Rebuilding a personal brand obsessed with the details
Mike Lane might genuinely be one of the most difficult clients I’ve ever worked with.
I probably shouldn’t start a case study by saying that… But I mean it in the best possible way.
Mike is one of those people who notices absolutely everything. The tiny details. The things most people would overlook.
And that obsession with getting things right is basically the reason his entire business exists.
Mike runs a scale-model modification workshop here in the UK, creating insanely detailed upgrades for model makers all over the world.
We’re talking models inspired by some of the most iconic moments in TV and film history – Back to the Future, Batman, Ghostbusters and loads more. These aren’t little toys you build on a Sunday afternoon either. Some of these things take months, sometimes years, to complete.
And the people building them care deeply about getting them right.
Mike knows that because he was one of them. Before there was really a business, Mike was simply someone who loved building models.
He’d buy one, start putting it together, and inevitably find something that bothered him. Maybe the manufacturer had simplified a detail. Maybe a part wasn’t quite accurate. Maybe something that made that car, prop or object special in the film had been completely overlooked.
And Mike would think: I can make that better. So he did.
The business had grown BUT The brand hadn’t
For nearly ten years, Mike had been using his own handwritten signature as the logo.
And honestly, that was pretty much the entire visual identity.
The same mark went onto boxes, products, the website, packaging, social posts and anywhere the business needed a logo, that signature got dropped in.
And at the beginning, that made complete sense. The business was Mike. He was one person, making things himself, talking directly to customers and slowly building a reputation inside this relatively niche world.
But over time, the company grew far beyond that.
What had started as one guy making modifications in a workshop had become an established international business with thousands of customers, a huge product range and a reputation for some of the best model modifications in the industry.
The old logo hadn’t grown with it.
Mike had fallen out of love with the signature, and you could almost see that happening in real time. It became smaller and smaller on the packaging.
Something that felt like it was being hidden rather than proudly displayed.
And that told me there was a much bigger problem to solve than simply “make Mike a nicer logo.”
Building Mike a new signature from scratch
The first place I started was the logotype. If Mike’s old handwritten signature represented the original version of the business, I wanted the new one to represent what it had become.
And because Mike’s entire world revolves around three-dimensional objects, scale models and incredibly precise construction, I started looking at isometric forms. Rather than choosing an existing typeface and tweaking it, I built the Mike Lane logotype completely from scratch.
Letter by letter. The M started influencing the I. Those decisions then started shaping the K. One form informed another until the whole thing began to feel like it had been constructed rather than simply drawn. That was really important because Mike’s products are built with intention.
So I wanted the typography to feel like it had been created with exactly the same philosophy.
The finished wordmark felt much more structured, solid and precise than the old handwritten signature.
It was still Mike Lane. Just a version of Mike Lane that now felt like an industry expert.
If you’ve built something worth showing, put it behind glass
Once I had the new logotype, there was still something bothering me. On its own, it just felt like it was floating in the air. So I started thinking about the actual end goal for these model makers.
They can spend months, sometimes years, building one of these incredible, insanely detailed models. They don’t go through all that blood, sweat and tears to chuck it up on a shelf or stuff it in a cupboard.
They obsess over every detail, paint it, modify it, break it, build it again and eventually perfect it.
There’s this really satisfying moment where they finish the build and finally get to put it on display. Often, quite literally, behind glass. That felt like such a beautiful part of this world that I wanted to bring it into the logo itself.
So I created a frame around the Mike Lane wordmark. Almost like a display case. Suddenly, the logo wasn’t just sitting on a shelf. It felt like something finished but, more importantly, something worth displaying.
Finding a little box of epic
Then we needed a symbol or a mark that could work independently from the full logotype. And this was where one of my favourite moments in the whole project happened.
Mike’s love of model making really started with Back to the Future. The DeLorean, the flux capacitor, that whole world had a huge influence on him. During the project, Mike had given me this tiny model of the flux capacitor, and it sat on my desk while I was working.
I kept looking at it. And eventually, I couldn’t unsee this little M shape sitting inside it. A glowing M. Inside a box. And that immediately started connecting with something else Mike had told me.
He has this phrase for the packages he sends to customers. He calls them: Little boxes of epic. That was the money.
The flux capacitor was already this tiny, glowing box of epic. So I wanted to make Mike his own. The final mark became this boxed M symbol, with a slight superhero-badge quality to it.
Simple. Bold. Immediately identifiable and capable of working at incredibly small sizes.
Some of Mike’s products are tiny, and the identity needed to exist in places where the full Mike Lane wordmark simply couldn’t. This new mark gave us something that could sit inside those intimate little spaces, but also scale up into something much more powerful when the brand needed to make a statement.
Precision on the outside. Personality on the inside.
The packaging brought us straight back to that original challenge. How do you make Mike feel like a serious industry leader without stripping away all of the personality that made people care about him in the first place?
From a purely functional point of view, the packaging had a huge job to do. Mike sells a massive number of products.
He offers SO MANY different parts, lengths, sizes, measurements, specifications.
So before the boxes could look cool, they needed to work. The team needed to be able to identify products quickly. Customers needed to understand what they had bought. The system needed to make sense across hundreds of variations. This was utility first.
But utility doesn’t have to mean boring. On the outside, we kept things structured, controlled and precise. Then you open the box. And that’s where the personality comes in.
The details most people would never bother with
Inside the packaging are these little illustrated Easter eggs inspired by the films Mike and his customers love.Tiny references and little moments of epic.
Things you might not even notice the first time you open the box. And that felt so right for Mike. Because his entire career has been built around noticing the details other people miss.
The manufacturer leaves something out. Mike notices. A part isn’t accurate enough. Mike notices. A tiny element could be made better. Mike notices.
So of course his own branding should reward people for paying attention too. Those illustrations then became a much wider part of the visual identity.
They could live across packaging, merchandise, stickers and other brand touchpoints, giving us a way to bring much more humour, personality and pop-culture influence into a system that otherwise needed to remain very structured.
I think that balance is where the identity really started feeling like Mike.
literally trusting me with his name
There’s something quite personal about redesigning somebody’s namesake brand. Mike wasn’t asking me to rebrand some faceless company. His name is above the door and his reputation is attached to it.
So when Mike trusted me with this project, he was quite literally trusting me with his name. I don’t take that lightly. Despite me spending this entire case study calling him one of the most difficult clients I’ve ever worked with, my respect for Mike is fucking enormous.
Somewhere during all of the debates, tiny adjustments, hard questions and pain-in-the-arse moments, I also ended up making a genuinely brilliant friend.
If Mike hadn’t been so obsessed with the details, I don’t think I would have pushed this project anywhere near as far. He made me think harder. Question more. Search for better answers. And ultimately, become a better designer through the process.
This might genuinely be one of the most difficult branding projects I’ve ever worked on. But I’m incredibly happy it was.
It’s also one of the projects I’m most proud to have come out of my studio. And I’m pretty sure those two things are connected.
ONE LAST THING… THE FULL BRAND REVEAL
Mike gave a shit about getting this rebrand right, and I wanted his audience to understand exactly why everything had changed, not just suddenly wake up one day to a new logo with no context.
So on top of the full visual identity, I also created a cinematic brand reveal film to properly introduce the new Mike Lane to the people who had supported him for years.
I filmed it, scripted it, recorded the voiceover and edited the entire thing here in the studio, with the aim of telling the story behind the rebrand and giving every decision the explanation it deserved.
If you’ve made it this far through the case study, firstly, thank you. And secondly, feel free to watch the full brand reveal below and see the whole thing come to life.