We love to design... a slick look for a start-up training company

We love to work with start-up businesses. We find that start-up's get the most out of our services because they recognise that our input can add value and they tend to trust our judgement. Start-up businesses are also a sponge for information and expertise and it can therefore be very energising working with them.

Gemma and Anita of Global Hair Training were no exception to this. Having just launched a hair training company through which to deliver their own extensive expertise, they needed an eye-catching, slick and professional image to roll out their company. As with many start-up's, budgets were tight but this never changes the standard of the final results - we just ask the client to do a bit more of the legwork than normal!

Oliver started off by creating a simple and low cost logo. The ladies gave us a rough idea of what they had in mind and we created is graphically so our creative input was hugely reduced, thus minimising costs in this area. However, even a quick job by us looks hugely professional!

Gemma and Anita really liked the idea of a shaped card with spot UV for maximum impact. By using an offer on our StarMarque business cards coupled with a voucher for free shaping, we managed to get the most out of the budget allocated to the cards. The cards look fantastic and the ladies are getting a lot of attention and positive feedback from them.

We then sent Gemma and Anita off to get together the content for their hand-out and to source imagery. They did a great job of selecting images that really enhanced the overall look.

The final stage of the project was their website. The brief was to create a website that would create an online 'shop front' that hairdressers and the like could go to, off the back of the business cards and hand-outs, to find out more about Gemma and Anita and the courses they are running. With a tight budget, we had to come up with quite a few work-arounds, including PDF click-through's rather than link pages.

The site is a simple solution and whilst it is not intended to drive business (since it is not SEO'd), it does provide an excellent solution for the stage that GHT is at currently.

We weren't the first choice for GHT, as the following feedback shows, but we think that Gemma and Anita are pleased they found us in the end:

"We were originally recommended to use printing.com by a friend but, thinking that all printing.com's were the same, made the mistake of going to a store closer to us. We had our meeting but felt that our ideas weren't taken seriously and no feedback was given so we approached the team originally recommended in Sheffield. We found them very approachable and we had a number of meetings with them in which they gave us great ideas to promote our business. The design was fantastic and we've had lots of positive feedback about the business cards, hand-outs and website, all of which have a very professional look and feel."