byFounders and Creative Force Team up to Bring Leading E-commerce Brands Industry-changing Solutions

We asked: what would you do if Creative Force didn't exist? 

“I don’t know. Creative Force makes life so much easier and saves so much time and headaches”

“There’s nothing else out there… it is industry-changing.”

This is a snapshot of the customer love we received when speaking to some of Creative Force’s clients.

A deep understanding of creative operations

Having scaled their previous company, Pixelz, from 0 to 1,000+ employees, it’s no doubt that the founders of Creative Force, Thomas and Tejs, are world-class entrepreneurs. With 20 years of experience, they have worked side by side, gaining knowledge and experience in creative operations within e-commerce. 

Through their experiences, they’ve understood the criticality of digital content in e-commerce. 

Online retail is powered by content in all stages of the purchase funnel, from marketing & advertising to driving online sales. 

Over the years, e-commerce content production has matured in scale, strategic importance and complexity to the extent that it has become a critical part of a brand’s online marketing and sales strategy. The ability to create consistent, high quality e-commerce content at scale is becoming one of the main differentiators for e-commerce focused brands.

However, there’s an unmet need for the workflow management tools required for planning and managing digital content at scale and across the value chain. Among the inefficiencies brought on by this lack of appropriate tools are increased time to market, production cost, and a more opaque production process. These problems are only exacerbated in high-turnover e-commerce, such as fashion retail.

The team at Creative Force recognized that there was no viable solution to address these problems. 

So far, the alternatives to their business have consisted of patchwork solutions with large amounts of manual work in Google/Excel sheets, alternatively building an in-house creative operations management solution.

An end-to-end creative operations platform reducing ‘time-to-online’ 

Creative Force has built the operational suite of applications to complement the existing creative suite (Adobe, Capture One etc..) and automate operational processes across stages of content creation workflow for high turnover e-commerce retailers. 

Doing this allows leading e-commerce brands, commercial studios, and online retailers to free up their creatives’ time to actually create, while publishing content faster and increasing  productivity.

The primary KPI that Creative Force addresses for their clients is ‘time to online’ A core challenge for most e-commerce brands is to reduce this metric. The quicker brands can get content online, the faster products sell, ultimately generating more sales and revenue. This is exactly what Creative Force does. 

Additionally, Creative Force’s solution allows for complete visibility and transparency over the entire production process through live tracking of specific production units. This provides better insights into production KPIs as the process is fully digitalized. 

Leading global brands love their product, turning content production from batch to flow

Now Creative Force’s clients can tangibly see the quantifiable productivity gain (in many cases 25-50% productivity gain), allowing content production teams to turn around in hours, not weeks.

Creative Force demonstrates true product-market fit with virtually no churn, strong net dollar retention, and achieving $100k+ in annual contract values from leading global brands. Their commercial traction is in line with series A startups - and they have achieved all of this while entirely bootstrapped.

We see Creative Force as category-defining, serving critical infrastructure to the e-commerce chain of content production. They are revolutionizing creative operations within e-commerce by shifting operational content processes from batch (processing content once a period) to flow production (being able to produce content continuously). This fundamentally changes the day-to-day operations of content production and their clients - including Otto, Bestseller, Scotch & Soda, Boohoo, PVH, Debenhams, and more - love it!

The road ahead

The verdict is still out on where the market will go in terms of market size for e-commerce retailers content production. However, we see considerable potential for Creative Force to expand across:

1. Content medium (expand from photo to video, 3d assets, VR/AR), 

2. Vertical (expand from fashion to beauty/cosmetics, furniture, and more), and 

3. The sector of the market (expand from enterprise sales downstream to mid-market).

Bringing the A-team to scale

We are impressed with what Thomas, Tejs and the rest of the Creative Force team have achieved so far, bootstrapped, with no marketing and only a small sales team. 

The potential is massive, and we are applying not only capital but some of the strong founders and operators from our byFounders Collective to help scale the organization. To that end, we engaged Christian Hjorth (enterprise SaaS sales wizard) to co-invest and represent us on Creative Force’s board. Bringing more than a decade of world-class enterprise sales knowledge, we believe he can be a true game changer, showing the strength of the byFounders Collective.

Founder and CEO Thomas Kragelund agrees:

At Creative Force, we appreciate the community-powered approach that byFounders brings. On top of the funding, we're also excited about the connections we've made with several of their Collective founders. It's refreshing to work with investors who have been founders themselves.

We look forward to seeing what the future will bring for this stellar team, building a product their customers truly love in a rapidly expanding market, backed by some of the most accomplished founders from the New Nordics.

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For further reading, check out the Letter from the CEO here: https://www.creativeforce.io/blog/we-just-received-6-million-in-funding/