A good full time senior designer or art director in NZ will cost you $85k p/a at minimum. There are employer responsibilities, holiday pay, sick pay, hardware & software that need purchasing, office space and more - and all this remains when you have quiet times.
Outsourcing your creative and design requirements means you only pay as and when you need the work with quick turnaround times, no contracts and monthly invoicing.
I work with one of the largest franchise chains in NZ and do all of their creative design from the smallest to the largest projects and including the local area marketing for every franchisee. This sees a professional consistency for their brand across the board.
Over the last few years, this has only cost them between $29k and $39k per year, depending on how many jobs they've needed doing. A 50%+ saving.
Going for a less experience or skilled designer to save on money is often a short sighted solution. You can't guarantee quality work that will get the results it should and your brand could be damaged by unpolished attention to detail and lacklustre creative which ultimately leaves you with less customers, less profit.
Incase you needed any more convincing of the cost saving and added value, see what my clients have to say..."
"We used to run all of our design work through a large design and print company. It was fine, however depending on what other work they had on at the time the turnarounds were very inconsistent. Their design team also had strict 9 – 5 hours, so if you needed something done urgently overnight it wasn’t going to happen. Bridget seems to run flexible work hours, often working at night which suits us working in a fast-paced retail environment with ad-hoc urgent jobs popping up.If something was urgent, I would let Bridget know and it would be in my inbox in the morning.
However, the best thing about working with Bridget is using her experience and creative input. Quite often I would roughly brief a job that I would have a visual of in my head, but is hard to communicate via email. Bridget generally understands what I am asking for first time, supplies the job with quick turnaround and additional concepts based on her suggestions, which most of the time are better than what we had originally had in mind. With this, my briefs to Bridget have become more vague overtime, as I know she understands our brand and it’s in our best interests to use her creative experience and flair whenever we can. This is something that I didn’t rely on with the previous design and print company, there were often frustrations and multiple back and forth communication until we would have to settle on a design as we would run out of time.
Bridget has consistently produced great bespoke creative for our national and local campaigns, keeping things fresh and exciting for our customer while still staying true to our brand.
Bridget is also very transparent with the time that she works as well. If something only took her 20 minutes she would only charge for 20 minutes. Where as other designers that I have worked with have a minimum fee regardless of the job.
I really enjoy working with Bridget and feel she is a real asset to the marketing side of our business."
I've got an awesome mix of clients but there is always room for you. Get in touch if you want to make some magic!