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Say hello to the team!
Justin Champney
Design and Branding guy
email: hellojustin@buildabrand.com
linkedin: profile
twitter: @Champney
Dave Shanley
Tech and Geek guy
email: hellodave@buildabrand.com
linkedin: profile
twitter: @daveshanley
Rob Carter
Facts and Figures guy
email: hellorob@buildabrand.com
linkedin: profile
twitter: @RACarter
A bit more information about what we do
By on August 11, 2009 at 1:34 pm
Keywords Branding, Technology and tagged Branding, buildabrand, Design, feedback, logo, TechCrunch.
Well, we weren’t quite expecting that! Thanks so much to everyone for all the emails, beta requests, tweets and blog posts. We’ve been astonished and delighted with the level of interest in buildabrand.
We’ve appreciated the positive comments, but we’re also taking some of the constructive criticism seriously. Reading through the discussions online, it became clear to us that we ought to clarify a few things about the buildabrand service. So here’s a bit more information about how we work.
We’re a small team, based in Soho, London. We’re entrepreneurs ourselves, and what we set out to do with buildabrand was provide access to branding for other entrepreneurs: we want to make branding accessible.
Here are the questions that have been asked, and the comments that have been made, most frequently in the last 24 hours:
Are you trying to replace traditional branding agencies?
We don’t want to replace traditional agencies. We’re looking to open up an entirely new price point for branding and identity solutions. Traditional services aren’t really our competitors.
Buildabrand will allow entrepreneurs and freelancers to acquire branding as a cost, rather than an investment. It will allow them to take a punt on their idea much more easily.
We at buildabrand see ourselves as entrepreneurs, and we’ve built a service we’d like to use ourselves. We see it sitting comfortably alongside traditional design services.
There’s a lot more to branding than a logo.
We know that. But before a company gets to the big umbrella stage, it has to start somewhere. “Buildabrand” is as much a description of what the service will aim to deliver as it is a call to action to our prospective users. To inspire them and to help them build the foundation for a brand.
We are trying to lower the barriers to entry for startups by providing them with accessible and affordable tools. Eventually, we would like to provide branding knowledge and support as well as products.
We will not solve the complex branding problems a large enterprise might face.
Automation will never replace creative thinking.
Of course not. But our algorithm and the way it has been constructed is the result of years of branding experience and a lot of strategic research. All our designs are originated by designers, from the symbols to the colour palettes.
Our goal is to match business ambitions with brand suggestions.
How big is your catalogue?
We’ve done a lot of strategic research into startups and into creating brand symbols that will fulfil a startup’s needs. We’ll have 1,800 difference business / segment types to choose from in total. During beta tests, the number will be smaller, but we’re planning to grow organically.
We’re confident that we can keep feeding new designs into the database fast enough to cope with demand. We also have plans to open up our system as a marketplace for designers to sell their work.
We’d love to hear what you think about the product. Leave a comment below or contact us if you’d like to know more.
Given the level of interest in buildabrand, we’re increasing the number of beta invitations from the original 50 offered by TechCrunch to 200. They will still be dished out on a first come, first served basis. We’ll be in touch if you made the cut.
12 Comments
Having never worked in branding I can’t really comment on the finer details of what developing a brand involves and whether it can be automated or how successful the results will be.
But that said I know there is something very sketchy about automated creativity, or an approach to creativity that feels very out of the box.
In the same way that you can get a logo for $50 I kind of feel that this will devalue the overall process and reduce it to ‘algorithm’ which given the fact that there are thousands of designers without a job isn’t what the industry needs.
I can understand you are competing with the established but how can they compete with ‘How much!? Buildabrand can do it cheaper than that
I still look forward to seeing the results and open to be proven wrong.
Just wanted to post and say that this is EXACTLY what I have been spent over a year looking for. I am not trying to create a large company, just a small one person consulting gig and the main sticking point keeping me from “going for it” has been branding (especially logo). All I need is something basic but am well aware of my inabilities in this area. Just the validation of having something professional is reassuring and up to this point that has been prohibitively expensive.
Brilliant idea, I am really looking forward to your launch! I know it will be appreciated by the many people on-the-fence about doing side jobs and the like.
Hi,
Will you be create brand names as well, or just the visual identity?
Thanks,
Sean
I’m a marketing and business consultant who’s done his fare share of brand strategy work for some of the world’s biggest customers and with some of the world’s largest agencies. I’m now heavily focused in marketing automation technologies, although I’ve never seen anything try to do what Buildabrand does. It sounds primarily to be an automated logo-building tool, and it appears branding strategy is not taken into much consideration. But still, if it works, I can see value for entrepreneurs.
Please put me on the Buildabrand’s beta invitation list. Conveniently, I’m in the midst of launching a new company; the timing for this test is good. I’d love to help you hone your product.
Good for you for launching this venture.
Cheers.
Hi Sean,
At this stage, users will need to come to us having decided on a company name. But we plan to offer naming services in the future.
Justin
love your works – hope to see more of this soon and hopefully take this for a spin
cheers Justin
I am in the process if creating a seminar company for real estate investors. I have business cards and stationary of my own making but your approach and potential results sound appealing.
I hope that I may be included in the 200 beta user test group.
This is a perfect service. I can’t remember the last genius moment I witnessed in branding – maybe the private note cards from Mickey Drexler at JCrew when the market first tanked – which were spectacular but not at the level of genius you guys just hit. This is great design, uncomplicated, clean, precise, does exactly what it ought. It’s to the internet what Givenchy was to Audrey Hepburn.
In my opinion to build a brand is not an automated process. I try to find terms and conditions of Build a Brand, but was not successful yet. I will be happy to contribute in testing process.
Hello People!
Branding is NOT a Logo, a Color Theme and a Tag Line!
A Brand is not a $4.99 online deal!
Building a sustainable and recognizable Brand requires Brand Strategy, Brand Positioning, Brand Segmentation, Brand Extension, Brand Philosophy, Product Lifecycle, Customer Experience (online + offline) and much much more.
To call the result of Buildabrand.com a “Brand” loses the completeness and the scope of what a scalable and sustainable Brand really is and places its users into a misguided false sense of reality that they have a “Brand”.
As an Entrepreneur many times, I fully commend the Founders on locking into a niche and a “tribe” – but to end there is actually disinformation and digital highway robbery at best.
Ytzik Aranov
See my Blog on Corporate Transformation and my article on the “B” (Branding) Word at http://bit.ly/57UIK
Please add me to your list of beta clients. Am regularly trying to help small nonprofits or advocacy groups without a budget develop a brand for their effort. It will be wonderful if you can help. Best of luck.
Buildabrand is one of the most exciting developments in Web 2.0 of recent years and illustrates where the web is going.
Buildabrand gives entrepreneurs and other business professionals ownership and control of their branding – giving them the opportunity to create on demand branding any time, any place, any where… from the web.
Buildabrand makes good quality branding fast, reasonable and accessible to all, illustrating that brands are about more than logos.
Buildabrand’s Beta site shows it’s potential to transform the branding industry. While there will always be a need for agencies that craft bespoke branding for organisations with more complex branding requirements – Buildabrand is absolutely ideal for the SME or start-up that needs a basic brand ID to get going. Buildabrand also provides the ideal platform for a brand that has already been developed, but needs applying across a range of media with speed and efficiency, but to a budget.
Buildabrand is going to be big.
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[...] a blog post from the company founder here explains a bit more about the service in response to some commenters’ [...]
[...] I have to give great credit to the people at Buildabrand in that they have clarified their position a little further in what is quite a brave piece directly responding to some of the criticisms that myself and others have levelled at them. You can read that here. [...]
[...] a blog post from the company founder here explains a bit more about the service in response to some commenters’ [...]