50% Fewer Status Emails and 2x Project Throughput for a 10-Person Design Agency

Craft Agency is a boutique creative and design agency specializing in brand identity, web design, and marketing collateral for mid-market companies. With 10 employees including six designers, two project managers, and two account leads, the team consistently produced award-winning work. The problem was not quality — it was capacity.

Designers were spending nearly as much time communicating about projects as they were designing. Client emails asking “what’s the status?” interrupted deep creative work. Project files lived in shared drives that were poorly organized. Invoicing was disconnected from project milestones, causing billing delays and awkward payment conversations.

• •Clients constantly asking for project updates via email, phone, and Slack, disrupting creative flow
• •Project files scattered across Basecamp, shared drives, email attachments, and Slack messages
• •Designers spending more time on communication and admin than on actual creative work
• •Billing in FreshBooks completely disconnected from project progress, leading to delayed and inaccurate invoices

Nina Patel, Craft’s Creative Director, tracked the team’s time for two weeks and discovered that designers were spending an average of 2.5 hours per day on non-creative tasks: answering status emails, searching for files, updating project boards, and coordinating with the billing team. In a creative agency, that time has a direct cost — it is billable creative capacity that goes unbilled.

The client experience was suffering too. With a Net Promoter Score of 45, clients appreciated the final deliverables but were frustrated by the communication experience. They felt out of the loop, could not easily find shared files, and were sometimes surprised by invoices that did not align with their understanding of project progress.

Craft Agency deployed Dewx in just three days — the fastest rollout of any case study, made possible by the small team size and the agency’s eagerness to eliminate tool chaos. The approach was simple: replace everything with one platform where clients, designers, and the billing team all have appropriate visibility.

The key design decision was giving clients self-service visibility into project progress. Most “what’s the status?” emails are not because clients are impatient — they are because clients have no other way to get the information. By making progress visible in Portal, Craft eliminated the need for those emails entirely.

Craft Agency completed the full migration in three days, the fastest deployment in our case study portfolio. The small team size and clear pain points made decision-making fast.

Client onboarding was notably smooth. Each client received a brief walkthrough of their Portal dashboard and immediately commented on how much easier it was to see project progress compared to the old email-and-Basecamp workflow.

For creative agencies, time is the product. Every hour a designer spends on admin is an hour of billable creative work lost. Here is how the math worked for Craft:

Nine additional creative hours per day across the team — that is the equivalent of hiring a senior designer without the salary, benefits, or onboarding time.

Creative agencies face a paradox: the work they sell requires deep focus, but the business of running an agency is full of interruptions. Client management, project coordination, and billing are necessary but directly compete with the creative work that generates revenue.

Dewx resolved this tension by automating the predictable parts of agency operations. Status updates, invoice generation, and progress reporting are all patterns that can be systematized. Dewx handles these patterns while leaving the creative, strategic, and relationship-building work to the humans who do it best.

The client-facing Portal was the single biggest driver of the NPS improvement. Clients do not want to feel like they are bothering their agency with status requests. By giving clients self-service visibility, Craft made the client experience feel more professional and less transactional.

The three-day implementation proved that tool consolidation does not have to be a months-long ordeal. When the replacement platform genuinely handles everything the old tools did, migration is mostly data import and team training — not complex integration work.