I recently had a chance to speak with the owner of a company in Los Angeles that designs, develops, and sells massage chairs. The conversation turned to the balance between design and profit in small and mid-sized businesses.

They have been operating in California for forty years, but over the past few years, competition from Chinese and Taiwanese companies has been intensifying. The owner is looking to differentiate the brand, yet he seemed to place little importance on revisiting the company's corporate identity or logo.

There is a logic to this, and it is a businessman's logic worth respecting. A significant part of their revenue comes from trade show sales, where customers experience the product firsthand. When you think about it, it makes sense: if you were considering spending ten thousand dollars on a massage chair, you would want to try it before buying. Which means whether or not a high-ticket item sells depends enormously on how the booth is presented.

Out of that trial and error came things like flashy pop-up displays and hand massagers shaped like the Bocca della Verità. On their own, they look like party novelties — but arranged together in a booth, they become remarkably effective tools for drawing people in across a trade show floor packed with countless competing displays.

The owner built the business from scratch starting in the eighties, and has a pragmatic, results-driven character. The hand massager is one proven example of that thinking; he continues to experiment with new ways to bring people to the booth.

Listening to all of this, I felt a certain frustration as a designer. His logic is sound. And yet I also sensed that just outside the boundaries of that logic, there was territory no one had touched yet.

So how should we, as designers, approach a company like this? If we propose refreshing the CI and logo to clarify the brand's image, can we actually explain how that translates into profit?

Here is one way to frame it.

Not many people will spend ten thousand dollars on the spot at a trade show. Most will take home a brochure, search on their phone a few days later, and eventually purchase through the company's website or Amazon.

That is where CI and logo do their work — carrying the warmth generated at the trade show all the way to the checkout button, without losing any heat along the way. The product takes center stage at the booth, but if the e-commerce site or company logo looks cheap when the customer searches later at home, that alone can cost you a prospective buyer. Losing just one potential ten-thousand-dollar sale per month amounts to a hundred and twenty thousand dollars in missed opportunity over a year.

And the same thing is happening on the competitor's side. That lost prospect is likely to land on a competitor's site. Now imagine they find a page anchored by a beautiful, coherent CI and logo. What happens then?

At the moment, CI and branding are low priorities across the industry — most likely because product specs and in-person trade show experiences have historically been enough to close sales on their own. In industries where trade show culture runs deep, "selling" has always meant the experience of the booth. That inertia is strong, and it is proof that the owner's logic has worked. But in a world where customers compare competitors side by side online, the blind spot in that industry is exactly where the opportunity lies.

We as designers must be able to explain to our clients why it is worth investing in design, why CI and branding matter. Because I believe that only the designers who can make that case are truly standing on the business side of the table.