Our clients have always attached great importance to a continuous, long-term design strategy. For some years now, this trend has also been increasingly evident at the business level - design retainer is the keyword that Gerhard Seizer from WILDDESIGN-Shanghai explores in this article.

One problem faced by leading business managers around the globe is the same and omnipresent - too little time and too many tasks to manage at the same time. One of these tasks, regardless of industry, is building and maintaining a strong brand.

Everyone knows that this task is extremely important. But where should you start, what priorities should you set and where can you use the budget most profitably? Should you work on new product packaging, a website relaunch or rather on product brochures?

To solve this problem as elegantly as possible, WILDDESIGN offers to work within the framework of a design retainer. A fixed team of our designers works on the various tasks, plans them in context and ensures that they are completed on time - for a fixed monthly fee, which is measured against the calculated working time and schedule.

The process:

1) Recognize and classify what needs to be done
2) Set deadlines
3) Work on the tasks
4) Define new tasks
Many of our clients want to reduce their own personnel costs and outsource design and brand management to an external supplier at a calculable cost. Among other things, a design retainer can also mean that WILDDESIGN acts as the company's art director for a period of time. This involves training and educating an in-house team that will later work independently.

One example of a design retainer we are currently supporting is our collaboration with the Demag Plastics Group, a leading injection molding machine manufacturer in China. But there are also several successful examples of design retainers in the medical technology and consumer goods sectors in Germany.

The design retainer model also means that the collaboration does not just focus on a single project, where the learning curve is very steep and the corresponding effort on both sides is very high. In this way, a well-established collaboration can develop over several projects, which allows mutual understanding to grow and makes the work results particularly accurate.