White labelling Mission Control: what carries your brand, and what does not

What is actually white labelled

Your brand in HostHQ is one document: an identity block, a colour palette in light and dark, a typeface pairing and a set of logos. You edit it in one place and publish it once. From that moment it dresses the app, the screen people sign in on, the emails the workspace sends and the PDFs it produces.

For a manager that is the whole point: the client sees your firm, not your supplier. For a host it is the same machinery with a different payoff, a business that looks like one on every document a guest, a lender or an accountant is handed.

The caveat belongs up front rather than in a footnote. Two things do not carry: your typeface stops at the edge of the app, and a small number of structural colours in documents are fixed. Everything else follows the brand.

Where you set it, and who is allowed to

Brand Studio is a tab rather than a module. Open Settings, then Branding: the whole studio is four cards with a bar that follows you down the page. Domains sit on their own tab beside it.

Editing is gated on a privilege rather than simply on being an admin. A super admin, or an admin whose branding privilege is set, can change it; every other admin sees the studio read only. The brand is the one setting that changes what every client and guest sees, so it should not arrive as a side effect of access to the bookings calendar.

The four things you set

The studio is four cards, in the order most people want them.

1. Identity

Twelve fields: company name, app name, app short name, registration number, VAT number, contact email, contact phone, website, two address lines, town or city, and postcode. The app name is what a browser tab and an installed app are called; the short name is the label under the icon on a home screen. One field is not cosmetic: a VAT number that is filled in is what makes invoices apply VAT.

2. Brand assets

Six upload slots in four groups: a main logo for light mode and one for dark, a collapsed sidebar icon for each mode, one browser tab icon and one app icon. PNG, JPG, SVG or WebP, up to 2 MB each. You need not fill all six: a missing dark logo falls back to the light one, and a missing sidebar mark or app icon falls back to the tab icon.

Uploading a main logo runs a colour extraction and suggests a primary and an accent to build the palette from. It suggests. It never applies one on your behalf, because the two loudest colours in a logo are not always the two an interface should be built out of.

3. Palette

Twenty-one colours in six plain-English groups: core (page background and body text), cards and menus, buttons and links, sidebar, status, and lines and focus. You set them for light mode and for dark mode separately, which is the part people underestimate.

Two things make that tractable. A Generate action takes one primary and one accent colour and derives both full palettes and the ramps from them. A live contrast checker scores the pairs as you work, warns when one falls short, and offers a one-click fix. Use both: a palette that fails contrast fails it on a client’s phone, in sunlight.

4. Typography

One pairing from a curated list of twelve, each a display face and a body face chosen to work together. There is no custom font upload, so if brand compliance means one specific licensed face, that is the constraint to know before you promise anything to a designer.

Draft, preview, publish

Nothing goes live as you type it. Every edit saves to a draft after a short pause, and the bar at the bottom of the page tells you when the draft was last saved. There are four states, and they are worth knowing by name:

1. 1Draft. Yours, saved automatically, invisible to everyone else.
2. 2Preview. The app reloads in the draft brand for you alone, behind a signed cookie that cannot be forged or replayed against another workspace.
3. 3Publish. The draft becomes the live brand, with a confirmation step in the way.
4. 4Reset. Puts the draft back to the built-in default and leaves what you published alone.

One rule underneath that deserves its own sentence: emails and PDFs always read the published brand, never a draft, so an admin in preview mode cannot leak a half-finished look into a document that leaves the building. The flip side is that a rebrand applies to the very next email sent after you publish.

Where the brand reaches, and where it stops

This is the table to keep: the difference between a white label that holds and one that gets caught by somebody reading a PDF on a train.

Two rows surprise people. The typeface is an app decision, and it stops at the edge of anything sent out. And every branded email renders in your light palette, whatever mode you work in yourself, because the logo most people upload is made for a light surface. What the documents themselves contain.

Your own domain

Every workspace gets a free address on hosthq.uk from the day it is created, built from your company name and your signup date. It is frozen at that point, because it is baked into every link the workspace has ever sent. Nothing about the brand depends on replacing it.

Running on a domain you own is a paid add-on, billed flat per workspace rather than per property. You add the records at your registrar and the panel rechecks them for you every few seconds while anything is still pending. What the add-ons cost.

The web records and the email records verify independently, so your site can be live on your own domain while the mail records are still propagating. Until email verifies, mail keeps sending from your included address, so nothing bounces while you wait; once it verifies, outbound mail moves across on its own.

Removing a domain asks you to type it out in full. There is no undo on that one: it breaks links in mail people already have.

A worked example: what there is to settle

Before you book the afternoon, this is the whole surface area of the job.

The bottom row is the one that changes how you plan the work. Forty-two colours is two passes, not one, which is why the Generate action exists. Start there with two hex values from your own brand, then correct by hand where the contrast checker complains or your eye does.

Before you publish