Opportunity
Through our creativity we make sense of our world. Our capacity to create thrives when there are no boundaries, no borders and no limits. It is inclusive and diverse, it is individual and cultural, it is local and global but most of all it is free to everyone.
Through 2017 we witnessed a year in which worldviews turned inwards and the social mediastream started to overflow with confused, divisive opinions. As an initiative housed within Fabrik's community outreach, I recognised an opportunity for a new way of supporting and championing creative and artistic thought.
We built Fresh to realize and nurture a new way to reward creativity.
My Scope
Co-Founder & CEO
—Fabrik
Brand & Marketing
—Brand Strategy, Mission & Vision
—Brand Identity
—Campaign Promotional Design
—Sponsors & Partnerships
—Awards Design & Delivery
Digital Community Development
—Awards Programme Strategy
—Digital Properties & Submissions Design
—Judging & Scoring Criteria
—Team Management
—Programme Management
Programme Summary
Our mission was to support and celebrate talent. We used our platform to empower aspiring creatives to share their work with a global community, regardless of where they live, work, or what they’re creating. The awards were an opportunity for fresh creative voices to shape our culture and future.
As well as our awards, Fresh was designed to showcase important and forthcoming trends within the creative industries and in the way we generate and consume creativity. This is a core value that helps us form insights, patterns and concepts from the entire pool of entries.
—Fresh 18
Fresh 18 showcase saw 75 winning entries from more than 1600 approved entries. Fresh celebrated 19 gold, 29 silver and 27 bronze winners, including outstanding entries from Sevi Iko Dømochevsky, Pierre Fudaryli, Shiouwen Hong and Anthony Capristo; artists that are challenging and reimagining the human condition at the juxtaposition of technology and art.
Fresh 18 showcased the work of more than 200 creatives with each dip back into the entries pool - building a significant, permanent record of the culture we live in.
—Fresh 19
The second year of the programme introduced a new Carbon award to showcase notable work that scored above award grade within creative categories. With a total of 126 winning entrants from 1500+ entries, Fresh celebrated 11 gold, 24 silver, 25 bronze winners and 99 carbon winners. Featuring gold awards for John Robert Brown, Mike Fisher, David Mrugala, Boris Seewald, Aiste Stancikaite and Jan Vrhovnik.
—Curator Series
As a dedicated initiative run by Fresh's editorial team, Curator Series served to proactively surface both rewarded and unrewarded work from the entries pool to form trend insights throughout the year between awards. As a way to celebrate more creative work and to energise the judging body, Curator Series encouraged inquisitive exploring through the pool of submitted works with one eye on the horizon.
Fresh 18
Supported by a series of visual assets created for Fresh 18 by 3D designer Shannon Hoyne, the system runs two parallel moods sharing one skeleton. The first is dark and electric: charcoal grounds, pixel-dispersion textures, draped 3D forms, with acid green and magenta hitting hard against the black. The second is soft and editorial: blush and bone backgrounds, rose-gold wireframes, marbled gradients, palm shadows, and mint accents. Both lean heavily on rendered sculpture, generous negative space and a gallery-like sense of restraint; the imagery does the heavy lifting so the typography can stay still.
The logo is the calm anchor that holds both worlds together. Set in Helvetica Neue Italic, the wordmark in regular weight beside the numerals in a heavier italic cut, with a macron over the E that works as a typographic signature and linkes to the website URL. A Swiss workhorse in italic - rather than a custom display type - keeps the mark disciplined and readable at any scale; the italic gives it forward motion, the macron gives it ownership.
Generating interest
Early creative direction for the programme focussed on a simple call to actions over the F18 assets.
Prior to promoting the awards, our first task for the initiative was to bake in Fresh's mission and start building a judging and advocates group through creative community and platform connections.
2017
Building a community
Ready for submissions
To capture creators at home across the holidays and during cold winter days, Fresh was slated to go live in early January - just in time for new year reslutions.
Fresh's first phase site was a message of intent and a submissions vehicle to enable creators to submit work through the submissions window.
2017
Building a presence
Every participant acknowledged
Fresh was not an initiative that came with funding. From the outset I had to consider how we'd reward judges and winners alike for their contributions without a budget.
The first gift was a unique hand-printed poster to mark the judging panel. Screenprinted after-hours in East London with the amazing help of Joe Gibson Studio and G.F. Smith papers, the initial run formed the basis of how we'd mark the awards to come.
2018
Building rewards
Fresh Future is an ambitious project but the message is simple; to level the playing field. Creativity has no boundaries, no borders and no gender. Fresh 18 is a new start.
To promote the call for entries a series of carousel posts were built out and shared widely to creative audiences. Partnership communities at Ello, Working Not Working, Creative Mornings and Glug also carried the message further - using the No Borders assets to head up editorial and promotional material.
After judging and winners announcements a series of promo posts we built out for each genre's gold-winning work. As Fresh stepped from a direct awards programme towards it's permanent phase as a showcase and record of the work, these promos served to bring new creative eyes to the site and build an audience for reviewing the work and drawing inspiration from it.
Building on the work i'd already done in creating unique screen-printed posters for the judging panel, I wanted to use our partnership with G.F. Smith to produce a series of limited run screen-prints that personally reflected each award winning gold, silver and bronze creator alongside the category they won.
Sourcing A2 gold, silver and bronze metallic papers from the Peregrina Majestic range, I designed a two-colour screen-print for each award group using a shared solid black layer along with a spot varnish layer for each award group - making the gold, silver and bronze posters each unique to their group.
Printed with Alasdair Manson of Manson's Press in Hackney Wick, these posters formed the centrepiece of the awards package sent to each awarded creator. They remain an astonishingly beautiful token of the inaugural year's work. it was a great pleasure to receive photos of the posters in situ by the creators over the course of the year.
Fresh 19
Taking learnings from across the year since Fresh 18 was launched, it was necessary to simplify some of the scope for it's second year. Presented as F19 to build recognition from thumbnail format upwards.
Fresh Future was built on a simple vision statement: Advocate for the new. This statement informed the mission for the awards and showcase initiative and framed the messaging that united both the judging group and the entry group.
By delivering hard-copy mission statements to both these groups in the printed material we sent them, the initiative had a foundational purpose from which to build on. For F19 the original mission statement was retained and simplified.
Free to enter and open to all creatives F19 was the largest and most relevant global creative awards initiative to discover and celebrate outstanding talent; recognising creativity regardless of boundaries, borders and gender. F19 was a call to empower new visionaries, to championing creativity and an opportunity for fresh creative voices to shape our culture and our future.
For the artistic direction of the year's awards I wanted to bake in the gold, silver and bronze award symbology and build an aesthetic around precious metals - which we could deliver on through the award phase. I asked Fresh 18 graphic design category winner Owen Gildersleeve to create an original series of paper sculptures that encapsulate the rare minerals aesthetic. Along with photographer Chris Hoarse, Owen built paper-based scenes with low-poly style folded geometric shapes and coal-black organic backgrounds.
I then adopted the low-poly aesthetic in wireframe format to produce an iconic for the awards materials.
Carrying on from the rare minerals theme I adopted a topographic background asset that included unique river/vein detailing for each of the proposed award and judging groups - resulting in five topographic backgrounds to cover gold to bronze, carbon and judge presentation materials. In use, this detail suggested a 'fingerprint' aesthetic to position material within each group as unique and individual.
Saying less
With simplified messaging, supporting promotional assets played into the intrigue of pushing less explanation and instead relying on the inquisitive nature of it's audience to learn more about the initiative and take part.
2018
Delivering the call to entries
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.
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
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 within the team and with external 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)
