Dear __CLIENT NAME___,
This letter is in response to your request for ___FIRM/COMPANY NAME___ to develop a project for you at no cost so that you may evaluate our process and style, in the theory that you will bring us additional paid work in the future.
Our firm has a strong dedication to providing quality products to our clients. This dedication does not come without a certain amount of commitment of both time and effort.
Clients like yourself come to us with a variety of problems, with the hope that we can offer solutions. The problem might be to develop awareness of the company, for which a corporate identity design might be the solution. Alerting the public of a new product might be another problem, for which an ad may be the solution. However, for these, and many other situations, an effective solution cannot be developed without obtaining insight into your unique needs.
When we agree to take on a new project, we are committing not only to delivering a final design, but also to investing the necessary time to learn about you and understand your problem. This, we feel, is the only way we can truly offer you a superior product. Our fee not only encompasses the final design, but also dedicates a certain portion of our time to you and only you, allowing us to study your needs for the purpose of coming up with our best solution.
Taking on projects for zero cost, or on speculation as we call it in the industry, compromises a valuable aspect of our process. We don’t have the luxury to devote the necessary expense of time and research into developing projects for clients with the hope that they will like it enough to pay for it. Therefore, if we were to create anything at all, it would be done “blind,” without the necessary insight into your specific situation.
We believe the result is delivering to you an inferior product, and that simply goes against everything that our firm is about.
We understand your desire for some sort of “guarantee” that you will like the final design product. For that, we can offer examples of previous works and we can cite our experience within the industry. We are even more than happy to sit down with you and discuss your design problem and offer some idea about possible directions we might take for a solution. However, it will simply be impossible for us to commit our time and efforts into developing tangible designs without a commitment from you.
We appreciate your interest in our firm and hope that we can have the opportunity to work with you in a manner that will allow us to provide you with the best quality work we can offer.
Sincerely,
___YOUR NAME____
If you have questions or suggestions, contact us.