BRIGADE

I’m the director of project development, sales, and marketing for a construction company.

We needed new branding and a new website.

BRIGADE has designed a new logo, a new website, and new marketing materials for us. The site was built from scratch on WordPress by a developer they subcontracted, but they were in charge of its entire design. As for the marketing materials, these have included business cards, marketing ads, lettering for our vehicles, proposal documents and templates for our presentations, and more.

We work with three dedicated resources from BRIGADE, including a senior account manager, the associate creative director, and a senior creative.

We found them through a Google search. I just Googled design companies, interviewed a few of them, and chose BRIGADE.

We’ve spent around $150,000.

We started working together in January 2021, and our engagement is ongoing.

Thanks to BRIGADE’s efforts, our website traffic has increased by 200%. Our leads and conversations have also increased, although those have been harder to track.

BRIGADE’s performance has been outstanding. They use Google Docs to manage the project, and we communicate via phone calls, emails, and Google Meet meetings.

BRIGADE’s main strengths are their communication, accountability, and quality of work.

I don’t know how they could improve; they’re amazing!

The more responsive you are, the quicker they can turn around assets.

We are an advanced manufacturing institute based in San Jose, California. We create STEM outreach programs for K12 across the US to inspire them to pursue STEM & manufacturing careers.

We replicated our K-12 STEM outreach program in different manufacturing institutes across the US, each focusing on a different advanced technology. Brigade designed the suites of materials for these different programs.

Brigade had made the suite of materials for our flagship program, and we wanted to use them again because of the quality of work.

Our partnership with Brigadedates back to the design and creation of our flagship K-12 STEM outreach program in 2015/2016. Brigade created a suite of beautiful print/digital resources for this program with custom branding. We were awarded a grant in 2020 to adapt this program to the focus areas of affiliated organizations. Brigade was contracted to design these adapted programs. Through this work, Brigade created custom branding and feel for eight new STEM outreach and engagement programs.

In total, we worked with 4 people, including an Account Manager, Project Manager, Director of Creative Strategy, and Creative Lead. The Account Manager and Project Manager did an incredible job of communicating timelines and deliverables in a professional and kind way. The Director of Creative Strategy and Creative Lead designed eight beautifully unique programs.

Their project management of the project and deliverables was top notch. They kept the project on track and helped us reach our goals.

As stated before, the project management from the Brigade team was excellent. Both teams had clear deadlines for deliverables and the Brigade team kept everyone on track.

The designs themselves were beautiful, and the management of the project was fabulous. We worked through many different iterations of the same type of project and each of them was successful.

No

I am Managing Editor of UMass Magazine, the semiannual alumni magazine for the flagship UMass Amherst campus, with a circulation of about 240,000 print copies per issue.

We rely on BRIGADE to create exciting, engaging layouts for each of our feature stories (up to 15 spreads per issue), produce illustrations for many of them, and pull everything together for each issue—flowing in copy and art, handling multiple rounds of review, and preparing final files for the printer. BRIGADE also creates custom sized versions of the art to fit the needs of our web edition.

Initially, BRIGADE was selected by our CMO, but our experience with them has been so positive, and our collaboration with them has become so integral to the magazine, that we were very happy to award them a larger contract through the UMass RFB process.

The magazine is a complex project with so many details - 52 pages plus covers, twice a year.

We generally work directly with Alexia Geary, account manager, and Tim MacKay, art director. Designer David Foote, illustrator Thom Dudley, and other staff are also brought in to work on the layouts, but having Tim and Alexia as our points of contact is really helpful.

The magazine consistently garners rave reviews from our alumni, including mentions of the design's freshness and relevance. In the past year, the magazine has also won design awards including: A Hermes platinum award, an award of excellence from Communication Arts, and three gold awards from the Ad Club of Western Massachusetts. https://www.umass.edu/magazine/awards

I've worked with designers and firms for over 20 years and BRIGADE is just the best, in terms of what they produce of course, but definitely in terms of the workflow. They're extremely clear and great with details, expert collaborators in any electronic systems, as flexible as possible about deadline shifts, super professional in taking feedback, and willing to continuously improve and adapt the workflow. What more can one ask?!

We're consistently impressed by the high level of creativity they bring to their work and their ability to take a germ of an idea and run with it. They're communicative, sharp, fun, and a joy to collaborate with. They get excited when we deliver photos—they're really invested in making this magazine the best it can be.

No project of this size and scope happens without hiccups! What's perhaps most amazing is when we hit wrinkles in our process, or something goes awry, the BRIGADE team is always receptive, direct, and quick to make needed corrections to designs, processes, templates, etc. That's what makes a collaboration survive and persist—they've become invaluable partners for us.

I am the VP of Marketing for Canndescent, a top supplier of cannabis in California.

We lacked resources to develop custom strain specific packaging for a new brand VOLCANNX. We asked them to create bold and dynamic graphics for key strains in both 1/8 jars and mylars.

I had a long history of working with Brigade in the spirits category while working on SVEDKA with Constellation Brands.

We provided them with the brief on each strain as well as packaging mandatories. They created each custom package from scratch and presented it back to the Marketing team with one round of changes before the went to mechanicals. They have created six custom strain packages for us.

There were three people from Brigade on each call Kirsten the founder, Elena the account executive and Joe the head of creative.

Brigade is so easy to work with. They are fast and nimble. They understood the brief and delivered amazing packaging on time.

Elena manages the timelines and communication. She is a pleasure to work as the team is collaborative and responsive.

The most impressive thing about Brigade are the people. Not only are they talented and deliver but it is fun and a pleasure to work with them.

No improvements needed!

I am a marketing director at an aesthetics device company. We distribute cutting edge aesthetics technology to plastic surgeons, dermatologists, medical spas, and other providers.

Our brand has reached a 5-year milestone, and it was the perfect time to refresh our branding and positioning (we changed a lot in 5 years!). We hired Brigade to help evolve our point of view, our language, and our look and feel across several verticals.

Brigade was one of the agencies recommended by our digital agency partner. We considered 3-4 agencies for the job and in the end chose Brigade because of the team energy and dynamics, their impressive portfolio, and their passion for the project.

The first step was a discovery process: they conducted a deep dive of all of our existing materials and interviewed key stakeholders (internal and external) about how they view the brand. This resulted in a brand audit and some initial thoughts for how we might evolve. We then started exploring (A/B pathing) the brand visual identity and language.

We primarily worked with the project manager, two Creative Directors (one focused on visuals, one focused on strategy & copy), and had constant input and contact with the Executive Creative Director as well.

While we haven't launched the official brand yet, the feedback along the way has been overwhelmingly positive. We've shared sneak peaks with various key leaders in the company and everyone has loved the evolution and elevation of the brand.

Since the start of the project, we've had weekly status meetings with the project manager and creative director(s). Outside of the weekly meeting, we also frequently communicate over email, and the response from Brigade is always timely. The project manager also does a great job reporting on progress and hours tracking - she creates a burn report each month (and upon request for additional reports) to help us understand how we're pacing on our hours. Overall they're very flexible, roll with the ball type of people, and have been very adaptable as the project morphed.

As far as creative agencies go, there's absolutely no ego. They're total team players and just really fun, easygoing people.

Nothing comes to mind.