The company that explained itself better got the deal.
You never found out that’s what happened. Buyers compare before they ever contact you, and you don’t get to be in the room for it. I fix the case. I direct the identity, the website, and the message, so buyers find you, understand what you’re actually worth, and buy.
25 years in brand, web, and product design
School of Visual Arts, New York
Design work trusted by teams at
Microsoft
Strategy and brand work trusted by owner-led companies like
Maat Holdings · Schropp
Thirty minutes, then my read in writing. Free, including if the answer is that you don’t need me.
The gap
The work is strong. Reputation hasn't caught up yet.
You explain your business better in one conversation than your website does in ten pages. Three situations where that gap costs you money.
01
“We're launching, and it has to land.”
Investors, first hires, and first customers form their view in the first few weeks, and it sticks. Launching twice costs more than launching once.
02
Our work is premium. Our brand doesn't reflect it.
You get compared on price, and you lose to people who do worse work and present it better.
03
We changed. How we show up didn't.
A pivot, a raise, a new market. Buyers are still buying the old company, and the part you actually want to sell stays invisible.
A redesign won’t fix any of this on its own. What’s missing is a decision, not more effort or better taste. Without it, a new website says the same unclear thing in better fonts.
The method
Nothing gets built until the message is decided.
Not a preference. It’s what stops the work going in circles and you paying for it twice.
01
See
I ask until the real offer, audience, and message are on the table. Most owners have never had to put it in words for someone who doesn’t already care.
02
Decide
One position gets named, and anything that contradicts it gets cut. Nothing after this gets reopened, which is what stops the circles.
03
Build
Identity, website, and marketing material, directed as one build. You get assets that do a job, not a folder of files.
04
Adapt
Markets move after launch. Yours moves with them, so what you paid for is still true a year later.
15yr
8yr
Proof
Their customers could see why they were the better choice.
Schropp · Haso · CapLid
Sustainable packaging
Schropp in Germany, Haso in Japan, CapLid in Switzerland. Real products in a category where every competitor claims the same thing and most can’t back it. The environmental case stayed in, but it stopped leading. Regulation led instead: single-use plastic is being legislated out, so their customers have to move, and these three could carry them across at a workable cost, without giving up what plastic actually does. All three launched with that argument and all three still lead with it.
“We had the product. We didn’t have the words for it. Zoltán gave us a value proposition we could launch with, and it’s still what we lead with.”
— Sven Schropp, CEO, Schropp GmbH & Co.
Fintech
A digital payments platform
Anonymized at client request
A company nobody had heard of, asking banks that were slow to adopt new technology to move card issuing and processing onto its platform, and asking gas station chains to run their POS, their own cards, and loyalty points on it. Expensive, risky, and routinely put off for years. The positioning, message, and identity were built to carry that weight. Banks put it into production. Gas station chains issued their own cards on it. Investors backed the same story for $30M.
Anonymized, per client request. No client name attached.
Storage and IoT
Powered Storage
2018 to present
I hold equity in Maat Holdings and I’m retained as its creative partner. Eric Davis owns the business decisions there. Mine are the ones the outside world sees.
A facility opening with services the local market had no word for, under a brand nobody had heard of yet. You cannot search for a product you don’t know exists, and nobody looking for a place to work was going to type “storage.” The brand was split into sub-brands along what each customer was actually looking for, one operation underneath, each given language its buyer already used. The property went from empty to ninety percent occupied, and new brands keep splitting off it as demand shows which offer belongs to which buyer.
Brand Architecture
Positioning
Customer Experience
Website
Marketing
“Zoltán makes the calls, not just the designs. Five brands in, that’s saved us money and a few nightmares.”
— Eric Davis, CEO, Maat Holdings
Where to start
You only pay for the part you’re missing.
Tier 1
Clarity Sprint
Two weeks. Fixed price.
For when the positioning was never decided, or it’s decided and lives only in your head. You leave with it written down and usable, whether you build it with me or with someone else.
Brand & Build
Scoped per project.
For when the positioning holds but nothing else has caught up. The identity, the website, the pitch deck, and the marketing material, built as one job instead of three vendors.
Tier 3
Ongoing Ownership
Fixed monthly retainer.
For when it’s built and now has to keep earning. Getting found, staying current, and deciding what changes as the business moves.
Which one you need is decided on the call, not from this page.
The close
You already know something isn't landing.
Maybe you can already name it. More often there’s a second thing underneath, and that’s the one holding the rest up. I’ve done every one of these jobs myself, which is usually how I spot it early.
Thirty minutes, no deck, no pitch. You tell me where it’s stuck, I tell you what I see. Afterwards you get it in writing: what you have, what’s missing, and which of the three above it points to. If the answer is that you don’t need me, I’ll tell you that too.
In thirty minutes you’ll know what you have, what’s missing, and what it would take.
If what you put in front of buyers isn’t bringing them to you, let’s talk.
Based in
Budapest
Working in
English and Hungarian
Founded
2019