|
The team behind Kimp launched our first design-based business in 2003, as digital marketing was starting to blow up - www.bannersmall.com. BannersMall is an ecommerce shop that allows marketers to order web banners. There weren’t many services offering banner design online at the time, and so the team grew quickly (from 2 guys in Canada to those 2 guys + about 30 amazing designers in Bangalore, aka India's Silicon Valley, where the creative scene is booming) and had the opportunity to serve a ton of different clients.
As clients started asking for more services, we eventually expanded our offerings to include 3D rendering, motion graphics and website design and development. And we zeroed in on serving the real estate industry in particular. It was a great experience getting to support clients through the real estate boom in Canada, but then came the bust. And suddenly all of our clients were scaling back their design budgets, and we were trying to figure out how to pivot.
We had an incredible, hard-working team. And we knew that there were still so many other industries that needed ongoing design services. We weren’t about to give up on ourselves or our clients. It was a tough year, but we tried a few different models, and then decided that productized design was the best way for us to make our services accessible to clients across industries. Kimp came to life at the end of 2018.
Today we serve clients in over 15 countries, ranging from agencies, and SMEs to entrepreneurs and startups.
We’re a design company because we love how design allows brand stories to be shared in impactful ways. And by offering it is as productized service, instead of a high-priced, custom, a la cart option, we get to serve clients across industries, around the world. Our clients span entrepreneurs and startups to SMEs and agencies and it’s amazing being able to support all of the different kinds of projects they work on.
Right now, we have our sights set on expanding our team, so that we can offer more coverage to our clients. And improving the overall client experience through new tools and service enhancements. Beyond that we see ourselves continuing to expand globally, working with clients in different regions to support their goals, and offering more services that help our clients scale more efficiently. Those may be related to design or just to productivity in general.
Unlimited graphic design means not facing the limitations of working with a single designer (whether they may be an in-house designer, or someone hired for each project). By offering a team to each client, they get access to different styles, can make unlimited requests and get unlimited revisions. We work through our clients’ requests daily, between Monday to Friday, providing them with anywhere between 2-3 designs per business day on average. All for a flat monthly fee.
With Kimp, clients get to work with the same design team on an ongoing basis, throughout their subscription. So, they don’t have to explain their brand and vision each time they start a new project as they do when they work with different freelancers and agencies. Also, our pricing structure helps our clients with budgeting as we charge a flat monthly fee.
We cut out the bells and whistles that come with working with more expensive services like rush delivery and round the clock communications. We focus on providing print and digital graphic design services, Monday through Friday and nothing else.
And each of our teams serves several clients, ensuring that they each receive their daily guaranteed outputs. This means that we’re kind of like an Uber Pool for design – because our clients are sharing a resource (i.e. their dedicated team), they get to where they need to be, in a little bit more time, for a lot less money.
There are some types of design that we don’t work on and some types of design which we do focus on. We focus on the types of design projects that can be completed at scale for our clients so that we can help them with getting through a higher volume of projects.
We don't work on projects like full websites, videos and 3D rendering as they often need a lot of back and forth, involve many stakeholders with conflicting priorities, and are just not needed as often as the types of graphic design that we do focus on for our clients. So, we leave those to the experts in those areas.
We average about 2-3 designs and/or revisions per business day (this’ll just depend on whether the revisions are minor or completely new concepts being requested, and of course the scope of each request). We’ll take more time with complex projects like custom illustrations and ebooks than we will with web banners and social media posts, and we discuss this with clients once we have their requirements for a given request.
Our clients own the creative work completed for them. And they are free to use the creatives we design for them in any commercial or non-commercial application they’d like. We don’t disclose any information about our clients, or share their projects, without their permission. So, for instance, when we display work as part of our samples, that means we’ve received permission from our clients to do so. Some of our clients like to think of us as their secret weapon when it comes to finishing design projects. And we're cool with that :)
We work on multiple brands, and our clients can request to have multiple team members added to their Trello boards to help manage all of their requests too.
If you like a particular designer on your dedicated team of 3 designers, you can definitely request that your designs are completed by that particular designer. Your Project Manager will make every effort to prioritize your designs being completed by them. And they’ll also make sure that your other 2 designers review the designs that you’re particularly happy with, so that they’re also prepared to design accordingly.
Clients can make and manage design requests via Trello or email and we provide guidelines for the types of information to include. We also try to guide clients through the process as well, especially during our free 7 day trial when they’re using Kimp for the first time. We know that not everyone has a lot of experience with creating design briefs or working with designers, so we’re also available via live chat at www.kimp.io to help.
We design using Adobe Suite software – Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator. We provide our clients with source files so that they can tweak the designs as they need to.
Absolutely. You can request to have additional team members added to your account at no extra charge. Design and marketing are often collaborative efforts for any business. So, we built that option into our service.
Let us know more about your client’s workflow and we’ll let you know what’s possible. We’re always open to looking at new integrations and productivity hacks. If there’s a way we can work with you on that, we’d love to chat. You can drop us a line at hello@kimp.io to submit an inquiry.
We don’t provide rush service in general, but if you make a request to your Project Manager to expedite a project, or to bump a project up in the queue for completion, they’ll do their best to accommodate within our business hours. If your request comes through too late in the business day, as your other projects are already being worked on, or there simply isn’t enough time to finish your urgent request, we’ll make sure we prioritize it for the following business day.
One-off design requests are something we are definitely looking at fulfilling for clients. We haven’t yet rolled that out, but for the time being if you’ve got an inquiry about a one-off project please drop us a line at hello@kimp.io.
Since we work with a lot of great clients, we get the chance to work on a lot of interesting projects. But the thing that makes us say “this is great” most often is hearing from clients about how we’re helping them scale. A lot of our clients just don’t have the ability to hire a designer on an ongoing basis or to source out new designers for each project. So, when we get to hear that we helped to get a new business idea off the ground, or to scale a design agency that was previously unable to, or to help a social venture reach even more people with a positive message, we feel pretty great about that!
