Brandpad is made to be a “design-first” solution for design agencies and studios that want to professionally scale brand delivery and management across a full team and portfolio. Our goal is that our system will help your business thrive—now and in the future.

Why we made Brandpad.
You might not know this, but initially, we made Brandpad to handle our own clients as designers. We wanted a customisable system to standardise our brand project deliveries. When we opened the product for others, we had one clear goal: Help studios handle their brand portfolio and clients in a professional way. To be clear, we’re okay at helping you launch one brand—but we’re very good at helping you handle and grow a portfolio of brands efficiently and in a valuable way.

A business model for your studio.
When we started using Brandpad (we still do), we also built a successful business model to complement our project-based revenue. Let’s call this “brand hosting for clients”. With Brandpad, we aim to help you do the same.

How does this work exactly? It starts with finding a price for your brand deliveries. It’s important to remember that you decide what a brand platform through Brandpad should cost for a client. Most of our customers pick up the bill from Brandpad themselves and then invoice their clients on the side. Now, since delivering brands through Brandpad is more efficient for a studio, and the value experienced by a client getting a digital platform for their brand is bigger (than with a PDF), there’s a value gap in between. We encourage you to consider this gap a margin that you put in your pocket.

Having worked with a lot of different studios over the years, we see that people have different ways of doing this. Some agencies charge a fixed fee (normally between $1K to $10K), some include this in their project estimate (and make sure they have enough room to add a digital brand platform on top of the work), and some count the approximate hours it takes to make it.

From our experience, the first is the most valuable to a studio and the last is the least valuable if you look at revenue alone. To give some insights on this, we have studios in Brandpad with 80+ brands that charge $5K-$10K per brand guideline (not counting the branding project), and they spend 3-5h creating one. Needless to say, they’re pretty happy. On top of this, we see some agencies charging a monthly or yearly retainer to be proactive in updating the brand platform and keeping it hosted. Since modern brands aren’t static but grow and adapt over time, this is the perfect use case for a retainer deal.

When we use Brandpad ourselves, we do a combination of fixed price + retainer, and it’s been a good addition to our revenue. For us, it means we have more freedom to choose projects that we really want to do. No matter how you use Brandpad, remember that we should be a source of income for your studio—not a cost. We’re okay with not making money unless you make money, and we’re happy to talk to you about how you can ensure this if you want more information.

Which plan is suitable for you?
Brandpad is made to reflect portfolio and team size. The plans mainly count team members and the number of brands. Generally speaking, the more brands you bring, the cheaper the price per brand is. That being said, we always suggest starting with one brand (use the free Starter plan if you want) and see the results it has on your client relationship. Normally, a brand in Brandpad will be quicker to make, easier to distribute, seen as a more professional delivery by clients, and minimise the post-project support needed afterward. If this is true for you as well, then bring the next brand too.

The most successful studios in Brandpad have now standardised their internal process of finishing a brand project by using the system. All their team members have access to their portfolio in the cloud and new brands are added when projects are coming to an end. This means that you’ll probably end up on one of the bigger plans eventually, but when you do, you should already have a model in place to ensure that more brands mean more value for you (and not more cost).

What is the Bespoke plan?
We get a lot of questions about Bespoke, understandably. Put shortly, Brandpad Bespoke is our tailored service to you. Your own system, if you will. It’s 100% white-labeled, ready for you to input your brand and client list. You own all the touch points—and the full value created by having the brand in the cloud is now provided by you.

With Brandpad Bespoke, you also get “unlimited everything”. You can bring as many team members as you want, unlimited brands, and create accounts for your clients and partners if needed. It comes with your brand, on your domain, and with your name on everything. This means everything that has to do with Brandpad is removed and replaced with your own information. Your team and clients will log in i.e brands.yourstudio.com/login and you can natively launch brands and distribute them to your clients at brands.yourstudio.com/clientname if you want. This means Brandpad is out of the equation and how brands and clients are handled is completely up to you. Do clients want access to the system? Should partners have editor access as well? Maybe that costs something per year. You decide.

In addition, we’ve put some sprinkles on top. We call these Bespoke features. This now includes brand analytics (so you can see how each brand is used), unlimited file sizes (the normal Brandpad account caps files at 35mb per file), and custom templates for your organisation. In addition, we tend to be flexible with custom requests for features—as long as they’re fun.

Let’s move forward together.
Over the last few years, we’ve worked with a lot of studios from around the world to create something that helps designers run their offices in a good way. Some of these you probably know, some of them you don’t know. What they have in common is the wish to create a healthier economical baseline for their agencies, so they can spend more time on being creative and less time on administration and support. Our promise to you is that this is the mission we continue to pursue. This is what guides our decisions and our strategy. We’re here to help design studios thrive, now and in the future.

Today, Brandpad is a team of experienced creatives. Combined we have experience with everything from pitching through strategy and design to client management. We’re happy to share our knowledge with you at any time and we’re available for you, free of charge whenever we can. Reach out if we can be of service.