Finding the right opportunity
not just the right interface
Scaling Brand Without Scaling Design Teams
2014-2022
Founding Brand Meadow from scratch — from a charity design team's real problem to a funded product with clients including Barclays Bank and Oxfam.
I founded and designed Brand Meadow from 0→1, turning a problem I lived as a charity design lead into a funded SaaS platform used by charities, start-ups, and enterprise organisations.
Project Snapshot
Scale
£350,000+ investment secured with 1,000+ users across 10 organisations
Enterprise and non-profit clients including Barclays Bank and Oxfam
Built and evolved over a 7-year product lifecycle
Complexity
Founded, funded and grew a SaaS business from 0→1+
Balanced product strategy, pricing, growth, fundraising and delivery
Defined a new market between simple brand tools and enterprise DAM platforms
Impact
Validated a commercially viable product through continuous customer research
Built a sustainable business beyond investment through complementary services
Created a product that reduced organisational dependency on design teams
Context
Picture this. The ever growing rise of design requirements for different platforms, a design team at capacity, lack of brand consistency, and a market gap to solve this real problem. Wouldn't it be great to create a home where brands could design, approve, export and share content quickly without having to wait for a designer? And to do this without removing the need for a designer but instead freeing them up to work on the visionary projects that can move a company forward?
The Problem
I lived this problem before I designed the solution. Heading up the design team at a busy charity, I saw what happens when demand for design outpaces the team's capacity, with no brand home to fall back on. No brand guidelines. No approved photography. No templates. Every new piece meant starting from zero — design team, volunteers, and fundraisers all quietly reinventing the wheel.
What people needed was a self-serve brand home: guidelines, approved assets, and templates that fundraisers and volunteers could use without waiting on a stretched design team. That would free the team up for the work only they could do — moving the whole brand forward, not producing the next asset.
Few tools solved this well at the time, and the ones that did were clunky, especially beyond basic web graphics — nothing handled high-resolution print or scalable export (SVG) properly. I set out to make both digital and print-ready design genuinely easy for people who weren't designers.
My Role
As founder and founding product designer, I owned product, growth, and business strategy end to end.
Defining the market
Brand asset management was still an emerging category, especially for charities and growing organisations. I defined the product positioning, target customers, and differentiation strategy, identifying an opportunity between simple template tools and heavyweight enterprise DAM systems.
Building the product
I worked directly with customers to shape the product through continuous research, testing, and iteration, balancing long-term product vision with short feedback loops and small experiments. To start with, I was balancing the need to grow the product with bringing in income through additional design work. The bottom line mattered, which in turn helped me to work nimbly and test, fail, learn, repeat.
Finding the business model
I researched SaaS pricing models, tested assumptions with customers, developed and iterated a model that worked for both enterprise organisations, resource-constrained charities and growing companies.
Scaling the product scope
The best thing I did throughout this journey was to bring my early adopters with me on every step of the journey. It meant that I could test and validate design iterations quickly and ensure that every design cycle moved the product forward. I scamped and prototyped areas in the product, such as an in-built approvals system, a dashboard to prove ROI, export and share functions.
Scaling the business
Over seven years, I owned product roadmapping and prioritisation, balancing customer demand, platform stability, and new feature investment. Alongside the product work, I raised more than £350,000 in angel investment and secured customers including Barclays and Oxfam.
I built a services arm alongside the core product — web design, UX and UI — diversifying revenue beyond the platform itself and helping the business cover costs and more, not just run on investment.
The Real Challenge
The real challenge wasn't brand management. It was organisational capacity. Every request that depended on the design team slowed the organisation down. The opportunity wasn't to create another design tool. It was to redesign how brands were managed altogether.
As organisations grew, their brands often fragmented faster than teams could keep them aligned. This was especially true in charities and purpose-driven organisations, where design capacity was stretched thin and often pulled toward immediate delivery rather than long-term stewardship of the brand itself.
Brand Meadow was never really about designing a better interface. It was about creating a system that made brands easier to manage day to day, so teams could spend less time recreating assets, chasing approvals, and answering the same questions, and more time focusing on the work that actually moved their mission forward. It was also where I first learned a lesson that has followed me through every product since: the interface is rarely the real problem. More often, the real challenge lies in the system surrounding it.
Key Decision
Build a product, not a service.
After experiencing the problem first-hand, I chose to solve it through a scalable self-serve SaaS platform rather than another agency or consultancy model. That decision shaped everything from the product strategy and pricing model to customer onboarding and long-term growth.
Trade-off
Chose a focused self-serve platform over a feature-rich DAM, prioritising simplicity and adoption for growing organisations.
Traction (0-7 years)
Raised £350,000+ in angel investment, validating demand for the category before it was widely established.
Acquired 10 paying organisations and 1,000+ users.
Secured enterprise customers including Barclays and Oxfam.
Operated and evolved the product over a seven-year lifecycle.
What this reinforced
Building Brand Meadow taught me that product strategy and design strategy are the same discipline viewed from different altitudes.
Pricing, positioning, onboarding, retention, and interface decisions all shape the product experience.
Founding a company forces you to move constantly between systems thinking and implementation, holding both the business and the user in view at the same time.
That's still how I approach product design today. No matter the size of the company.
Results
Secured enterprise customers
Barclays & Oxfam
10 paying organisations
1,000+ global users
