Finding the right opportunity
not just the right interface
Scaling Brand Without Scaling Design Teams
2014-2024
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
Achieved an 80% customer renewal rate on £16k annual contracts, alongside £20k implementation fees
Adoption expanded from one Barclays programme to two
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
Whilst working as a design lead for a busy Children's Charity, I experienced rising growth in demand for design services. The limited resources in my team meant that fundraisers faced bottle-necks, or had to design fundraising materials quickly on the fly that weren’t aligned to the brand.
This lead to the charity's brand being diluted and the design team being overwhelmed, with requests out pacing capacity. It also meant that I was busy delivering the day-to -day, rather than focusing on the strategic design vision, which had the potential to propel the charity to a new level.
I started to look for a type of digital brand home to solve this problem. I was looking for a platform to empower fundraisers and volunteers to quickly design their own day-to-day materials, without going off brand and to be accessible 24/7.
I contacted a few companies but nothing matched my vision of what I was looking for. I was looking for a simple, user-friendly platform to guide non-designers through designing, offering options for colour ways, different images and content but without diluting the brand. At the time, the only platform that looked promising was Canva, but their focus was mainly on B2C, and their main market was Australia.
The Problem
As I had already lived through this problem first-hand, I saw the market gap and decided to go for it.
I partnered with a developer who became my co-founder as our visions were greatly aligned. After further in-depth conversations with potantial users; we knew we needed to create something that empowered the following:
A secure brand home, where brand guidelines, approved photos, and sign-off procedures could live.
A suite of customised templates to guide the user in easy steps.
24/7 access, to reduce bottle-necks.
The ability to allow volunteers outside of the internal team to become advocates and design templates, such as Facebook posts and posters for their own fundraising events.
Templates needed to export as pdf, jpg and HTML. We needed to be able to export vector graphics (svgs) too.
A CMS to be able to prepare and build each clients “Meadow”
A dashboard to validate return on investment for each company, to help the business-case and increase yearly renewals.
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. When it's your own business and your own product, it's brings home how incredibly important it is to learn fast, fail fast and validate fast. There is no time nor money to design or build fetaures that aren't commercially viable.
Finding the business model
This was tricky, since some of our clients were large blue chip organisations and others were smaller charities. 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.
It was really exciting to bring clients with me on this journey, from sketches to polished interfaces.
I attended an innovation accelerator and discovered that fellow entrepreneurs were crying out for a similar type of platform to help them quickly set-up their new brand. They had limited budget and needed to scale quickly. We deigned and trialed a "solo" product to help solve this problem. This became an area of potential rapid growth but we needed to be careful to not steer away too much from the core product.
Scaling the business
Over seven years, it was important to balance my vision for the business alongside developing the product with a focus on user needs. 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 was providing scaling systems that could be customised to each brand. Each brand home needed to be somewhat restricted to avoid dilution of their brand, but also flexible enough to allow for diversity of content.
This was not only a challenge for each individual brand, but also for the platform scaling to fit other brands. As we were a typical cash strapped start-up, we needed to ensure that every decision answered a real user problem but could also be scalable to suit other brands. Any features that were specific needed to be parked as a nice-to-have.
The big elephant in the room however, was how our competitors were scaling and moving with changing market forces. We could see that Canva was starting to take-off and move into our market, shifting their focus from B2C to B2B.
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
I chose a focused self-serve platform over a feature-rich DAM, prioritising simplicity and adoption for growing organisations.
The product started off in the charity sector, but we soon realised the need in other sectors which would ultimately be more commercially viable. We needed to be nimble and open enough to flex to this market, whilst holding true to our core values.
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
Taking an idea from scratch to product used internationally by a complex company, required determination, self-belief and deep confidence that what I was building would genuinely solve a problem.
Having a vision, stepping outside of my comfort zone to sell, moving quickly with markets, and all whilst being the founding designer required steal, and unflappable determination to succeed. At times this could prove challenging, but at other times ecstatically rewarding.
I found that clients, investors and prospective employees invested in the people behind the product, not just the product itself.
It's the winning ingredients of commercial viability, stealth, solving real problems, character, leadership and direct collaboration that make products what they are.
Results
Secured enterprise customers
Barclays & Oxfam
10 paying organisations
1,000+ global users
