When it comes to deciding on who you’re going to approach to design and produce the branding and marketing material that you inevitably require to help give your business its best chance for growth and success, where do you start?

Nowadays, through the evolution of technology, there is a saturated presence of design agencies all competing with one another and it can often become somewhat overwhelming to know where to begin. They all have their own value proposition, promoting why they think their offering is superior to the competition. But there is one factor in particular that we’d like to highlight in this article; size.

Tall oaks from little acorns grow

It takes a lot of dedication and hard work to grow a business, that goes without saying. Within the creative industry, the larger design agencies will have a workforce possessing just about every relevant job title you can imagine. They will have specialists in each department with intricately honed skills that make them highly proficient in a range of key areas for their role. But does this setup necessarily make it a better proposition than a smaller agency which regularly sees its staff multitasking and stepping outside their standard remit of responsibilities?

With over 35 years of industry experience between them, Creative Fire’s two founding partners have had the fortune of experiencing first hand the operations at both ends of the spectrum. Whilst a studio with 100+ staff can give a design agency status and help to give an indication on its success as a thriving business, with so many links in the chain to take a project from brief through to realisation, communication can suffer breakdowns which can in turn compromise the delivery of the end product. From experience of working at some of the leading branding agencies in the UK, we have identified that information fed through from a client can be interpreted differently and specific key criteria can be neglected depending on the knowledge and understanding that a particular individual has. Whilst we must not ‘tar everyone with the same brush’, a pedigree project manager, being the front of house, face of the company may typically prioritise in ensuring that requested deadlines are met and they may overlook the technical limitations and implications to what a client has requested. Such a drawback can delay and inconvenience proceedings, damaging long standing reputations and in the worse case scenario cost a client financially.  At the same token, a designer may not possess the polished manner that a project manager would have spent years perfecting in how they present themselves to the client which doesn’t cast the company’s image in the best light.

Deliver on your promises simply and painlessly

Granted you can’t be a master of all trades; if it were that easy we’d all be sipping Dom Perignon from the top deck of a yacht in Monte Carlo but that’s not to say that we can’t identify and utilise the top line, key skills that are required to ensure that a client always receives their product on time, on brief and with minimal fuss. They’re not interested in the square footage of your office space or how you’re just about to open your fifth office in Europe. The sole fundamental factor to them is simplicity and that you can deliver on your promises in the most straightforward and painless way possible.

Quality

At Creative Fire, we created an agency that focuses on putting our customers first through streamlining the design journey by amalgamating stages and refining processes. In doing so, our designers are on hand to guide them through this journey from the very beginning to the very end. Furthermore, our clients have often stated that by dealing solely with the creative through the duration of their project, it provides clarity and confidence, safe in the knowledge that they know there is no risk of information getting lost in translation as it gets fed through from one department to the next.

Value

We are not defined by departments. Our designers are hybrids, skilled on a multi-disciplinary level. By keeping our overheads tight through streamlining and avoiding these phases that we consider to be obsolete, it also means that we can strip back our costs therefore offering a much more cost effective service to our customers. Larger agencies often use their status to justify inflated fees. We simply do not do that.

Speed

The one remaining aspect that determines the efficiency of an agency is how quickly they can act to deliver. By removing links in the metaphoric chain that is required to ensure your vision to be realised, we are able to deliver our projects to our customers faster. Rather than a brief being passed from one department to the next, there is just one handover; from the customer to the designer. In turn, we have managed to perfect a blend between quality, value and speed.

We’re not just another small time, local provider of design solutions. The market is inundated with young pretenders claiming to have the answer to your branding or marketing needs, often with poorly considered strategies. We may be small but what we lack in size, we make up for with our big agency mentality and have the experience to cover that. It’s a little bit like panning for gold; by sieving out all the stones and dirt, you’re left with (if lucky) a golden nugget – and that’s what we’ve done with Creative Fire.