The studio
CREAT/RS · Strategy and design · Freiburg im Breisgau
CREAT/RS is a strategy and design studio for people whose business should look like their work. We make the frame, and the picture is always yours.
We learned what a brand is for by selling.
CREAT/RS grew out of e-commerce. Before the studio designed brands for anyone else, its founder built three brands of his own, grew the business and sold it. The studio started from what those years taught, and it is less glamorous than most agencies make it sound.
A brand does not live in a presentation. It lives on a product page between twenty similar products, in a photo that someone looks at for a second, and in a shop that either earns trust or loses it within a few clicks. If it does not work there, it does not work.
From sellers to artists.
For years we worked mostly for e-commerce sellers, on the brand around a product, the packaging and the photography that has to carry it. Then more and more creators came to us, and the job changed, because a personality cannot be borrowed from a competitor.
Today we work for personalities, publications and labels. Some of that work hangs below.
What the practice taught us.
Every project goes through the same four steps. They are not a method we invented for a pitch deck. They are what was left after years of doing the work with our own hands.
- i.
Start with the person
Before we design anything, we find out what the founder stands for and what makes the work theirs. Everything else is built on that, so it is the part we never shorten.
- ii.
Find what has to go
Most brands carry things that belong to someone else's blueprint, such as a tone copied from a competitor or a promise that every shop makes. We take those out first, because nothing of your own will fit next to them.
- iii.
Let the form grow
Strategy, identity and presence are built from what remains. That is why the result looks like the founder and not like a template, and why it still fits years later.
- iv.
Prove it where it sells
A brand only counts when it works on the product page, in the photo and in the shop, so that is where we judge the work. A presentation that wins a meeting is not the goal.
You talk to the people who do the work.
Every project is led by Philipp, who founded the studio, from the first conversation to the final file. For photography, development and print we bring in a small circle of specialists we trust, so the work stays in a few hands. That is also why we take on only six projects a year.
Philipp · Founder