Year in Review

2023 was a year of growth for us. We grew our team, added new products to our portfolio, grew closer to our customers and deepened our relationship with Papirfly, our parent company. We also got some new team members:

Sophia - Customer Experience Manager

• Loves dessert, naps and all things fancy
• Sometimes wakes up early to sneak-eat an entire cake <3
  

Maja - Community Manager

• Loves naps, weird movies and traveling
• Super picky eater
  

Alex - Front End Developer

• Loves photography, good video call backgrounds and motorcycles
• Secretly an Instagram influencer
  

Jørgen - Head of Product

• Loves pad krapow, music (all of it), and having to only come up with two "loves"
• Takes unnecessarily long ice baths
  

That brings the total of Brandpad humans to 9, so we doubled our team this year.

On a more personal note, we grew our families: in 2023 we had a wedding in New York, a proposal, a new baby and a new puppy, all from just the 9 of us.

And on a super personal note, some of us grew out of our pants due to really awesome lunches at the office, but it was absolutely worth it. Speaking of awesome lunches, office life has been pretty awesome this year. We moved to a new building in Oslo called Rebel (very fitting). We are working hybridly in its truest form, but the lunches are so good that most of us get lured to the office pretty regularly. We had a couple of hangouts with the entire team, a few trips, a completely ruthless Mario Kart tournament and we are planning a hangout for January to kick off the year. We also started doing sauna every Tuesday before work, so if you’re ever in Oslo and see weirdos jumping in the frozen fjord in the middle of the winter, come say hi to us.

In 2023 we had:

1. 8682 new Brandpad users. That is 24 new users per day on average.
2. 1330 conversations with our users.
3. 1050 brand new brands added to Brandpad.
4. 1925 existing brands updated during the year.
5. 41600 Slack messages exchanged between the team.
6. 661 Slack messages is our record during a single day on Feb 15. We were probably planning a night out.
7. 9 meetings that could have been a Slack message. We’ll do better next year.
8. 105 jumps into ice-cold Oslo Fjord.

We recieved a few awards for our Brand Activation Management campaign, BAM! from European Design Awards and Visuelt (the National Norwegian Design Awards). So proud of Nicklas and Bendik who designed the campaign.

We launched our Brand Management offering in collaboration with Papirfly. Our enterprise users can now take advantage of a world-class DAM system, templating, design-to-print and design-to-network solutions, full-scale asset editor, automation flows and so much more. We are very excited to see all the ways our users are already utilizing the product and can’t wait to onboard new ones.

We revamped the Bespoke plan. Bespoke users can now white-label the platform, customize the design and functionalities of the dashboard, use SSO for secure and simple login and have first dibs on new features.

We changed our plans. When it comes to brand design, collaboration is key. So now, all of our plans come with unlimited users to make that a reality. Our two plans - Brand and Portfolio - come with all the features a studio or a company might need like collaboration options, unlimited assets, password protection and custom domains. And for those who need a little extra, there’s always Bespoke.

We went to the Brand New Conference in Chicago. We had the absolute pleasure of being the presenting sponsors of this year’s Brand New Conference. We got a chance to hang out with some of our clients, meet designers from all walks of life, listen to inspirational talks by industry leaders and try the best deep-dish pizza in town. Totally worth the jet lag.

We launched our Kickback program. Studios bring clients to Brandpad all the time. We decided it was time to start rewarding that, so all the members of the Kickback program now get 15% back on the annual subscription of the clients they bring to us.

We launched a Discord server to build a community of brand designers. It’s still early days, but you can join it here and share your work, give feedback to others, ask for and give tips, share resources will fellow designers or just hang out.

If we label 2023 as the year of growth, 2024 can be labeled as the year of the product. We are planning on pushing out product updates throughout the year. Some of them will include new features, others will improve UX/UI and all of them will make Brandpad even better and easier to use. We don’t want to give away too much, so you didn’t hear this from me, but some of the updates might include multipage, a new brand hub and themes.