In the spring of 2023, we decided it was time for a change.
For years, we had operated under the name The Workhouse—a name that, despite our best intentions, never quite held. It was frequently misheard or misremembered—“workhorse,” “workout,” something else entirely. Over time, those mispronunciations pointed to a deeper issue. The name carried a historical weight tied to hardship and survival, one that no longer reflected who we were or the kind of work we wanted to create.
The name we carried belonged to a previous version of the business. Letting it go wasn’t just a branding decision—it marked a shift in direction.
We often tell our clients that naming is one of the hardest parts of building a brand—like naming your first child. It’s a line we’ve repeated often. Going through it ourselves, we understood why.
A name isn’t just a label—it’s a shared belief. And when that belief has to be built across multiple partners, each with their own instincts and perspectives, alignment takes time.
To create the conditions for that, we removed ourselves from distraction. We gathered at one of our partner’s houses in the countryside with a clear constraint: we wouldn’t leave without a name. What followed was six and a half hours of iteration—circling ideas, revisiting familiar territory like house, exploring concepts like luck, fate, and kismet, testing and discarding options as we went. It was demanding, but necessary.
Eventually, we arrived at The Agency of Love and Logic.
The name felt clear. Not perfect, but right. Within it, we found something even more distilled—LOLO. A name within the name. “Lo” from love, and “lo” from logic. Simple, memorable, and reflective of how we work.
It captured the interplay between intuition and structure, between emotional resonance and functional clarity—the forces that shape both meaningful brands and effective businesses.
With the name established, we turned to building the brand itself. This is where the process became more complex. Strategy is often framed as something you can design from the outset—as if you can sit down, balance emotion with structure, and arrive at the right answer. In practice, it rarely works that way, especially when the brand is your own.
This wasn’t client work. It carried our identity, our ambitions, and our sense of legacy. That proximity made objectivity difficult.
Our first attempt at strategy reflected what we knew best. It was clean, articulate, and highly logical—on paper, it made sense. But something was missing. There was a friction we couldn’t ignore. Logic had taken the lead, and in doing so, it had pushed out the very thing we claimed to value equally: love.
Recognizing this, we stepped back. Instead of trying to force an answer, we returned to a question—a principle we often use, but now had to genuinely trust: What if? The act of asking it shifted something. It removed constraints and opened space for exploration in a way a predefined strategy never could.
That shift opened the process. We explored a wide range of directions—typographic systems, logotypes, and visual expressions that moved between the structured and the expressive. Many were strong, but strength wasn’t enough. If it didn’t feel right, we let it go. We refined, reduced, and rebuilt until we reached a point of clarity similar to the one we experienced with the name.
The solution didn’t resolve the tension between love and logic—it made it visible.
A typographic system that is precise and controlled sits alongside a LOLO mark that is fluid and expressive. Together, they form a relationship rather than a resolution.
From there, the visual language began to take shape. We were drawn to magical realism—something that exists between imagination and reality. It offered a way to articulate what we were building: not a blending of love and logic into a single idea, but two forces existing side by side, each shaping the other. We chose to launch on Valentine’s Day. It felt fitting—an acknowledgment of one half of the equation, and a reminder that emotion is often where things begin.
Now, the brand is no longer just ours. It’s out in the world, shaped by people, contexts, and interpretations we can’t control. And like anything built on both love and logic, it isn’t fixed. It continues to evolve between how it’s felt and how it functions.
The Ideas We Keep Shapes What Comes Next
