Presented by Brandpad: how to manage your portfolio of brands, with North, Matchstic and Gretel

Hello, and welcome back to The Finishing Line, presented in collaboration with the digital brand guidelines platform Brandpad. Over the course of six articles, we have been talking to the creative industry’s finest about what is often seen as one of the most challenging, fiddly, frustrating and complicated elements of brand design: getting it over the line. For our season finale, we’ve gone one step further, speaking with Atlanta-based creative agency Matchstic, Brooklyn-based design studio Gretel and London branding studio North about what happens once a project is finalised. Namely, how do you manage your portfolio of brands and, likewise, where is the client-creative line drawn? “We think of brand management as being a shared responsibility with our clients,” Partner at North, Stephen Gilmore, tells us, “we aim to help ensure that appropriate tools and platforms are in place so that the management side of things is as painless as possible,” a practical sentiment shared by Matchstic. “Ultimately it’s our clients who manage their brands,” Design Director Brit Blankenship simply puts. “They’re doing the work day-in and day-out while we’re like special ops, coming in to partner with their teams at key moments,” she details, checking in and nurturing the brand’s lifecycle, depending specifically on Matchstic’s unique relationship with them. “We have clients of all different shapes and sizes,” Blankenship recalls, “so sometimes there’s a large in-house team and sometimes there’s no creative staff at all,” meaning the client is more reliant on sustaining the identity IRL. “No matter where a particular team fits on either end of the spectrum,” she adds, “our first job is to build beautiful, hardworking brand tools with systems and usability in our minds from the outset,” ensuring they’re optimised for and understood by the correct audiences.