expert without coldness. Contemporary typography, a flexible colour system, and a strict discipline about hierarchy – the artefacts are always the heroes, the brand is always the frame. The voice carries the same tension: authority paired with the genuine enthusiasm of people who got into this because they love films.

We built it to flex across more contexts than most clients ever need. Live auction theatre and museum-grade catalogue. Out-of-home in London and Los Angeles. Books, posters, social, signage, digital product. The system holds together because it was designed to – built around principles, not templates, so that new applications could be made years later by other hands and still feel unmistakably Propstore.

That’s the test of a brand worth building. Not how good it looks at launch, but whether it still works five years and three continents later.

The brand work was the beginning of the relationship, not the end of it.

What started as a brand and web engagement has evolved into one of the most substantial partnerships in our business – a multi-year product and engineering programme building the back-office systems that run Propstore’s global auction operation. The same team that wrote the strategy is the team that now ships software.

That arc is the thesis. A brand is most valuable when it’s built to grow with the business. The work doesn’t crystallise at launch; it becomes the spine the company keeps building against.

The brand we delivered is the brand Propstore operates from today – across record-setting auctions and an expanding global footprint.

The brand didn’t sell the lightsaber. The team, the provenance, and the cultural moment did that. What the brand does is make Propstore legible at the level of seriousness those results demand – to collectors, to studios, to museums, to the journalists at Variety and the Hollywood Reporter who cover them.

Most brand work is built to a launch and dated by the next one. The best brand work is built to grow.

Propstore is the longest-running proof we have of a brand designed as long-term infrastructure – strong enough to carry a specialist into the global market, flexible enough to absorb new product lines and territories, and durable enough to become the foundation for a partnership that has continued and deepened for years.

That’s what we mean when we say living brand. Not a project. A spine.