Built for one. Rebuilt for two.

Estate agency. Stripped back.

Charlie Morgan left his previous agency in 2025 and wanted to build something that did not look or behave like the agencies around it. He came to Thinksay with a business, a covenant period to sit out, and no name.

What followed was a brand programme. The website is the largest single piece of it, but it is not the job.

Finding the name

The strategy came first, through interview-led sessions with Charlie and repeated rounds of positioning and refinement until there was a platform worth naming against. The naming programme explored a long list of routes before arriving at Naked.

The name does the work, but it needs defending. Naked strips away obscurity and unnecessary convention. It does not strip away expertise, care or process. Stripped back describes the presentation, not the service. Everything behind it stays carefully prepared and managed.

That distinction runs through the whole verbal identity:

Estate agency. Stripped back.

Selling homes properly.

The tone is direct, plain speaking and confident. No inflated claims and no estate agency superlatives, because the name has already made a promise and the copy has to keep it.

The identity

The logotype is a heavy geometric sans, all caps, with the full stop carried as part of the mark. NAKED. The guidelines set a formal exclusion zone defined by the height of the wordmark, so the mark holds its space wherever it lands.

The palette is deliberately quiet against a provocative name. Onyx anchors it and carries the contrast and typographic structure. Yale Blue and Smoky Rose sit alongside it, with White Smoke as the ground. Sky Reflection is the single accent, used sparingly on key actions. A set of secondaries including a grey olive gives the digital and UX work room to move while keeping the whole thing calm and readable.

Type is Freight Sans Pro for body and interface, Freight Big Pro for display headings, pull quotes and italic taglines, delivered through an Adobe Fonts kit. Italic is reserved for pull quotes and taglines and never used for body copy.

The guidelines reached version 1.2. The version number is the point. This is a system that was tested, argued with and revised, not a document delivered once and filed.

Then the business changed

Naked was conceived for one person. Partway through, Charlie and the team at Gyles & Rose came together, Gyles & Rose rebranded as Naked, and the business became a partnership.

A brand built on exposure had its subject change. The name held. The strategy held. The identity held. What moved was the language.

The homepage had opened as a first person introduction from Charlie. It now opens differently:

We put experience on show.

Selling your home is one of life’s biggest decisions. At Naked, you’ll work with an experienced property professional who knows your home, understands your goals and stays close to your move from start to finish. Behind every relationship sits a team of experienced specialists working together to deliver the best possible outcome.

One relationship, with a team behind it. That is the merger showing up in the copy, and the fact the rest of the brand needed no rescuing is the strongest evidence we have that the strategy underneath it was sound.

The first website did not work

The designs were produced by Thinksay and handed to a third party to build in a page builder. They were not implemented as designed. The project ran long and underdelivered.

We took the build in-house and started again.

Rebuilt in Astro

The site was rebuilt from the ground up on Astro and Tailwind, running on Cloudflare Workers, with images served from Cloudflare R2 through image transformations.

Three homepage concepts were designed and presented. Editorial, Asymmetric and Signature. None was taken forward whole. What was built is a hybrid: Editorial’s magazine-led structure and type hierarchy as the base for every page, Signature’s scroll reveal woven in where it fitted naturally rather than applied everywhere, and Asymmetric’s off-centre balance used wherever a layout would otherwise have been symmetrical, including the closing call to action on every page. Featured listings became a slim horizontal band rather than a grid of cards.

Delivered at launch:

• Full site architecture across home, about, sell with Naked, valuation, properties, property detail, area guides, values, contact, join us, complaints and a branded 404
• A live property feed from the Loop Open API with search and filtering, and property types consolidated from more than twenty categories down to seven
• 145 legacy properties migrated into Sanity with every image rehosted in R2
• Fluid typography anchored to exact pixel values at 375px and 1600px rather than flat viewport units
• Team profiles the office can edit themselves
• Interactive maps with consent gating
• Five branded transactional confirmation emails
• Consent Mode v2, structured data, XML sitemap, robots.txt and llms.txt
• 301 redirects from gylesandrose.co.uk

The site went live on 28 July 2026.

Built to be handed over

A site with a live property feed and 145 migrated listings is only useful if the office can run it. The content sits in Sanity with a deployed Studio, and there is a Publish to website button inside the CMS so the team can push changes without coming back to us.

Beyond the screen

The identity runs across the applied estate: Rightmove asset packs, signage and boards, business cards, business stationery and door drop cards. A brand about presentation has to hold up on a board outside a house, not only on a homepage.

The fifth Beatle

Nick appears on the Naked team page as Creative Lead. Not as a supplier credit, as a member of the team.

That is how the relationship works, and it is how Thinksay is built to work. Embedded, on the inside, close enough to the business to argue with it. The work carries on: the native instant valuation journey against the ValPal API, continuing performance and SEO work, and whatever the business needs next.