How To Scale Your Creative Team with Subscription Services

The way we create, design, and work in the digital marketing space has changed dramatically in the past year. From the AI creative revolution to talent resource challenges, businesses and agencies are looking for scalable, flexible, and reliable solutions for staying ahead in the cyclone of marketing.

Your in-house teams can get overloaded when trends and scope of work change, or you land a major client and need to ramp up resources on the fly. Design, consumer, and search trends evolve constantly so staying relevant with a small team can be challenging. Hiring and training new talent for your in-house team is an expensive investment and can take months, and using a traditional agency can be even more costly.

So, how do you expand your creative output and scale your marketing teams? Let’s weigh the options:

In-House Teams
Scaling your in-house design or content teams can be challenging, from the interview to the onboarding process. Hiring additional designers and writers to meet every creative capability is expensive and impractical.

Creative Agencies
Involving creative agencies can be costly, slow, and inflexible, adding complexity and delays to project timelines. Traditional agencies often cannot meet velocity demands due to extensive onboarding processes and clunky workflows.

Freelancers
Working with freelancers can be unreliable and hard to schedule and scale, resulting in inconsistent quality and delays. Contractors require management oversight and ongoing training and often lack accountability and insight into the big-picture strategy.

Self-service Tools
Self-service solutions make incremental improvements to capacity and work mostly for simpler, repetitive tasks.

Subscription Services
A Creative- as-a-Service subscription helps teams, agencies, and brands get compelling creative at scale. With a fully managed creative team, a seamless collaborative platform, and a clear pricing model, the CaaS approach is the new way to get high-quality creative done.

Why CaaS is the Future of Creative Output for Brands and Agencies

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, the demand for high-quality creative output has never been higher. Brands and agencies are under constant pressure to produce content that captivates and drives engagement across platforms. This growing trend for sourcing creative talent and services has inspired a more agile solution: Creative as a Service (CaaS).

CaaS offers a subscription-based model that provides brands and agencies with access to a flexible, on-demand creative team without the overhead and constraints of in-house teams and unreliable contractors.

Here’s why CaaS is the future of creative scalability:

1. Scalability and Flexibility
One of the most significant advantages of CaaS is its inherent scalability. Unlike in-house teams or traditional agencies, which require long-term commitments and substantial investment, CaaS allows you to scale your creative needs up or down based on your current demands. Whether you need a comprehensive brand overhaul or a series of quick-turnaround social media ads, CaaS provides agility and efficiency.

CaaS also eliminates the typical bottlenecks with in-house teams, such as limited bandwidth or skill gaps. Instead of being confined to the expertise of a small team, you gain access to a broader pool of global creative talent, each with specialized skills that can be tapped into.

2. Cost-Effectiveness
Building an in-house team to meet growing creative demands can be time-consuming and costly. The expense of salaries, benefits, onboarding, training, and equipment adds up. Traditional agencies, while offering expertise, come with hefty retainers and additional fees that can strain budgets.

CaaS operates on a subscription model, allowing brands and agencies to predict and manage costs more effectively. This model reduces the financial weight by eliminating the need for ongoing overhead expenses, offering a more streamlined and ROI-friendly approach to sourcing creative talent.

3. Access to Diverse Expertise
In a world where creative trends and consumer preferences shift rapidly, having access to a diverse range of expertise is crucial. CaaS providers often employ a network of seasoned creatives from various disciplines—design, copywriting, video production, animation, and website development —ensuring that you have the right skill set for every project.

This diversity means that your brand’s creative output is always fresh and aligned with current trends, something that can be challenging to achieve with in-house teams or freelancers who may have limited exposure to industry shifts.

4. Speed and Efficiency
Time is of the essence in the digital age. Traditional agencies, with their layered approval processes, can slow down the production timeline. Freelancers, while flexible, may not always be available or able to meet tight deadlines.

CaaS platforms are designed for speed and efficiency. With a subscription model, you can bypass the lengthy onboarding and briefing processes typical of traditional agencies. The on-demand nature of CaaS means you can get your projects started—and finished—faster, allowing you to stay ahead in a competitive market.

5. Focus on Core Business Activities
By outsourcing creative needs through a CaaS subscription, brands and agencies can focus on what they do best—whether that’s strategic planning, product development, or customer engagement. Instead of getting bogged down in the day-to-day management of creative projects, you can leave it to the experts, ensuring high-quality results without diverting attention from your core business activities.

In an era where content is king, the ability to produce creative at scale is a game-changer for brands and agencies. While traditional methods have their merits, Creative-as-a-Service offers a modern, scalable, and cost-effective alternative that aligns with our fast-paced market. CaaS not only gives you direct access to top-tier creative talent but also the flexibility and efficiency needed to keep you ahead of the curve.

Why The Shed Creative?

I like to think of us as outside the agency, a partner that seamlessly bolts onto your team. The Shed Creative goes beyond the traditional model, becoming an extension of your in-house marketing department or agency. We offer end-to-end graphic design and content services for a variety of industries, from hospitality and food brands to education and the environment. 

Led by marketing and design renegades, The Shed offers a range of service capabilities, including branding, digital advertising, website creation, product packaging, and content- powered by a flexible Creative-as-a-Service membership plan. With our CaaS model and collaboration platform, The Workbench, The Shed is your partner to energize your output and help you stay relevant in a fast-moving world. With a monthly subscription, you get unlimited access to skilled creative talent, efficient project workflows, quality control by subject matter experts, and a best-in-class project management tool for oversight.

For more information on our services and plans, or to schedule a demo of The Shed Workbench, contact Mike Speiran, Head of Business Development, at mike@theshedcreative.com.