On EQT Ventures’ investment in Frontify, maximizing brand consistency and efficiency
I’ll start this post by quoting one of my beloved colleagues:
Johan Svanström <johan@eqtventures.com>
Mon, Sep 30, 9:23 AM
to Ted PerssonDo you know where I can find our brand guidelines? Specific ones for Ventures, or for EQT? I’ve seen a bunch of different variants of the ‘Q’, but just so I get it right, do we use our own proprietary version of the ‘Q’ form factor, or does any of them work?
Johan (and the countless other people I’ve gotten similar emails from during my life), this one is for you. And for me.
With more than 120 employees in St. Gallen, Switzerland and NYC, Frontify has built the most user-friendly and comprehensive brand management platform to help people like Johan, but also companies like Facebook, Dyson, Lufthansa, Vodafone, and Allianz to be on top of their brand assets, to maximize brand consistency and efficiency.
We’re very happy to join Frontify’s journey as the team announces their $22.3m Series B-round today, led by EQT Ventures, with participation from existing investors, including Blossom Capital, Datartis Ventures, Thomas Dübendorfer, Tenderloin Ventures, and Myke Näf.
Our journey with Frontify started a few years ago, when noticing that more and more designer and brand strategist ex-colleagues started sharing Frontify links instead of PDFs, fonts and EPS files. Just like myself in my past life (or ok, profession - leading creative and design teams), they had grown frustrated spending massive time and effort perfecting the building blocks of a consistent brand experience, only to find them being implemented inconsistently.
Countless outdated PDFs, wrong typefaces and colors, low resolution artwork, creative “interpretations” of the design guidelines had become status quo. And as the world is becoming more fast paced, more touch points (many of which digital) are introduced and creative professionals choose to work project based (in many cases as freelancers), maintaining brand consistency is harder than ever.
That’s why Roger Dudler and the team created Frontify as a central hub for brands, serving as a digital asset management portal that includes dynamic, modularized design systems, and brand assets that can be edited, maintained and shared with others across the company and beyond.
In other words, it encapsulates the whole branding process in one platform, making it the single source of truth for employees and collaborators to stay #OnBrand.
As the branding and design technology stack is being formed, being the platform where the single source of truth for brand design lives, is a pretty good position to be in.
And Johan, here’s the link to our brand guidelines on Frontify.
Shoutouts to the rest of the EQT Ventures deal team: Ashley, Konstantin, Henrik, as well as Bold Scandinavia for creating the EQT Ventures brand identity and, of course, Frontify for allowing us to host it and share with the rest of the team.
