SocialMarketing90 is thrilled to have the opportunity to sit down with Saskia Ketz, the founder of Mojomox, a modern logo maker and automatic brand kit creator.
In this interview, Saskia shares her journey in the branding and design industry, entrepreneurship advice, the inspiration behind Mojomox, and the keys to creating a successful business logo.
Saskia is a brand designer with over a decade of experience in the field. She runs a design agency in New York City that has worked with big-name brands like Netflix, Ikea, and Timberland.
But, she also has a soft spot for startups and small businesses that struggle to get stunning brand design within their tight budgets – and that is how Mojomox came to life.
Let’s start our chat!
Q: Hi, What’s your Name? What’s your business? Introduce yourself!
Hi! My name is Saskia Ketz, I was born in Germany, and I’m the founder of Mojomox, a modern logo maker and automatic brand kit creator. Part of Mojomox is a font shop where we sell our custom logo fonts from the logo maker. Many people want to download and use the font they’ve used for their logo for other marketing materials.
Q: If you want to disclose that, how well is the business going? What is the monthly turnaround volume?
I don’t want to share exact revenue numbers, but we get about 8.5k users to our main site organically. On top, we have partnerships with software listing platforms that add a steady revenue stream. The font shop I mentioned earlier we just launched because we had so many requests from people wanting to buy their logo fonts.
Q: Why did you decide to start a logo creation company?
I’m a brand designer by trade and run a design agency in NYC that’s worked with world-class brands like Netflix, Ikea, and Timberland. Most of our clients are bigger companies or startups that have raised funding.
On the side, I used to offer free office hours Zoom calls with founders of smaller businesses and startups without funding. They would ask me how to get stunning brand design on their small budgets.
I’ve always had a soft spot for startups but didn’t want to devalue my work. Plus, new companies shouldn’t spend much on early design work because they pivot.
There was no DIY solution I could recommend to them. I found all the other online logo maker tools dated and they weren’t producing results a professional designer would create.
Q: Starting a business in logo creation seems like a brave choice. There is definitely fierce competition, From Freelancers to other graphic design websites like Canva. Did this large competition not scare you?
You’re right! There is a lot of competition. Lots of Mojomox users are also Canva users. They use our app because it gives more hand-holding during the design process. Many of our users have also told me that Mojomox is much easier for logo design and that it creates more minimal and modern results.
That’s because it’s a set framework with design options explicitly created for branding. For example, they can choose from color palette presets and use logo fonts you can’t find anywhere else.
People can see their whole brand on one page while they click everything together. We call that the automatic brand kit.
Q: What makes the perfect business logo?
Good design is rooted in brand strategy. The perfect business logo is memorable and communicates what the brand stands for.
Unfortunately, people often don’t have a good understanding of what that means. But it’s easy! “Memorable” means that customers can identify your brand from your competitors. “What the brand stands for” is the brand’s positioning. Positioning is the one word or short phrase that comes to a customer’s mind when they think of you.
From a functional standpoint, the perfect business logo is easy to deal with when creating marketing assets daily. For example, a logo needs to be readable in small sizes. Or logos that resemble a square rather than a horizontal shape are harder to work into the header design of a website.
Or, a logo with many colors doesn’t easily work on partnership flyers because they have their own colors. Of course, designers can deal with all of these use cases, but it’s more time and cost-efficient if something works without much tinkering or flipping through extensive brand guidelines.
Q: Looking at the logos of many popular brands, they seem to be very simple. In a way, also your logo platform provides simple logo outputs. Is simplicity one of the keys to a good logo?
Yes, the best logos are simple. They are easy to remember. They already say through design “ah, this company is easy to deal with.”
Q: What is the most common logo mistake that new businesses make?
The most common logo mistake I see them make is spending too much time creating their logo. And often, the result looks unprofessional. I always recommend what I call “black dress” design – something minimal that looks professional, such as your brand name typed out in a nice typeface.
Later, when the company’s positioning is clear, and the business is making money, work with a designer to create a more comprehensive brand identity.
Q: Is this your first startup experience? What experience did you have before this one, and how do you think it helped you to successfully run the current business?
I mentioned already that I have a design agency. That’s a B2B services business and it means lots of meetings and design rounds, and tight timelines.
I’m also the founder of an art publication called A Women’s Thing which features women artists and fine art that puts women’s topics front and center. We’ve had over 350 contributors, most of them are volunteers. Working with volunteers means following up often, but it’s very satisfying and meaningful work.
This new business, Mojomox, is different from both of them. The work I put in daily is not directly correlated to the time I’m working on it. This has been a new experience for me. For example, we have a lot of alternative letter designs that people can pick from when creating to make their logo unique – many of those letters I developed months ago.
Sometimes people report a bug – I then have to go into my design files and reconstruct why I designed certain things the way I did. [laughing].
Overall, from my other businesses, I’ve learned how to make decisions quickly to get things out the door asap. That’s been incredibly helpful for this business.
Q: What were the most difficult moments – if any – during this business journey?
Every business owner knows that every day is difficult. If it’s not, you’re probably not doing enough! [laughing] There’s always something that needs improvement.
For the first time, I’m doing customer service in a B2C fashion. It is very different from working with other agencies or companies.
While we also have agencies as clients that use Mojomox to develop logo ideas and brand identities quickly, most of our users are solopreneurs. Seeing what issues they run into when creating logos and brand kits and how they deal with them required me to build an extensive database of basic how-to’s.
Q: And what about the best ones?
I’m a people person. I like talking to customers. While I don’t always have the time to have long conversations, people can text me their issues and suggestions to improve the app. I’m fascinated by how invested our users are. That’s very special to me.
Q: Surely, this new venture taught you something new already, related to the business or entrepreneurship world. What is it?
We’re a small team of just two people. So everything we do needs to be lean. Every feature development we take on needs to be backed by a certain number of users who say that they really want it and are willing to pay for it. Otherwise, it doesn’t make sense to work on it.
Similarly, I have my ideal version of Mojomox in mind too. I love designing the product and coming up with ideas for everything we can add. But some of the features that I would like to see, users are not as interested in.
Sometimes it’s hard to cross out product features from your roadmap. Building a purely user-driven app has been a great business lesson and experience.
If you found this interview informative and are considering starting your own Logo designing business, we highly recommend taking a look at our Mojomox Review or visit directly the Mojomox website.
Additionally, and if you’re on the hunt for the perfect graphic designing tools, don’t worry; we’ve got your back with our list of best graphic design softwares, which offers a curated list of top-rated sources for acquiring reliable and efficient Graphic designing tools.
We extend our gratitude to Saskia from MojoMox for her contributions to this piece, as her expertise and experience in the field were invaluable in creating a valuable resource for our readers. Thank you, Saskia.
So, that’s the wrap for today! We will meet in the next exciting knowledge-driven interview; until that, stay safe and keep hustling!
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