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.
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.
Marram
Naadam
Lolli & Pops
Small Batch
Walker Hotels
Hashdex
Our process enriches the connection between audience and product. Here’s how we systematically deliver lasting engagement:
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.
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Client & Customer Interviews, Market Research, Ethnographic Studies, Competitive Landscape, Observations, Insights
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.
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Audience Definition, Psychographics, Positioning, Brand Definition, Brand Pillars, Manifesto
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.
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Brand & Product Identity Moodboards, Thematic Design Directions
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.
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Brand Identity Development, Logotype & Mark, Color System, Typography Systems, Brand Guidelines, Voice & Tone Guidelines
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Packaging, Product Design, Digital Design, Retail Design, Illustration, Photography, Videography
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Collaborated with Naadam’s founding team to define the brand strategy and narrative, brand and product identity for this ethical cashmere leader.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.