Wunderdogs

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the head of marketing, branding, and communications for a currency trading solutions provider. We accelerate global access to frontier markets through an innovative infrastructure. By leveraging technology, we’re able to lower the costs and increase the speed of business payments to and from frontier markets, specifically Africa.

What challenge were you trying to address with Wunderdogs?

We started out as a cryptocurrency company more or less. That’s how we positioned our brand identity. As we moved away from that sector, we were looking to create a new brand and position the company alongside trade, finance, and cross-border payments. We needed to establish a new brand with a new identity.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Wunderdogs helped us through the entire rebranding process. Their team developed a position statement to describe where we stand in comparison to other players in the market. They also created a new name, which was a tall order. The name had to signify trust and reliability as well as be interesting and dynamic. On top of that, it had to be ethnically ambiguous but also have African roots. Their team did a lot of research and came up with 50 names. We went through them and thought about what names were appropriate as well as how we were positioning ourselves. We liked two names and Wunderdogs came up with different brand identities accordingly. Unfortunately, we decided to go with a third name, but their team was patient with us. They created a brand book, which included all the logos for our mother and sub-brands. Currently, we’re looking to do more work with Wunderdogs. 

What is the team composition?

We worked with either four or five members of their team. Our main point of contact was the founder, but we also worked with a designer and a researcher.

How did you come to work with Wunderdogs?

A peer agency referred Wunderdogs to us. They’re a female-led company, which we thought was awesome because we love working with vendors that are also diverse and inclusive. Their team was clear about costs and came highly recommended by the peer agency that we love and work with frequently, so it made sense.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent between $15,000–$20,000 on their services

What is the status of this engagement?

We hired Wunderdogs in May 2019 and finished the project in August.

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

Our investors love the new brand. Wunderdogs produced high-quality work and went above and beyond, especially with the naming exercises. They were communicative, transparent, and collaborative. When we felt that they disappeared during the research process, we communicated our concern and they adapted their efforts quickly. We’re a complex company with specific demands, which their team adjusted to well.

How did Wunderdogs perform from a project management standpoint?

Wunderdogs was and still is responsive. In the beginning, the research process wasn’t what we expected exactly so we had a conversation with them. Then, the founder came on to manage the project herself and it was amazing.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Wunderdogs provided personalized attention. Their team really dug deep to understand our business and our clients.

Are there any areas they could improve?

When we first started working with them, we would’ve liked to see their progress more clearly. Rather than only showing us a final report, we wanted to have checkpoints along the way. Wunderdogs adapted their process quickly.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

I highly recommend working with Wunderdogs. They have a really great process. If you’re not sure where to start, I would definitely recommend them.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the co-founder and CEO of an education nonprofit based in Baltimore. We work with high school students and run programs on design thinking and entrepreneurship.

What challenge were you trying to address with Wunderdogs?

We had a simple Squarespace website that we needed to update. We also wanted to create a unified brand identity.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Wunderdogs designed and then launched our new website from end-to-end. The team added links, forms, hover over and clicking functionalities, and animations and graphics. 

They also created a brand guide and folder with various design elements and icons that we can use to create flyers and other documents in line with our brand. Other deliverables included a slide deck template and some one-pagers. 

What is the team composition?

We collaborated with Daria (CEO, Wunderdogs), Natalie (Creative Director, Wunderdogs), and Olga (COO, Wunderdogs). They may have had 4–5 people in total working on the project.

How did you come to work with Wunderdogs?

Daria was a classmate of mine at business school. Shortly after she started Wunderdogs, we needed the types of services she offered, so I reached out to her. We talked about how they could customize things and make the work fit our feel. We looked at their portfolio and discussed budget constraints, and we ultimately decided to work together after that. 

How much have you invested with them?

My company spent $15,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our work with Wunderdogs was from November 2018–February 2019.

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

Wunderdogs did awesome work, and they did a great job personalizing things to our company. We’re happy with the website, which is well-integrated, and all of the other end products, from the one-pagers to the deck. People compliment us on the website, which makes us look more professional as an organization and really communicates what we do. We’ve also gotten good feedback on our branding and slide deck. 

Overall, their team was great at creating design elements that look awesome, fits into our branding, and have become identifiable. We use the design elements to make fliers and brochures; just recently, we used them to make Instagram posts for Giving Tuesday. 

How did Wunderdogs perform from a project management standpoint?

They did very well. We communicated via email and video calls. We also had a Google Doc to track their work, and they’d turn a task red once they finished it or use strikethrough if they couldn’t complete it.

Throughout the project, we provided feedback on parts that they built, whether it was an icon or a web page. Their team did a great job incorporating that feedback, and they made updates on the fly. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

Wunderdogs was good at listening to us and not just creating what they had in their own vision. They drove a lot of things, but when we said that something they created didn’t fit or asked them to make adjustments, they were receptive to that feedback. Their team had a really good sense of design. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

Overall, they did a wonderful job. When I look back at our engagement, there are two big things I’d mention. First, it would be nice if they’d enabled us to make site changes on our own. Part of what makes the site look so nice is that it’s coded very well, but if we want to change something, a lot of it needs special coding. We can’t make simple backend fixes or updates, so there are elements of the website that have become challenging for us to keep live and updated.

Second, I think we should’ve reduced the scope of the project to reduce the cost. For all the things we got, I think they offered a really good market price, and their team deserved to be paid well for all the hours they put in. However, being in the nonprofit world, it felt like a high cost for something that was less essential to actual student programming and impact. That’s feedback I’ve gotten, especially from my board.

Any advice for potential customers?

Just be open and communicative. Share your thoughts, ideas, and inputs freely so that they can have that information and then design accordingly.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the VP of marketing for a Berlin-based FinTech startup that automates accounting for small businesses and their tax advisors. We have around 150 employees right now and mostly operate within Germany, but we’re looking to expand to other markets in Europe eventually.

What challenge were you trying to address with Wunderdogs?

We were in the process of completely overhauling our brand identity and internal and external collateral, like presentation and document templates, stationery, and so on. We were also rebuilding our entire website to better explain the product and value proposition, while maintaining a more visually consistent and elevated representation of everything. 

Before working with Wunderdogs, we had a very basic logo and font as well as colors and branding. We didn’t have a thoroughly defined branding architecture that could be easily shared and applied within the company and with outside vendors.  

What was the scope of their involvement?

We worked with Wunderdogs on revamping our brand identity and look. They also helped us build our website. We provided wireframes, design requirements, and copy, and Wunderdogs built out all of the different assets required. They also helped us implement those in WordPress.

They started off by doing a brand audit. They interviewed a couple of our stakeholders to gather information about how we saw the brand, the market, and our target customers. They did competitive research and pulled all of that together to describe the status quo and derive certain recommendations. In the process of reviewing that, they turned those recommendations into different design explorations. We made a couple of revisions and decided on one.

They started developing the first part of our brand book, and, based on that, we built out certain deliverables. We started with high-level web design and revamped some of the initial pages using an iterative process. Eventually, we built out all of the pages, implemented them, and went live.

From there, Wunderdogs built our Google Slides presentation template and a couple of smaller stationery collateral and templates. They helped us define the visual representation of our brand. We kept the logo but introduced a new font and colors, as well as a whole new visual illustration style. They proposed a modern and graphical illustration style and created our design language. All the applications are defined in the brand book at a high level, with fonts, colors, logo imagery, and illustration style. It’s a 30-page document with visual applications of how we’d design business cards, letterheads, and other stationery items, along with presentations, banners, billboards, and so on. They didn’t build out complete templates, but they illustrated the rules of what digital and physical use cases would look like, so that we can implement them ourselves using any agency.

On the website, they created a consistent look and feel that uses a lot of white and illustrates some abstract concepts, such as saving time with accounting standards compliance, peace of mind, and so on. They helped us keep these items approachable but still a bit more sophisticated, and they developed a couple of elements that we now use throughout our design, especially on the website, namely an outline illustration style that we use on all headers. There’s a more graphical style for all the benefits and product illustrations, which helps us show off screens or parts of screens to illustrate the actual product. Wunderdogs’ key contribution here was developing this design hierarchy and style and applying it to everything that was already there, and then helping us implement it from a technical standpoint.

What is the team composition?

There were 5–6 people working on our project overall, and we mostly interacted with two people. Olga (Co-Founder & COO, Wunderdogs) was our main point of contact and worked with a couple of illustrators and a developer. Oliver (Head of Client Services, Wunderdogs) joined later to help us with some of the planning and project management. There was another person involved in the Google Slides part of the project.

How did you come to work with Wunderdogs?

I went to business school with Daria (Founding Partner, Wunderdogs), and I originally approached her asking whether she’d have any recommendations on whom we should work with. Given that we were in Berlin and they were in the Bay Area, they weren’t my first choice. I thought it’d be easier to have a local partner than one across the world, and I also assumed that, because of their location, they’d have higher prices than those of our local market. 

Wunderdogs gave us competitive pricing and a short turnaround time. We started with a short, low-risk project, the brand audit, and their work was very convincing. 

How much have you invested with them?

My company spent $20,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Wunderdogs on the brand audit in May 2019. We decided to work on the website in June and July. All of the initial projects are finished, and they’ve delivered everything we wanted. 

We’re still using them for graphic design as needed. They developed our design language, so if we introduce a new feature or need more sophisticated applications, we use Wunderdogs instead of our in-house design team.

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

Everyone is happy with the outcome, and we have received great compliments on the website and the brand book from company management and even investors. It was quite a change from what we had previously. The website is fresh and modern, and it has a unique design language that everyone in the company can use to get started on their own content. The quality and value for money were excellent, compared to other agencies we’ve worked with, which would’ve probably charged 50–100% more for the same project, and wouldn’t have been as easy to work with. Our internal team feels prouder to work for the organization because our external representation is much more professional. 

Wunderdogs’ team members are like colleagues that sit on the project with us. We can just email them and ask for something, and they’re always responsive to feedback. They’re friendly, and I’m looking forward to continuing working with them. We see everything going in the right direction, and the company’s growing rapidly, but it’s hard to measure how much Wunderdogs has contributed to this.

How did Wunderdogs perform from a project management standpoint?

I was impressed by how fast the turnaround time was. We almost couldn’t keep up with their proposed pace of providing feedback items, briefs, and other parts, especially when building the website. 

They worked fast and had people all over the US and Europe, so there was always someone working in the right time zone. We’d assign them something before we left the office, and it got done by the time we got back in the morning. Whenever we had feedback or a request, they turned things around quickly, and they were very organized in terms of what was missing, what deliverables we should expect, and what feedback loops we had. They were proactive, organized, and honest. Whenever they said they’d deliver something, they did. I never had to send them an extra email asking for something.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They act like a startup, in the sense that there’s very little overhead, and we get to interact directly with the people working on our project. What impressed me the most was that I could ask them for an illustration, get it back that same day or the next, give them feedback on what I liked and disliked, and get an update a half-hour later. They’re not only fast, but also reasonably priced. Whenever we had to prioritize something or meet a tight deadline, they delivered good quality and worked within a reasonable number of billed hours.

They understand the needs and dynamics of startups. They’re not an agency that just serves multi hundred-thousand-dollar accounts, where everything’s complicated, takes a lot of time, and is expensive. Wunderdogs understands the way we work and the tradeoffs that come with running a startup. 

They have an 80–20 approach of getting things done now and revamping in a few months if the product or the strategies change. We didn’t have to explain how we’re different from a corporate customer with a 30-person marketing team and different processes and budget constraints. They got us from day one, and I found that to be very helpful.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They started structuring their project management differently, introducing someone to oversee the outcome of the deliverables and timelines as a core role. That person served as the main communicator, allowing the creative designers and executors to focus on their work. In the beginning, it seemed a little more chaotic, and we didn’t know who was working on what and what timeliness they had. Over the last couple of months, we had someone to manage expectations. I don’t think there’s anything else they haven’t addressed.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

I recommend having an initial rapid prototyping session with them, depending on what the client needs. For us, it was a brand audit with high-level design directions for us to consider. They got back to us with how they saw us and our market, and where they thought we needed to go. 

Doing a rapid exploration before committing to multiple deliverables and projects is very helpful; it can build trust and a consistent language. Doing so also provides a sense of whether they’re the right partner before getting halfway through a project and realizing they don’t understand your vision or what you’re trying to get out of the project. It can help the client structure their own thoughts and be more disciplined and specific about what they want. Wunderdogs asks all the right questions, which helps the client clearly communicate what they need.

Please describe your company and your position there.

Cofounder & ceo

For what projects/services did your company hire Wunderdogs?

Design for content, basic branding, promotional materials

What were your goals for this project?

Beautification

How did you select this vendor?

Word of mouth

Describe the project in detail.

Deck Logos/branding Research Discussing options & iterating on content

What was the team composition?

me + 3 ppl from Wunderdogs

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

Excellent work - fully satisfied, 10x our design capability

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Smooth communications and workflow. We used email + zoom.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

They take a customer-centric approach to all projects. Great designers + significant early-stage company experience = They know what they're doing and how they can help to depend on stage of growth of the company

Are there any areas for improvement?

No