Blacksmith Agency

Cision is a global leader in the PR industry proving press release and monitoring software and consulting services to over 84% of the Fortune 500.

Blacksmith was hired to help Cision redefine our brand and assist us with designing a new identity for Cision. One that reflects our long history of innovation while showcasing our best in class software and service offerings.

We initially contacted five vendors. Blacksmith stood out from our first meeting in terms of their enthusiasm, their expertise and their recognition that every company and every project is unique and must be tailored to the customer. Their unique pre-sale process was tailored to Cision, helping them understand our business and our goals which put them head and shoulders above the other agencies we talked to.

Blacksmith spent several weeks understanding our business and our customers leading into new wireframes for the site. After wireframe approval, Blacksmith suggested several different design approaches starting with the homepage. Once we approved the homepage design, Blacksmith began to extend that design through all underlying pages.

I feel like I worked with Blacksmith's entire team at some point! Everyone we worked with from sales through code was exceptionally knowledgeable and clearly customer service was top priority.

At the time of this writing, we have not yet launched the new web site. however, we fully anticipate that it will be transformational in terms of its impact on our business.

I feel the workflow was exceptional. We always feel like we are their highest priority. They've never missed any deadlines and often are ahead of schedule.

Their commitment to us, the customer. They listened. They advised, They reacted. They felt like a true partner rather than simply a vendor.

Personally, I would have liked to have seen designs earlier in the process. Wireframes were absolutely necessary in our case. However, they were challenging for leadership to work with as they are, by definition and intent incomplete and challenging to project how the final product would look.

I’m the digital marketing manager of Sandridge Crafted Foods, a fresh food manufacturer specializing in cold salads, soups, and sous vide proteins.

Our goal was to elevate our new brand identity and develop multiple new websites targeted toward our diverse audience segments.

We’ve engaged Blacksmith Agency to help us rebuild our corporate website following a full-scale corporate rebrand. This has led to the creation of various customer microsites that we use to support our largest customers. Additionally, we’ve launched a handful of standalone brand sites targeted toward retail consumers. Blacksmith Agency has handled the website design, including wireframing, templating, and development of the site, including all pages and persona workflows. We’ve handled the content creation in-house.

We work with 2–5 teammates from Blacksmith Agency.

We found them through a referral. We chose them over other options because their pricing fit our budget, they were a great culture fit, they offered good value for the cost, and their company values aligned with ours.

We started working with them in May 2024, and our engagement is ongoing.

Our traffic and engagement metrics have been steadily improving since the new sites launched. Additionally, the customer feedback has been outstanding. Our team members have also expressed that the new sites have successfully elevated the brand and left a positive impression on external resources.

Blacksmith Agency’s project management has been stellar and is ongoing for additional projects and maintenance. We mainly communicate through virtual meetings.

Their responsiveness has been paramount to our achieving success.

They’ve had some turnover issues during our project that have extended the time it took to complete the project. However, we feel this was a one-off issue and haven’t had an issue since.

I’m the marketing and communications manager at the Medical Education & Research Institute (MERI), a nonprofit. Our organization has two sides; one is a medical institute with labs for doctors and device companies to train and work on new devices they’re researching. We also have cadavers on site for doctors and researchers to use for product testing or for studies.

We currently have two websites, one for each side of the organization. We hired Blacksmith Agency to merge the sites and create a story that explains who we are and connects our organization's two sides.

Blacksmith Agency is designing and building a new website from scratch. They’re using the information from our two current websites, which have different target audiences. The team has broken up our two audiences and then brought them together to show that we’re one organization. Our previous sites were on Squarespace, and Blacksmith Agency is moving us away from the platform. They use Figma for design.

We’ve worked with 4–5 teammates from Blacksmith Agency, including David (Project Manager), Kris (Director of Digital Strategy), Joel (Lead UI/UX), and Brett (Experience & Customer Strategist).

They reached out to us through a cold call. We were already thinking of redoing our sites because they weren’t up to par with what we wanted. Blacksmith Agency’s call sparked us to move the project forward. We had conversations with two other companies to ensure we were going down the right path. Ultimately, we chose Blacksmith Agency because they were very transparent with their pricing, the steps, and the design process.

The total cost of the project will be over $110,000.

We started working with them in October 2022, and the engagement is ongoing.

Blacksmith Agency has been able to portray exactly what we asked them to. Our executive director and I have been very happy with the site's look and design, making our organization look like the state-of-the-art institution it is. Soon, other organization managers will give their opinion on the site's progress.

They've delivered on time and stayed on budget. They meet all their deadlines, and any delays have been on our side. There have been a couple of instances where they've had to iterate a couple of times for Blacksmith Agency to make a non-negotiable change, but we've gotten there eventually.

Blacksmith Agency's biggest strength is keeping us on task while being personable. They've been excellent about developing relationships with us; they ask how we're doing and keep us on task. The team can reel us back in when needed.

They could provide more suggestions, particularly picture-wise. We're a very unique organization, and we've asked for their opinion on the body-donation side of our work. Blacksmith Agency could put themselves in our users' shoes more and provide recommendations on what they'd like to see from that perspective.

Ask every question you can think of. Blacksmith Agency is really good about answering our questions, even if they're about the simplest thing. They've explained what a sticky footer is, describing it as many times as necessary for us to understand.

I am the Marketing and Public Relations Manager at a financial services firm, where we manage mutual funds and ETFs in a range of global, niche industries.

Our website was created over 10 years ago, and it was time for a complete refresh and redesign. The goal was for Blacksmith Agency to aid us in not only creating a new aesthetically pleasing design, but one that was modern, easy to navigate and drives traffic. We also needed their help migrating our years' worth of content over to the new website with no issues.

After researching competitors, we chose BlackSmith Agency due to numerous reasons — one of which was we learned they did the build out of a well-known industry peer's website which was quite impressive. Not only that, they offered reasonable and competitive pricing and had the background we needed to complete this large undertaking.

We had a series of discovery meetings with the sales team and offered ideas for designs we liked and envisioned for our new website. We had weekly and bi-monthly meetings following this with the team who actually built out the new site — they addressed our concerns, gave us feedback and recommendations, and walked us through every step of the project.

We worked with a salesperson, and 2 project managers, I believe.

The new website design is much more user-friendly and easy to navigate. It matches our values of being forward thinking leaders in our industry. The site has been up for one day, and we have already received numerous compliments. We are excited to see how traffic increases.

The workflow worked well for both teams. The weekly meetings, and regular email communication made it easy to get our questions and concerns answered on time.

We were impressed with their skillset and knowledge to deal with such an undertaking as our website turned out to be. We have many Compliance hurdles to work around, years' worth of valuable content, and shareholders to deal with -- so it was great working with an agency that was familiar with the needs of the financial services industry.

The project took a bit longer than initially forecast, but as expected, that is due to various items we found needed addressing as we moved along.

Their team helped us to advance our branding. We sent them our new logo and some new photography. They took those new assets and imagined what our website could look like. Their team took on a lot of that design work for us. Once we finalized our photography and new logo, they helped us take those elements and build them out for the website’s UI. We decided to start the new website from scratch because the branding elements were going to be new anyway.