The Bravemark Story

This is the story of how I became a designer, met my cofounder Marcus and decided to build Bravemark to disrupt the brand identity design space.

It might seem like a natural choice for us as designers to launch a design-focused startup such as Bravemark, but it wasn’t a straightforward choice when we got started. However, now that we’re deep into it, it all makes so much sense.

Launching Bravemark has become more than a mission to make brand identity guidelines more practical for other designers like us.

It’s become something that has connected us deeply with our community, where we can play a part in innovating the industry we have always belonged to.

As a kid, I was always interested in computers; I loved playing games on the Nintendo and tinkering around with MS-DOS on a Pentium 286 I had. I guess that was where my fascination for computer graphics and software originated, even if I was unaware of it then.

My first encounter with design and development at a professional level was around the year 2002 when I was 23. I landed a job as a sales agent for a local web-design agency in my hometown Marbella located on the Spanish Mediterranean coast.

My job was to find potential clients with poor websites, call them up, tell them how we could improve their site, and arrange a meeting to talk further. After meeting with them, I would send them an estimate, guide them through our solution, and try to close the deal.

Business was booming, and everyone wanted to jump on the internet and have a website, and we were the best agency on the coast. Life was good.

I enjoyed my sales job. I was always moving around, getting to know all sorts of business owners, but more importantly, I was learning hands-on from designers and developers about everything we were building. I learned about the latest technologies and saw how they designed and coded things from scratch.

Back then, websites were nothing like they are today; there was no responsiveness to worry about, Cake PHP was the framework of choice, and the concept of user experience was in its infancy.

I became very interested in the whole creation process and kept thinking that if I learned to design and build websites on my own, I could make more money and have my own business.

I guess this was the very start of my hunger for entrepreneurship.

I started learning the basics by designing simple business cards, flyers, and logos when I was off work. I also wanted to build websites and spent loads of my free time learning HTML and PHP through trial and error.

As time passed, I learned I was better at design than writing code. In 2003 I quit my sales job and started working for a local listings magazine where I was in charge of designing the whole magazine In Quark Express. It was an insane amount of work, and I was not well paid, but I didn’t have any real professional experience, so for me, it was a great way to learn.

Sometime later, I started to work for a small design agency where I designed many brochures and logos for real estate clients. I was getting better at design, clients and my bosses liked my work, and things were looking good.

Print design became my specialty, and I was designing magazines, brochures, leaflets, and triptychs left and right. It was a lot of work that I put out during this time, and the agency grew to become a print shop where I took the role of design lead. I was very passionate about my work and also worked on any freelance jobs that would come my way.

It was around 2005 that Freddy, whom I had become friends with in the first company I worked for, that introduced me to Marcus. They were best friends that migrated from Sweden to live in sunny Spain and were also crazy about designing and building cool things on the Internet. Both of them were super talented in design and development; I really looked up to their work and the stuff they were producing for the agency they worked for.

I can’t exactly remember how it all started, but we all had the same idea in our heads. We wanted to be the best design studio and not work for anyone else.

Little after that, we all quit our jobs and joined forces to create a company called Quickform. We became a one-stop shop creative studio and provided services such as brand identity design, print design, web design & development. However, what really set us apart, was our specialization in interactive Flash websites, which was the hottest thing at the time.

We did a lot of projects back then, and some really amazing stuff came out. We had one creative agency from the US that continuously outsourced a great part of their workload to us, which included implementing top-notch interactive websites for renowned brands such as Amnesty International, Reuters, Coca Cola, Disney, AOL, Sonny, JCPenny, to name a few.

We were super ambitious, and apart from all the work we were putting out, we always had a side project in the works. Although we did lack knowledge in some other areas such as marketing, strategy, and business development.

In 2008, the recession hit Spain pretty badly; business suffered, and I was experiencing a bit of burnout which made me decide to leave Quickform and become a freelancer. I wanted more autonomy and to better manage my time. However, I kept working with them on specific projects, but for me, it was a more independent approach, which would also give me the time to explore other opportunities.

I knew then that I wanted to use my know-how to build a digital product that could be used by millions of people.

Around 2013 when the iPhone apps were exploding, and skeuomorphism was taking all designers by storm, I made my first serious attempt at launching a startup.

Organic food and farming was another passion I had been cultivating for a while. So I used some savings and invested them in an IOS developer to help me build a B2C marketplace app to connect organic farmers with end clients called Growcrowd.

As I ventured on, many things came up that I was doing wrong, and a little later, I joined a startup accelerator which became a mind-opening experience that I highly recommend to any first-time founder.

A year later, I pivoted to become an organic e-commerce that brought in revenue from day one. Of course, it did not come without its difficulties, and a year after that, I decided to close down the business, but that is a story for another time.

Some years later, Freddy migrated to the UK and ended up working for some of the world’s most important creative studios and consulting agencies, including ThoughtWorks and Potato.

Marcus had become a freelancer and was working with some exciting brands, such as World Finest and Hallstein Water, building advanced custom-built logistics and CMS systems.

I had kept myself busy working with various startups as a founder while also freelancing. By 2019, I moved to Madrid to take on a job as a Product Design Lead in one of Spain’s most ambitious and fastest-growing digital product agencies called Acid Tango. There I managed the design team and worked with many developer teams building products for hot Spanish startups that included Wallbox, Happets, Libben, and Yubick.

Things were good, busy times, indeed. Then the Covid happened and I moved back to my hometown while working remotely for the agency.

It was then that I started spending more with Marcus, and we started to seriously talk about launching a startup and that we should join forces again and build something useful and cool that we could be proud of.

As designers and makers that we are, I believe it is our innate dream to build something for ourselves and not for a client.

Something that we can give all our energy, our passion, and strength.

After having experienced a few failed startups, we decided to be very analytical in our approach and look through all the potential ideas we had. There was a lot to go through; Marcus had some ideas he had been pondering for a while, and I had my ever-growing notebook of ideas. However, there was one that stood out that we both agreed on the potential and feasibility.

While working for clients in the past, we had both been asked to create what we then called a media page or press page. This was a web page where someone could download a brand’s logos, photography, and brand items. Usually, they would be password protected and given to marketers and designers that needed the assets to make their designs.

It seemed to us like there was no service offering a simple solution where you could showcase your brand assets and simultaneously download them.

We both saw a huge value in this idea and that it would be relatively easy to pull off easily with Marcus’ in-depth knowledge of CMS systems and modular frameworks.

We kept thinking about the idea for many months and discussing the ins and outs while we chilled over a terrace restaurant we like to hang out in.

As we continued our conversations, we became aware that this was also something that brand designers were lacking, and the whole industry was simply neglecting it.

As a product designer, there are an overwhelming amount of tools for presenting and prototyping your apps and websites. However, it seemed that there was nothing like this for brand identity designers and that few companies were trying to solve this problem.

The more we went down the rabbit hole, the more we saw the enormous opportunity we had at hand. So we started exploring some UI layouts to get a better idea of the core functionalities we would need.

One thing that we decided from the very start was that it should be something utterly simple.

We didn’t want to build another design tool where the designer would have to spend a lot of time designing a new brand guideline layout. The idea was to make something easy that a designer of any level could use to make a brand guideline in a few minutes if they had their brand assets ready.

We envisioned it as a simple drag-and-drop UI with a few toggles to do a few design customizations that would allow you to create a branded experience.

As more and more creators are using mobile tools to create content and designs, we decided early on to fully automate responsiveness and make it so simple that there is just nothing to do. We don’t want designers to worry about breakpoints and testing to see if things will look bad in certain sizes. We just want it to simply work.

Another core concept we baked into Bravemark was that designers could not only use our tool to present their projects to their clients by sharing a URL but that it could become a way for them to hand off their brand identity projects when completed. That would not only mean that clients could download the assets from the brandpage but a series of other functionalities which we will uncover at a later time.

As we continued our exploration, we also came to the idea that brand guidelines should really be live documents and not static PDF docs and coined the term brandpages.

There is just so much power and flexibility in an updateable document than a doc that is tied to its moment of export.

This became part of our mission to disrupt the industry and promote a change in how brand identity guidelines get done. We firmly believe that online brandpages are the key to enhancing how brands and designers communicate and share brand assets and consequently improve the efforts of maintaining brand consistency.

We have now been more than a year in the making. As most of you know, we are still in beta and finishing off some of our core components before we do our official launch.

Both Marcus and I work as freelancers for a few clients, so it is hard to go as fast as we would want. However, our dream is to dedicate all our time to Bravemark, so that we can really move with the speed it needs. For that reason, we’ve started to look for investors that believe in our vision and can provide us with the capital needed to grow our team and move faster. 

If you are a designer and want to support our mission, the best thing you can do is sign up for our waitlist on bravemark.co with a link to your portfolio. If we like your work, we will give you access to the beta straight away so that you can start creating your own brandpages and giving us your feedback.

Hope to see you on Bravemark soon.