Can you build a complete brand identity for a company before you even know what kinds of products it will sell? Ben Pieratt, a designer and co-founder of Svpply, is trying just that with Hessian, a fully designed brand he created from scratch, and which he is now selling for $18,000. All the buyer has to provide is the product.

Your $18,000 gets you the following:

• Name
• URL
• Twitter account
• Tumblr account
• 20+ logo and other designs
• 10+ T-shirt designs
• 8 repeating patterns
• 1 website theme
• 1 app user interface theme
• 5 app icons
• Brand book w/guiding principles
• 30 hours custom design time (for transitioning the brand to buyer's needs)

"Hessian is an invader, an ode, a brand in waiting, a pitch to the market," Pieratt writes. "As a newborn idea, Hessian is aggressive and experimental. Its only conduit the working mind of designer Ben Pieratt, it fights for life by building meme-hooks through studies in contrasts, nostalgia, repetition and confusion. The Hessian could be a restaurant, a start-up, a clothing brand or more."

Pieratt originally envisioned Hessian—named for Richard Hess, an advertising art director who died in 1991—as a T-shirt company. But then it became this experiment—conceptual, but also, Pieratt hopes, eventually practical. In a blog post further explaining the idea, he says designers are naturally good at knowing what kinds of products the market wants, and especially good at knowing how those products should look. But they're less good at running companies. Thus, Hessian is a brand that can be handed off before it's incorporated into a company—indeed, before it's even attached to a product. In the future, Pieratt says he hopes to create product and brand together, and sell them as a (much more expensive) package.

Hessian has gotten lots of attention in the past few days. And that puts a wrinkle in the experiment. The more people learn about Hessian now, the more it begins to represent itself rather than the product it may eventually signify. As such, Pieratt admits he may not find a buyer this time around. "In that sense," he tells Wired, "Hessian is as much a marketing stunt for a mentality as it is a genuine attempt to make some money."

Via Co. Design.