Cinnamon

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the managing director of a company called Smart Build, a construction software startup.

What challenge were you trying to address with Cinnamon?

I was looking for someone to develop my vision and idea for a mobile app.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Cinnamon built and developed a fully-functioning app and was able to launch it in the Apple App Store.

We started the project with a scoping of the project where I described my idea and concept. They then introduced one of their team members who had a background in construction and architecture, so they took my concept and essentially created a real program that implemented all my ideas and requirements.

Furthermore, they provided us with logo redesign, research, consultancy on the best practices, and maintenance and support.

How did you come to work with Cinnamon?

We came across Cinnamon through a referral.

How much have you invested with them?

We invested over $25,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked together from February–December 2021.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We had to hold their hands throughout the development process and help them understand our expectations and what we really wanted. Despite all that, they were still able to deliver a working app and meet all our expectations.

We had to workshop a lot of ideas for the product and they were proactive in recommending ideas, so the partnership was more of a collaboration.

How did Cinnamon perform from a project management standpoint?

They performed well from a project management perspective, as they communicated consistently, adhered to our schedules, and kept us updated throughout the progress of the project.

We typically interacted through email and video calls.

What did you find most impressive about them?

While I can’t compare them to other providers, we were still impressed with the cost-effective solutions they provided us.

Are there any areas they could improve?

It would be great if they can simplify technical terms and describe the project in a way that non-technical clients can understand.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

I advise you not to be rigid and be more flexible and open when it comes to ideas.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CEO of pinetree.marketing, a digital marketing agency.

What challenge were you trying to address with Cinnamon?

We needed their team’s web design expertise.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We’ve engaged Cinnamon to support our web design efforts since we’re mainly involved in digital marketing. Their team creates landing pages and designs different websites for our clients, depending on their industry and needs.

Our usual collaborative process starts with brainstorming and scoping — we present our client’s specific requirements to Cinnamon’s team, and they’ll proceed with conducting thorough research on the client’s industry before they kickstart the design process.

What is the team composition?

We work with a team of 2–5 resources, depending on the project.

How did you come to work with Cinnamon?

I found them online while searching for potential design agencies to onboard for this project. I liked their organized approach and reasonable price points, so I chose them among their competitors.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent over $50,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our ongoing engagement with Cinnamon commenced in March 2017.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

Our clients are happy with the increased engagement and positive feedback they're getting for Cinnamon’s design work — their affirmations are clear indicators of the team’s expertise and understanding of our clients’ businesses.

How did Cinnamon perform from a project management standpoint?

We communicate via email and Skype.

What did you find most impressive about them?

We’re most impressed with their commitment to meeting our clients’ industry-specific standards.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I can’t think of anything off the top of my head.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Be detailed in outlining your goals and requirements — it shortens the process and helps their team to focus on delivering tailored services for your business.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the director of product at a fintech platform and service startup.

What challenge were you trying to address with Cinnamon?

We’re a startup, and we started with a great idea and product-market fit. We only had limited users when we started, but as we scaled, we realized that we needed our platform to be significantly better to allow self-onboarding. 

Our app enables online sellers to create a visual plan for their supply chain. Nowadays, that has soared into relevance because of everything going on with global supply chains. We wanted to give our users an intuitive custom tool that mapped, managed, and maintained their supply chains. 

We had been providing a lot of manual and hands-on support on our user’s onboarding process. It became challenging for us to see the app as something that could live without being handheld by our team. As such, we needed help with our app’s UI/UX.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Cinnamon helps us step up our UI/UX. They are working with us to reimagine our product for a wider audience and make it a self-service solution. They define the different components of our web-based product, understand the different use cases, and design various screens and interactions. They use Figma in creating their designs. 

Cinnamon is constantly reining us towards best practices to ensure our updates don’t create more work for our team. They’ve helped us to gradually release our team from providing hands-on support.

We were still developing our brand when they started, so Cinnamon used general guidelines and neutral coloring. However, once our branding partner stepped into the picture, Cinnamon had to update their work. They were great at providing input to the other agency about the site’s UX. 

What is the team composition?

I work with an account manager, a senior designer, and a junior designer. 

How did you come to work with Cinnamon?

Cinnamon was recommended to me. 

How much have you invested with them?

We’re spending around $7,500–$9,000 a month.  

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in January 2021, and it’s ongoing. 

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

Thanks to Cinnamon, we’ve made the shift from manual to self-service onboarding. As a result, our onboarding completion rate has improved. 

How did Cinnamon perform from a project management standpoint?

Cinnamon is excellent at project management. We’ve never experienced issues about timelines and budgets. They are easy to work with.

We video conference with Cinnamon’s team twice a week, and we regularly communicate through email. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

Cinnamon’s UX expertise is impressive. I know they also provide aesthetic and other design solutions, but they are focused on the user journey and interactions. 

When you’re an early-stage startup trying to prove product-market fit, you have to ensure your features shine over other details. It’s of the utmost importance that your core capabilities are there and running smoothly. Users need to know how to get to them, and they need to understand the logical flow of your app. Cinnamon has been helpful in this regard.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I can’t think of anything. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Dedicate time to the project, and make sure they understand your team’s knowledge of your users as quickly as possible — that’s going to enhance their work. They can work off of how much you share and provide to their team. 

Once I’ve equipped them with the necessary information, we’ve seen improvements on their deliverables, and they started to actively participate and suggest things. 

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CEO of an AI software company.

What challenge were you trying to address with Cinnamon?

We needed help with frontend development.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Cinnamon mainly focused on frontend development and the utilization of frontend software tools. They built the dashboards that enable us to deliver data to our clients.

What is the team composition?

We initially talked to their CEO. There were a couple of project managers and developers we were in touch with throughout the entire project.

How did you come to work with Cinnamon?

They were one of the first agencies that contacted us, and they gave a good impression when they went to see us.

How much have you invested with them?

We invested about €400,000 EUR (approximately $480,250 USD).

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in January 2017-January 2019.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We’re very happy about the outcome and process of the large software project.

How did Cinnamon perform from a project management standpoint?

We used Trello. We had a joint board where we added bugs and issues where they took care of them.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The results were very good.

Are there any areas they could improve?

The scheduling of the project was lacking a bit, but I think it was common with software projects. It was hard to define the schedule accurately before the project itself.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

It was extremely important to define every single piece of expectation before starting — everything went smoothly thereafter. The whole project design and specification were extremely important.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the founder of a platform to help online coaches deliver their programs and content.

What challenge were you trying to address with Cinnamon?

We needed help with UI/UX design for our platform since we’re building it from the ground up.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Before we started, I wrote a wireframe for the application. They took that and turned it into a full-blown design that our programmers can work off of.

What is the team composition?

We worked with one designer and a project manager.

How did you come to work with Cinnamon?

I found them on Upwork. They had impressive testimonials, a good portfolio, and great style. Working with them was a no-brainer.  

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent $17,000 so far.

What is the status of this engagement?

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

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

I can’t give them enough credit. I’m super happy with their work. They delivered upon expectations. They took ownership of the project. They don’t feel like a contractor; it feels like they’re part of my team.

How did Cinnamon perform from a project management standpoint?

They’re great. In a way, they’re better than my own team. We use Workplace for communication. We share links and designs through Figma and Trello.

What did you find most impressive about them?

It doesn’t feel like I’m just another project. It feels like they’re 100% committed to the results. Our designer listens to my ideas, and by the next week, it’s there. It’s always spot on.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, nothing comes to mind.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

If you like their portfolio and style, there’s no one better than Cinnamon for the job. Give them a small project to see how they operate; you won’t be disappointed.

Please describe your company and your position there.

We are an online service that pays you out for your unused Gift Cards. We are seeing major growth, as the demand for cash exceeds the desire of keeping old, unwanted gift cards. I am their Graphic Design & Digital Marketing Specialist.

For what projects/services did your company hire Cinnamon Agency?

We hired Cinnamon to create a brand new website from the ground up, including a brand new design for the brand and website, a new user journey as well as brand new components for upcoming features of our website.

What were your goals for this project?

Our goals for this project were to create a new and engaging user experience for our customers with visuals that greater express our company vision and our brand voice.

How did you select Cinnamon Agency?

We selected Cinnamon because we like their design style based on projects they’ve worked on in the past and we thought that it would fit the look we wanted for our new website.

Describe the project in detail.

In September we started planning the scope of our project as well as some rough deadlines as to when we would like to have certain deliverables completed. We started with the creation of the pages related to the new features of the website as this required the most work. After the completion of the wireframes, low fidelity, high fidelity prototype, and mobile prototypes we moved on to the creation of the rest of the website using our current website’s sitemap as a base and building off of there and making improvements when suggested by Cinnamon.

What was the team composition?

Our team consisted of myself, our CEO and Co-Founder, Lead Developer, Sales, Marketing and Customer Success Director, as well as the Project Manager Anamarija and Lead Designer Hrvoje from the Design Cinnamon Team.

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

At the time of writing this, we have been able to easily translate the designs provided to us by Cinnamon into a fully functional and responsive website which will be launching very soon. Cinnamon was able to provide us with access to designs and assets that made it extremely easy for the developers to translate the designs into reality.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Cinnamon always came prepared with questions and answers so we never felt out of the loop on the project. Cinnamon would always get us what we needed on time and always made sure to clarify with us if something was unclear.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

The designs created by Cinnamon not only for our website, but also our new company branding really blew us away, and we think that they were able to perfectly capture our company vision through their designs.

Are there any areas for improvement?

No.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CEO of Corrily, a startup that provides price optimization services to SaaS companies.

What challenge were you trying to address with Cinnamon Agency?

We outsourced completely our UX/UI development to Cinnamon.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Cinnamon provides us with UX/UI design. They’ve done different services, ranging from website usage flow enhancement to creating animations of all kinds for UX/UI work. The team has done extensive user research — interviewing around 50 end users — and has looked into our competition.

The website is running on React, however, Cinnamon didn’t recommend any specific technology and just delivered the actual design files. They’ve made the website incredibly simple to implement.

What is the team composition?

The team composition varies depending on the specialization we need for each phase. We have worked with over 6–7 designers.

How did you come to work with Cinnamon Agency?

I found Cinnamon on Upwork and saw they had a perfect rating, so I contacted them to work first on a personal project. I had been very satisfied with the partnership, so when we launched Corrily, we engaged with their team for the initial design. We got paired up with a really good UX researcher that managed the job quite well. Because of that, we decided to hire Cinnamon and rely on them for all of our UX/UI needs, instead of recruiting designers for our internal team. 

How much have you invested with them?

Our startup has invested around $15,000–$20,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our engagement started in November 2020, and it’s ongoing. 

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

Our website traffic has tripled thanks to their efforts.

How did Cinnamon Agency perform from a project management standpoint?

The project management is extremely well done. They onboarded us with a Slack Connect Channel and assigned us a project manager. She checks on us and always makes sure to give us the resources we need. She also assigns designers depending on specific needs. 

We communicate mainly through Slack and have video calls on a weekly basis. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

I’m definitely impressed at the speed at which they operate. The team understands quickly our business needs and is able to put together designs in a week. All their work is fantastic; they can do anything that’s design-related, from animation to web design They have a broad set of skills and operate pretty independently. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

I can’t think of anything I’d have them improve. Maybe they could expand into copywriting. 

Any advice for potential customers?

It’s important for you as a client to be sure of what the project scope is and define it very well. The team is very good and gets the work done, tell them what you want from them.

Please describe your company and your position there.

Hello, I am Camille and I work in digital marketing at Attitude Hotels, a 100 % Mauritian (Indian Ocean) hotel brand, managing 9 hotels across the island and employing 1600 family members (staff).

I am responsible for the digital guest experience during their stay and coordinate the e-business department.

For what projects/services did your company hire Cinnamon Agency?

Our main challenges were :

• Our main paint points with the actual website 2.1
• Design Confusing differentiation between sections
• Quite monochromatic
• Very rigid in the look, very squarish
• Static feel to the website (no auto-animation present on website to catch attention)
• Not enough immersive home page.
• The HP does not reflect the strong Attitude commitments (cf. Positive Impact Movement)
• User experience: Lack of pictures in the Hotel Page (rooms, experiences,...) clickable to enlarge
• Difficulty for users to understand and differentiate our products/hotels (No graphic elements, or table, ...). It is challenging for users to be sure they have chosen the right hotel.
• Business: Not enough conversion oriented (complex navigation, lake of strategic CTA,...) Lack of booking engine entry at the bottom of the Hotel page

What were your goals for this project?

• Increase of qualified traffic
• Better online conversion
• Display of our new visual identity
• Neat and smooth user experience
• Display our new company purpose

How did you select Cinnamon Agency?

Initially we wanted to work with our previous UX/UI designer, but he was not available for this project. Therefore we did a first selection on Upwork of 2 UX/UI designers + one recommended by network. The selection process included our art director, the e-commerce manager and I.

Our criteria for choosing Cinnamon was the work done previously for other companies and the fact that they were an agency so it was reassuring due to our deadlines (a team vs a single person).

Also, our first call with agency helped us as we had a very good feeling which is the perfect starting point for a good collaboration.

Describe the project in detail.

We hired Cinnamon for designing UX & UI prototypes for our new website. My manager (e-commerce) and I, worked on a precise brief, shared some materials, websites benchmark, our personas + we arranged a call between our Art Director and the UX designer, Emili, so he could present our brand visual identity and each hotel visual identities.

Emili (Cinnamon) helped & advised us during the whole process, what we really appreciated because her goal was not to only satisfy us but also to make sure our website will be 100% optimized in term of UX/UI design.

She did as well a great research job in the beginning of the project as it was her first time designing a hospitality website. Same when we were facing difficulties at this design phase, Emili has always taken time to do some research and revert us with the best solution.

What was the team composition?

So the team was made of :

• our assigned project manager, Anamarija
• the UX/UI designer, Emili

The team remained the same over the time

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Our website is still being developed by our developer (agency we worked since 2015) so we do not have yet figures to share, but we received great feedbacks from our colleagues and our top management.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

The workflow was really effective. We worked on Trello, and received each week a reporting mail of job done and pending points from our side (if any) so we could tackle them the soonest.

For quick and fast communication process (ie. missing info or visual,...) we talked through Skype to not lose time. I would like to precise that we had 3 hours jet lag and we did not feel it at all. The workflow was really optimized.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

What we liked with Cinnamon is their organization and their web design skills. What we have been promised has been delivered. They did on they could do to help us with our tight deadline. We also had a great collaboration, working with Cinnamon was a real pleasure.

Are there any areas for improvement?

No Everything was perfect

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the founder of financial services firm that is pivoting from web to mobile and from investing to cash flow assistance.

For what projects/services did your company hire Cinnamon Agency?

We wanted dedicated UI/UX expertise versus having our development team handle the design.

What were your goals for this project?

Our goal is to nail the design in the first iteration. Ideally, as the app grows in usage, the feedback & wish list from the users will be on functionality instead of design/layout.

How did you select Cinnamon Agency?

We use Upwork and received approximately 50 bids. Out of those, 5 were short-listed and Cinnamon was selected as the finalist. We chose them due to their previous work, high ratings/positive feedback.

Describe the project in detail.

We started the project with discussing the app, the target user and providing access to the current app in development. From there, they assign us a designer who created the work flows, wire-frames, etc..

What was the team composition?

We had a project manager and lead . There were also other supporting members that stepped in for their area or when there was more depth needed.

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

We are on target to launch the application. The design looks great. We really appreciated the time the UI/UX lead took in understanding the application goals, re-working the the flow, seeking & including feedback from other users.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Great, their team ran with the project and reached out whenever there were questions or major design decisions to be made. The use Figma which worked well, especially in calling out areas or sections to discuss. The pass-off to the development team was flawless and they kept involved with the project through development.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

We hire experts for a reason, with other vendors - they require constant direction and signoffs on the most minor details. However, with Cinnamon, we really appreciated the attention to details and the ability to run with the project. They struck the right balance of when to ask or confirm something and when to follow their own lead.

Are there any areas for improvement?

As always, it would be nice to be done faster. But the quality was worth the wait. On our next project, I will use them for the development in addition to the design.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the Managing Director of a business development and financial planning consultancy firm headquartered in Brooklyn, NY. We hired Cinnamon Agency to undertake a strategy, user experience and user interface design and a prototyping project for a fintech mobile application.

For what projects/services did your company hire Cinnamon Agency?

We had to identify the right human capital resources and expertise to bring a mobile application to market.

What were your goals for this project?

Our goal was to understand how to build a financial planning mobile application.

How did you select Cinnamon Agency?

Our company went through about 7 candidates leading up to our decision to engage Cinnamon. Their breadth of experience within our targeted industry, positioning as a turnkey solution, human capital options and genuine ease of engagement proved to be the deciding factor.

Describe the project in detail.

We kicked off with a discovery meeting to analyze the competitive landscape, iron out deliverables and delineate a realistic timeline to project completion with structured deliverables. Once we kicked off the initial UX exercise we iterated on the path to completing high - fidelity wireframes, complete the UI and arrive at a branding story with a full working prototype.

What was the team composition?

We had one PM, one UX/UI lead and a supporting designer.

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

We are on target to launch our application as a result of the clear direction established through this initial engagement of the project.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Our project manager was a pleasure to work with and available as needed. We received frequent updates and communicated seamlessly throughout the entire engagement. Overall, I was impressed with the ability to meet deadlines, quality of work and ease of experience.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

I was blown away by the quality of the work, ease of workflow, and constant updates towards completion. Their people are top notch and genuine experts in their field.

Are there any areas for improvement?

None that I can think of.