Nine people. Nineteen brand systems. One portal each.
Aperture replaced a Dropbox-and-WeTransfer delivery flow with one branded portal per client, started exporting pitch decks straight to PPTX without losing kerning, and entered the autumn pitch season with capacity they had not had in two years.
Aperture & Co.Pitch deck
Prepared for the boardPitch deck
Pitch deck handoff2.5d → 3h
New business won3 / quarter
Client delivery tools5 → 1
Pitch deck handoff2.5d → 3hfirst complete export
New business won3 / quarterautumn pitch season
Client delivery tools5 → 1WeTransfer, Dropbox, Frame.io → portal
The challenge
A studio held together by upload bars.
Aperture runs nineteen active brand programmes at a time, weighted toward visual-heavy work: a Lisbon natural wine label, a cultural institution's identity refresh, a fintech consumer rebrand. Every project shipped through some combination of WeTransfer, Dropbox replays, Frame.io comments, Loom voiceovers, and a presentation deck nobody could open on a phone. The brand system for each client lived in InDesign template files that only two of the nine people knew where to find.
The pitch-stage work was worst. A new business deck took two and a half days to lay out from scratch, even when the writing was solid by lunch on day one, because the team rebuilt typography and grid for each new prospect. Two pitches lost in the same quarter were lost on schedule, not on work. The partners agreed something had to change before the autumn pitch season.
“Honestly, the first week I missed the WeTransfer dopamine. The little upload bar, the timer, the email confirmation. By month two I'd realised what I actually missed was a sense of progress, and clients clicking through a portal we built gives that back faster.”
Felix BrandtFounding partner, design direction, Aperture & Co.
The approach
One brand kit per client. Wired in once.
Aperture rebuilt every active client as a Docsiv workspace, with the brand system loaded as a per-client brand kit: type stack, colour roles, voice rules, three reference layouts. Studio drafts new deliverables against that kit, so a treatment deck for the wine label opens in the wine label's typography by default. The team stopped touching kerning at the file-open stage and started reviewing layouts that already looked correct.
Client delivery moved to branded portals on aperture.studio. A motion brief, the final reel, the static cuts, and the invoice all live in one place. The client clicks through in order. The studio stops writing variations of 'find the latest in the Dropbox folder called FINAL_v3_REAL'. Pitch decks export to PPTX natively, with the brand fonts embedded, which closed the longest-standing complaint in the studio's feedback log.
The outcome
A season they'd have under-resourced.
Pitch deck handoff dropped from two and a half days to about three hours for a complete export. The studio entered the autumn pitch season with capacity for seven new business conversations instead of the usual four, and converted three of them, including the largest single project in the studio history.
The delivery stack collapsed from five tools to one. The Dropbox bill is still on the statement, mostly out of habit, mostly empty. WeTransfer is gone. The little upload bar is not missed.
Per-client brand kitsBranded delivery portalsNative PPTX exportCustom domain
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