Opportunity
Creatives are filmmakers, photographers, designers, architects, illustrators, artists, stylists, production companies and small studios. The Creative Industries are characterised by a large number of very small enterprises. 90% have fewer than five employees. Each creative’s portfolio is how they win new clients, how they ace job interviews and how they gain exposure and recognition for their work.
Creatives are poorly represented - almost all creative’s need to build an audience to get discovered. The impact and value of their work is diluted by noise across all digital and social channels. Continually evolving web technologies and the difficulty of coding websites from scratch holds back progress and is demotivating. Generic, unfocussed website builders are inadequate tools for both showcasing great visual work and amplifying creativity.
My Scope
Co-Founder & CEO
—Fabrik
Stakeholder
—Fundraising
—Investor Relations
—Board & Advisor Relations
—Community Management
Corporate
—Data Protection, GDPR, InfoSec Policy
—Financial Management & Forecasting
—Employee Policy
—Team Management
Digital Product Development
—Product Strategy
—Design System, UI/UX
—Roadmap
—Go-to-Market (GTM) Strategy
Brand & Marketing
—Brand Strategy, Mission & Vision
—Brand Identity
—Campaign Promotional Design
—Partnerships
Product Summary
A Fabrik portfolio website builds itself by importing content from existing services and uses intelligent technology to display it beautifully, on any device. It’s the fastest way on earth to build a beautiful, powerful portfolio website. And it’s simple to use. Signup to launch-ready in minutes.
With smart image analysis, a two-tier customisation model with themes and page-level layouts, carefully designed typography and styling, Fabrik was designed to look great from it's default settings and gracefully enhance creative work with playful customisations. From zero to hero in no time at all.
—One-step connectivity
Fabrik works best when importing media from creative services our audience already use. We built one-step connections to Vimeo, YouTube, Instagram, 500px, Soundcloud, Sketchfab, Spotify, Wistia, kinescope, Bunny, Simian, Dropbox and many more.
—Adaptive presentation engine
Fabrik's customisation engine determines page layouts, colour and styling choices by analysing content. Suggestive onboarding and industry-leading customer support help creatives get the most out of Fabrik.
—Instinctively usable
A sophisticated and very focused content model completely removes creative block and is impossible to break. Creative content remains untouched to make customising and refreshing the look of a website a delightful and rewarding experience anytime.
—Design System
Palette
The palette is anchored by a trust-led blue primary and a dark navy UI, creating a stable, foundation typical and understood within the ecosystem. This ensures clarity, readability, and focus - especially important in a content-heavy environment, while allowing the brand to feel unobtrusive. Surrounding this core is a fluid range of analogous hues from teal through to violet, primarily expressed through gradated flat colours. These two colour directions introduce a sense of creativity, motion, and flexibility aligned with a creator-led audience.
Functionally, the system is highly semantic and behaviour-driven: blue guides primary actions, green confirms success, orange signals caution, and magenta/red highlights errors or destructive actions. These familiar mappings reduce cognitive load and support fast decision-making. The palette balances structure and expression, blue builds trust, gradients inspire exploration, and selective high-contrast accents direct attention - resulting in a system that supports both efficient workflows and emotional engagement.
Semantic & Symbols
The typography system is built on a Perfect Fifth modular scale, creating a clear, harmonious hierarchy that balances expressive display type with highly readable body text. Large-scale headings prioritise Karla, a more characterful sans-serif - giving the product a subtle editorial, creative tone, while body copy and UI text rely on clean sans-serifs (Open Sans, Roboto Condensed) for clarity and consistency. This pairing reflects the product’s dual role: showcasing disparate creative work while remaining a functional.
Semantically, the system is tightly structured and behaviour-driven. Distinct roles (Display, H1–H4, paragraph, caption, and UI labels) are consistently defined ensuring predictable scanning and readability. Fabrik’s core blue is used selectively for titles, links, and interactive elements, reinforcing hierarchy and guiding user attention, while neutral tones maintain legibility against the dark UI. Buttons follow the same logic: primary actions are bold and prominent, while secondary and tertiary actions reduce visual weight but remain consistent in scale and spacing.
Overall, the typography balances usability and brand expression. The modular scale ensures rhythm and consistency across layouts, while the mix of sans-serif fonts communicates a blend of creative sophistication and digital precision. This results in a system that supports quick comprehension and navigation, while still feeling tailored to an audience of visual creators.
Impact Typography
The promotional typography system shifts from functional clarity to expressive, high-impact communication, derived from earlier use of Open Sans, Inter and Borna make organic evolutions. Inter’s neo-grotesque design, tall x-height, and open apertures make it highly legible and adaptable across sizes, particularly in digital environments. In contrast, Borna introduces personality: a geometric, Swiss-influenced sans with distinctive ink traps and a subtly technological tone, designed to feel both contemporary and expressive. Impact fonts create a deliberate tension between precision and character.
Visually, the system leans into scale, weight, and layering as primary tools of impact. Large, cropped headlines dominate compositions, often overlapping or repeating to create rhythm and motion, while colour is used boldly to segment hierarchy and inject energy. Borna’s structure holds up under extreme scaling, Inter is supportive. The stylistic expression reflects a clear shift from semantic hierarchy (UI) to visual hierarchy driven by composition and contrast.
In a promotional context, the typography communicates confidence, creativity, and cultural relevance. The combination of Inter’s neutrality and Borna’s distinctive form language allows the system to flex across campaigns - editorial, product marketing, or brand storytelling - without losing coherence. Psychologically, it balances clarity (Inter) with memorability (Borna), using scale, repetition, and colour to capture attention quickly while still anchoring the message in a system that feels modern, digital, and design-literate.
—Customisation
Intelligent Themes
With theme design led by myself and with bespoke input from some of the most incredible talent in the industry - with years of experience in finding the perfect way to present our own work, we used state of the art web technologies and techniques to make sure all of our themes make creative work shine; from mobile and tablet devices, laptops and desktops and anything else we can lay our hands on to test them with.
Each theme is packed with a variety of one-tap layout presets to fine-tune how project content is presented. From grids of small, medium or large thumbnails to stacks, magazine layouts, gallery slideshows and fullscreen options - finding the perfect fit for each project or job is simply a playful matter of tapping from layout to layout and watching images, videos and text content seamlessly morph to fit the layout. And the best news of all; Fabrik's presentation engine handled layouts independent from content on a page to page basis, so one portfolio could use any amount of project layouts across a body of work - meaning that if one project looks better in one layout then the user was free go with layout selection per-project.
—Group, tag, link
Fabrik includes advanced tools for categorising and tagging all kinds of work, making it possible to represent an entire roster of talent or present massive portfolios of work with thousands of projects - and to set out projects in whichever way makes the most sense to each creator.
—Infinite Portfolio Levels
Within Fabrik work projects can be arranged into multiple portfolios - so users could create and manage portfolios in any way they see fit; by subject, by discipline, by date - whatever makes the most sense to them. Portfolios can even contain sub-folios, giving each creator complete control over where their projects appear on their site.
—Private if you need it
Sharing contact sheets and progress work couldn't be easier. Toggle projects from private to public or protect them with a password and they're good to go.
—Clever Images
Smart focus automatically centers cropped images to interesting subjects such as faces, strong colours or objects. With easy manual edits each creator has the final say in how their thumbnails display.
—Add, sort and share
Documenting and sharing process is made simple with Fabrik's powerful blogging tools, collecting work into series or galleries. Fabrik is malleable; and made to work the way each creator works.
—Community
Frictionless Creativity
How did we get here? We are creators. We've been designing and building showcasing tools for a number of years. In this time we've come to understand exactly what creatives want; something that is easy to use, affordable and presents creative work in the most elegant way. The more we created the more we learned. We added features when they were actually needed and removed the things that weren't being used.
We created a service that we wanted to use, that our friends wanted to use, and we aimed for something that creative people all around the World would want to use.
—Celebrate Every Day
Fabrik's brand strategy was established by building a narrative that celebrates our community daily. By putting our users first we leveraged our unique independent position to build a reputation for promoting their craft, sharing their wins and increasing their audiences.
Our industry-leading customer support was designed to be there when our user needed it - removing blockers in realtime and encouraging portfolio progression via guidance from the team and through our knowledge library.
Fabrik Heroes
Celebrating extraordinary world-leading talent from the Fabrik community, Fabrik Heroes was an ongoing long-form interview format with creators at the top of their professions across all creative genres.
Each Hero showcase endeavoured to get behind the work and understand what made each creator tick - exploring the background, process and motivations that come together to execute great work.
60
Creative careers showcased
Maker Series
Each monthly Maker Series is a deep dive into a specific project with one of Fabrik's creators.
Interview format blog posts sought to lift the lid on client and production processes, what actually goes into the production of a creative work or project, set life, studio skills and tips and tricks of the craft - from established leading professional creators.
55
Creative projects explored
Fabrik Conditioner
Twice-weekly showcase activity across Fabrik's social channels of a project or image or video that caught our eye from the community. Quick amplification, an ocean of great work to show off.
Fabrik Conditioner was collected together each month into a blog post celebrating all of the wonderful stuff creators had been sharing through the month.
750+
Creators showcased
Portfolio Complete
Each Monday our social and owned channels would get a makeover. Fronting all of Fabrik's profile banners across Meta, Pinterest, X, Ello and our own linker site would be a freshly launched creative talent from the community.
Fabrik works best when new talent shines and Portfolio Complete was a long-standing celebration of emerging talent across the platform.
500+
New portfolio sites showcased
—Community
Partnerships
Born out of London’s film and design industries, Fabrik’s evolution was guided by the input of the creatives that use the platform. Community-first and founder-led, the team were free to create partnerships and initiatives using the full infrastructure of the platform - to enable and democratise creativity in any way we could dream up together.
Reviews
As a fresh contender on the scene, Fabrik stood apart from competitors with a concise featureset aimed at a more niche audience that could leverage the platform to achieve better results in a faster, more playful way than general purpose builders
—Campaigns
Fabrik's showcasing pillars were established around celebrating our community with campaigns delivered daily to quarterly via our blog, creative partnerships and social channels. By placing our user's content at the center of our brand strategy we were able to leverage our unique independent position across paid channels and our own reach to build a reputation for promoting their craft, sharing their wins and increasing their audiences.
2022 - 2024
Build It Like
An evolution of the Ready, Site, Go! campaign bolstered with insights from 12+ months performance marketing analysis. Build It distilled Fabrik's proposition and was deployed across Meta, Pinterest and Twitter properties to focus audiences into unique creator buckets leading to tailored landing pages.
Build It passed our funnel metrics for viable CAC:LTV ratio, click to trial, and trial to subscriber conversion rates - meaning we could scale the campaign as far as our MRR would allow. We staggered creator groups to allow testing and refinement, adding exposure to more creative people as the campaign progressed.
2020 - 2022
Ready, Site, Go!
With each promotion a snapshot in partnership with one of Fabrik's incredible creative talents, Ready, Site, Go focused on the speed and simplicity of making and editing a portfolio site and aimed to encourage creators to get started; taking advantage of Fabrik's playful onboarding experience.
Deployed against a backdrop of confusion and uncertainty in the Creative Industries, this campaign marked the beginning of Fabrik's measurable activity on partnerships with creator publications such as Future, Its Nice That, Dribbble, Ello - and later through paid search and social channels. The campaign provided benchmarks from which to test ideas and form a framework to evolve delivery effectiveness.
2018 - 2020
Show Your Colours
Built around the simple concept of making Fabrik a transparent enabler for exceptional creative work, our first paid social and paid search campaign evolved out of direct input from our initial user base. Fabrik's brand and digital properties were designed to showcase great work up front.
The style of this campaign evolved as we worked on partnerships and bespoke builds with filmmaker and vfx audiences and began engaging with publishers and communities on an international scale. As the campaign progressed we found a symbiotic aesthetic for Fabrik that complimented all kinds of creative work within Fabrik's customisations engine - allowing unique creator styles to coherently shine alongside our brand messaging across many different digital channels and formats.
—Productivity
Executive Summary
Fabrik is an award-winning SaaS product generating +$0.5M ARR with 75% gross margin, $1000 LTV, an incredible 7-year customer lifetime and organic 16% YoY growth. Loved by creators at the top of their game to students looking for their first gig, the platform is positioned for scale with proven CAC-LTV ratios, clear opportunities for featureset and revenue growth, and passes the Rule of 40.
With an impressive 25% trial to subscriber conversion ratio, Fabrk helps creators go from signup to launch-ready in minutes by importing content from major creative services like Vimeo, YouTube, Instagram, 500px, Soundcloud, Dropbox and uses intelligent technology to display it beautifully, on any device - making layout and styling choices effortless. The stack is fully current-gen with minimal operational overhead.
Workflow, Productivity & Management
My leadership role for Fabrik covered governance and stakeholder oversight as well as hands-on creative product development, brand and marketing oversight. My productivity and management workflow for operating these scopes and facilitating activity with external suppliers and partners included tools from Xero, OpenAI, Notion, Dropbox, Slack, Microsoft and Google. Creative and ideation activities used tools from across Adobe Creative Suite, Figma, Miro, Krea and Apple Creator Studio. Analytical tools from Google, Umami, Delighted and Later helped inform and manage ecosystem sentiment.
Performance
25%
Organic Conversion Rate (Sustained)
1.7%
Churn Rate (Sustained)
Profitability
ARPA (Monthly)
$
12
COS (Monthly)
$
3
Stack
Fabrik is an enterprise multi-tenant website builder platform with full redundancy and a 99.99%+ uptime. Fabrik is hosted on Microsoft Azure cloud platform with AWS load-balancing and Raven Cloud data platform. The service uses Azure storage coupled with Imgix visual media processing, optimisation and delivery. Payments are handled via Stripe and Paypal. Fabrik is a purpose-built bespoke solution but uses components and services from Duende, Imperavi, Redis and Approximated. Intercom is operating as a CRM and within the onboarding flow. Google Marketing Platform and Umami help us understand how our audience are discovering Fabrik and interacting with the platform.
Platform
5.25
Minutes Visit Duration
80+
Countries (Sustained)
