Way to grow! Collaborative branding model for small design enterprises

This master’s thesis is about creating collaborated house brands for small design enterprises. The purpose is to help small design brands collectively build their distribution channels to reach mass markets. Many small design brands struggle with lack of marketing and selling skills, face difficulties to build distribution channels, and are lacking of adequate resources. For this all, designers need support and, consequently, collaboration is suggested to be one solution. However, the existing design collaboration models are not meant for reaching mass markets. To facilitate building of the distribution channels, possibilities to collaborate in terms of branding were studied. In this thesis, the concept of collaborated house brand is introduced. Because of the house brand, the retailers could consider the collaboration of small design brands as one ‘company’. That would reduce the selling and marketing tasks of small design brands and enable the growth. The main aim for this study was to find an eligible branding strategy for establishing collaboration between small design brands. Moreover, there was a need to understand how to build and manage the collaboration. Another concern was in which ways the brand building process would be facilitated. Consequently, because such models did not exists in the context of small design brands, the grounds for the model were built on parallel existing theories and using interviews of the practitioners as a support. As a result, a five-stage model was created and a visualized tool to support implementation of the brand building process. The visualized tool is for to start building collaborated house brands and provide a platform to process the five stages. In this way, the designer-alike way of working with illustrations, sketches, and models was embodied to the model