As a full-service creative studio, Maker distills the meaning in businesses and their offerings to make your brand a lasting competitive advantage.

We are strategists, writers, and designers who deliver multi-disciplinary creative direction.

Our process enriches the connection between audience and product. Here’s how we systematically deliver lasting engagement:

1 — Discover

Our process begins with comprehensive market research, stakeholder conversations, and audience interviews. We engage you, your team, and your audience to gain situational awareness for your business to recommend where your brand should be positioned.

Related Services

Client & Customer Interviews, Market Research, Ethnographic Studies, Competitive Landscape, Observations, Insights

2 — Distill

We distill our discoveries into a comprehensive brand strategy and establish your unique positioning, core audience and own-able territory. We carry this into a foundation of brand pillars that will anchor your identity and serve as a common vocabulary for on-strategy creative.

Related Services

Audience Definition, Psychographics, Positioning, Brand Definition, Brand Pillars, Manifesto

3 — Concept

We begin by expressing your brand pillars as a series of design moodboards. Once we’ve selected a set of visual tools, we start iterating Visual Themes. Each theme is a potential pathway towards your final brand and product identity that tests visual language including typography, photo art direction, color, compositions and logo concepts.

Related Services

Brand & Product Identity Moodboards, Thematic Design Directions

4 — Establish

After we select a design direction, we refine it to ensure on-strategy presentation of our brand pillars. We ultimately document this new identity system from strategy, to visual language and voice / tone standards, to usage and applications in a comprehensive Brand Guidelines document.

Related Services

Brand Identity Development, Logotype & Mark, Color System, Typography Systems, Brand Guidelines, Voice & Tone Guidelines

5 — Express

The brand’s presence is expressed through a series of deliverables that might include collateral, packaging & product design, environmental design, retail design, as well as web design and social media. The application of the brand into these extensions serves as a stress test for the identity system, ultimately enriching the brand with greater nuance.

Related Services

Packaging, Product Design, Digital Design, Retail Design, Illustration, Photography, Videography

6 — Activate

Once the brand is expressed we shepherd it into production. Common services include creative direction of web development, photography, film, and print production oversight, experience and event design, as well as creative development of advertising campaigns in traditional, digital, social and guerilla.

Related Services

Go-To-Market Strategy, Advertising Campaigns, Broadcast, Print, OOH, Digital, Event & Experience, Guerilla Marketing

We partner with entrepreneurs and business leaders pre-launch or at key inflection points. Maker clients believe brand should be a competitive advantage and understand the sustained commitment required to deliver this impact.

Equity Partnerships — In order to build lasting brand equity and facilitate deeper creative partnerships, we selectively invest our services in exchange for equity in seed to growth stage businesses. We built Maker to facilitate these ventures.

Hashdex

$26MM Series A led by Softbank, Valor, & Coinbase.

Collaborated with the founding team to distill brand strategy and create brand identity, website, and collateral for this Digital Asset Index Fund. Hashdex launched the world’s first crypto ETF with NASDAQ.

Quince

$50MM Series A led by Insight Partners, Founders Fund & 8VC

Developed concept, brand, and product strategy for this M2C fashion brand that reinvents supply chain to deliver luxury essentials at a radical value. Quince is backed by Insight Partners, Founders Fund, & 8VC.

Revolution Golf

Sold to Golf Channel

Collaborated with Founder Justin Tupper and his executive team to distill the brand’s positioning and refine visual identity for the world’s leading online golf instruction platform. The business was acquired by the Golf Channel in 2017 and is now called GolfPass.

Naadam

$16MM in funding through Series B

Collaborated with Naadam’s founding team to define the brand strategy and narrative, brand and product identity for this ethical cashmere leader.

Lolli & Pops

80 Stores, 200 Products, Millions of Delighted Customers in 7 years

Member of executive team since pre-launch 2012-2019, led brand and product strategy, packaging and retail design, building a brand that reimagines the candy category.

Endless

Bridging the Digital Divide

We helped launch Endless Mobile in its earliest stages, first building an OS that transformed smartphones into desktop experiences, then helping to bring valuable content to bridge the global digital divide. During this time we built Endless’ Brand Strategy, Identity, and a variety of brand applications. Today, Endless continues its impact with investments in gaming, devices, and offline internet.

PLNT

Incubated in partnership with Aurify Brands

Partnered with Aurify Brands to incubate this early CBD beverage, bootstrapping its development to a successful launch alongside its founder in 60 days time.

When we find partners that align with our approach, we prefer ongoing engagements often betting alongside them. Here’s how we’re different:

1 — A Nimble Studio

We are a small team of entrepreneurial strategists, writers and designers with a network of world class collaborators. From the start, our studio was built to work responsively and integrate into our client’s teams and workflow.

2 — End-to-End Creative Direction

We believe lasting brand equity is created by coherent expression of strategy across every touch-point of a brand, through that business’s entire life cycle. That’s why we prefer broader engagements that begin with strategy extending through product definition into brand identity and multi-faceted expression.

3 — We Bet On Our Work

We thrive on building meaningful, differentiated businesses. We are partners in several of our portfolio businesses. We built Maker to facilitate these relationships when possible. The studio works in service of our equity partnerships and vice versa.

4 — Entrepreneur’s Urgency with an Owner’s Care

We are entrepreneurs and stakeholders ourselves that thrive by sitting on the same side of the table as our client partners. We are results-minded rather than project-focused. This means we bring a keen awareness of the discipline required to facilitate growth to every project.

If your brand, its strategy, identity, and expression should be a competitive advantage, then drop us a line.