Anybody that's met me more than once probably knows my penchant for shirts. Bright, colourful, unique and — I hope — tasteful. If you looked in my wardrobe you'd be surprised how many I own, and how few of them I actually wear these days. My wife, being a bit of a hoarder, won't hear of throwing the retired ones out. She proposes to make cushions of them instead. But the thought of walking into our living room and finding my ex-shirts scattered about the place fills me with a distinct sense of dread, because every one of them carries associations that nobody else in the room can possibly see. To a visitor they'd be soft furnishings. To me they're a record of where I was and what I was doing at the time.
Walking into NLS Days 2026 (Stockholm, 8–9 September) felt much the same, only on a rather larger scale. Everybody else sees an exhibition hall. I see fifteen years of work, most of it entirely invisible to the people standing in the middle of it.
Not all of it, mind you. For a start, UP created the brand and identity for NLS Days itself, back in 2016, and we went as far as drawing a bespoke typeface for it. That identity is ten years old this year. It hasn't changed, and it's still in use across the whole event — which, for conference branding, is unusual enough. Most event identities get torn up and started again within two or three years. This one didn't.
There's an older piece of Stockholm in the room too. Julian Stubbs created 'Stockholm — The Capital of Scandinavia' for Stockholm Business Region in 2005, along with a seventy-page brand book that argued, at some length and against a certain amount of resistance, for a more confident tone of voice than Swedish institutions were then comfortable using. The Swedish word is kaxig, which sits somewhere close to chutzpah. It was a genuinely uncomfortable proposition at the time, in a culture that was still shaped by Jantelag — “Don't go thinking you're better than anyone else”.
Twenty years on, I sat through a round table on the main stage where three separate speakers described the Stockholm–Uppsala cluster as 'The Capital of Life'. Nobody prompted them. Now, I can't prove that the Stockholm brand book put that phrase in their mouths, and I'm not going to try — language spreads for all sorts of reasons and most of them have nothing to do with agencies. But the tone of voice it recommended is now the one the sector reaches for.
Among the organisations in the exhibition hall that UP has worked with are NLS Days, SciLifeLab, Health Incubator Helsinki, SVAR Life Science and Health Holland. But what is more interesting is what fifteen years in this sector has taught me.
As a smart UP colleague once said to me: these life science companies are all trying to say the same thing. And they are. The default instinct is some version of we're here to make the world a better, healthier, safer place, illustrated by a photograph of the staff in lab coats holding a pipette with something blue in it, wrapped in language that only their own R&D department fully understands.
The default fails on two counts. It doesn't distinguish the company from the forty others in the same hall, and it doesn't tell the target audience anything valuable, unique or easy to grasp. It survives because it's safe, and because an agency without a real stake in the sector will usually do what the client asks for, rather than pick a fight about it.
The work — the actual work — is to resist the default. To tease out what is genuinely distinctive about a company and then say it in a way that's unique, honest, memorable and, if you can manage it, beautiful. That's harder than it sounds, because it means knowing enough of the science to tell a real differentiator from a feature specification, and enough about the client to tell what they truly believe from what they think they're supposed to project.
Startups are not the sort of accounts that you can plan a year around. Their budgets are limited. They live on unpredictable injections of risk capital from investors, and they're forever weighing up questions like: do we run a branding project, launch a campaign, or buy a new DNA sequencer? Often the sequencer wins.
So the work is intermittent by nature — start, stop, start again — and any agency serving this sector has to accept that as a permanent feature of the landscape rather than a problem that will one day disappear. We do accept it. The revenue is lumpy and the projects are small. That's the price of the entry ticket.
What you get for the ticket turns out to be worth rather more than it first looks.
The first thing is speed. Things happen fast in a startup. An idea launches, a company is bought or does the buying, technologies get integrated and technologies get shed — the whole thing moves at light speed. Decision paths are short. Good ideas don't get quietly murdered by committee, and new directions are embarked upon without months of hand-wringing. For an agency, that's rare and it's precious: the work you propose stands a decent chance of actually existing. But it’s a roller coaster. Enjoy the ride.
The second thing is memory. The life science community is sizeable but, in the ways that count, quite small. People move constantly. The CSO who liked your work at one company turns up at the next one and brings you along with her. Over fifteen years that referral chain has done more for us than any amount of business development, and unlike advertising it compounds.
I first learnt this in Silicon Valley, where the same pattern is older and a great deal more visible. Startups come and go; the people in the sector stay put. Nobody out there especially minds if the company they joined goes under — they move on to the next rising star and take their opinions about suppliers with them. The healthy life science clusters show exactly the same attribute: Stockholm–Uppsala, Lund–Copenhagen, London–Cambridge, Boston–Cambridge. It's part of what keeps them healthy. The pool of experience keeps growing even when the individual companies don't survive.
The most consistent thing I heard at NLS Days came from the people running the incubators, and it wasn't about agencies at all.
Michael Lagerwall, Director of Business Development at Medicon Village Innovation in Lund, put it plainly: his startups don't yet know how to start thinking about branding and marketing. It isn't that they've thought about it and reached the wrong conclusions. They haven't arrived at the question. What would help, he reckoned, is a session on the fundamentals — differentiation, positioning, target audience, what a brand actually is and isn't. Something to kick-start the thinking.
That squares with what we've found elsewhere. We're running a webinar in Cambridge, UK at the moment called 'You've got funding — what happens next?', and we're proposing the same to Health Incubator Helsinki and to Medicon Village. In nearly every conversation I had with an incubator lead, some version of the same need surfaced: they're looking for a branding and marketing partner for their members, and they haven't got one.
Christian Lardot leads Health Incubator Helsinki, which was newly founded when UP worked on their online call for members. That campaign produced record application numbers several years running — a figure their team can verify. Christian now talks warmly about the 'New Nordic' region and the spread of life science across Iceland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The pipeline is getting wider.
If you're a startup choosing a branding or marketing partner, the pitches you receive won't tell you very much. Everybody claims sector expertise. Everybody has a handsome portfolio. These four questions sort the field rather more quickly.
Can they read your science? Not be enthusiastic about it — actually read it. Ask them to explain your own technology's advantage back to you, in one sentence, in language a generalist investor would follow. If they can't, then every brief you write will begin with three weeks of education that you are paying for.
Will they argue with you? The lab-coat-and-blue-liquid homepage exists because an agency said yes to it. You want the agency that pushes back, because your instincts about how to describe your own company were formed inside your own company, which is precisely the problem.
What does their cost structure look like? Large agency fees balloon with overheads, and those overheads have to be recovered from somewhere. That makes small projects either unprofitable for the agency or expensive for you, and usually both. Ask them straight out how they handle a modest budget. The answer will tell you whether you're going to be a client or a rounding error.
What happens between projects? Your work is going to be intermittent — see above. So ask what the relationship looks like in the quiet months: whether they'll take the call, offer a view, make the introduction. Agencies that treat the gaps as dead time are simply wrong for a startup.
We built UP FOR LIFE around those four answers. And Anne Jensen of the Netherlands Foreign Investment Agency — whose national positioning, 'Europe's connected Life Science & Health metropolis', we developed for Health Holland — makes a related point about the European life science sector at large: Europe has genuine, unique expertise here, and it will keep its lead for as long as Europe stays focused, and proud, and perhaps a little kaxig about what it's actually good at. That goes for individual companies quite as much as it does for countries.
There's one more reason this sector keeps throwing up companies worth working on, and it's a quirk of policy rather than anything cultural. Sweden's lärarundantaget — the teachers' exception — leaves the patent rights to an idea with the researcher rather than the university. It's a low-cost incentive with a big effect: scientists here have a real reason to start a business instead of signing their ideas away. I'd love to see it spread across the New Nordic region and rather further than that. Very little else in innovation policy costs so little and produces oodles of good business ventures.
Which is why I keep coming back to NLS Days. Life science as a sustainable engine of investment and national revenue is proven, AI looks far more likely to expand the sector than to displace it, and the supply of scientists willing to start something is getting deeper.
My wife may yet win the argument about the cushions. But this is one bet I’m willing to stake my shirt on.
Notes — UP colleagues who contributed to these brands: