Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Marielle Balogh. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Marielle, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s start with a story that highlights an important way in which your brand diverges from the industry standard.

Tributary Design Studio is a custom branding, website, and packaging design studio for underrepresented founders and small businesses. We’re always thinking of ways to better meet the unique needs of our clientele.

The industry standard for branding is to create really robust brand toolkits, 30+ page brand guidelines, with timelines that take months, sometimes even years. For new and small businesses, this just isn’t an option. They’re also overpaying for assets they most likely will not use.

We’ve repeatedly refined our services to give our clients what they need, and leaving out the rest. This meant defining what businesses really required to make the biggest impact that best speaks to their target audience.

We also take a “hire us when you need us” approach, setting up our clients to be self sufficient and enabling them to grow into our larger scale offers when they’re ready. We recently launched a Design Therapy service, which allows us to support them in the activation of their brand assets. That way if they intend on applying the brand themselves onto packaging, social media, etc. they can still get a designers feedback to help make their content the best it can be.

For Tributary Design Studio, we meet our clients where they’re at, and offer a judgement free zone for entrepreneurs trying to launch or grow their business. They’re often doing this for the first time and need a lot of educational support along the way. We intentionally build our offers around them and how we can best serve them.

Marielle, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My name is Marielle Claire Balogh, and I’m the Founder and Chief Creative Officer at Tributary Design Studio.

I come from a background in marketing and public relations before transitioning into brand design. I never intended to be an entrepreneur 7 years later, I just thought I would freelance for a year until I could grow my portfolio enough to apply to a higher level design position since I was switching career paths. But now I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I love how my team and I’s work helps small businesses grow into profitable companies. Seeing their successful trajectory after years of working together, brings me great professional fulfillment.

It’s actually how I ended up naming Tributary. Since a Tributary is a small stream flowing into a larger stream or river, I loved this metaphor for the work we do with our clients.

Additionally having a marketing background brings a deeper awareness around the goals of a business and what a rebrand can communicate to help them achieve those goals.

My education is actually in Cultural Anthropology, which has helped me immensely since the early days of my career to understand perspective of various groups. That is such a crucial component in both branding and marketing that is unique to our brand strategy at Tributary. Therefore our clients get so much more value and thoughtfulness to their brands then pretty logos or visuals.

We’d love to hear the story of how you turned a side-hustle into a something much bigger.

When I launched my business, I was working full-time at a pr and marketing agency in San Francisco. Cost of living was steep and I was young. I knew I didn’t want to be in the career I was in, and had to do some soul searching.

I read the book Cross Roads of Should and Must by Elle Luna, and she has some incredible prompts for helping identify your path. It led me to consider becoming a Graphic Designer. So I talked to everyone I knew that was a designer and realized it was in alignment with what I really wanted out of my career.

So I did some research on grad school, additional bachelors’ degrees, and bootcamps. I landed on a bootcamp that focused on Visual Design (UX focused) so that I didn’t have to quit my job. I took night classes for 3 months to ramp up my technical design skillset, even if creativity was always a strength of mine.

After completing that program I thought “what’s next”? So I told anyone and everyone I knew that I just finished a design program. Including a new friend I made on my bus ride into work (I meant everyone). She told me she might actually know someone looking for graphic design help and connected me with my first gig. One of those people I still work with today!

I took on any and all projects, and eventually I landed my first big contract. It meant I could not work full time and freelance. So I put in my 2 weeks notice thinking I’d just freelance for a while until I could apply for a role. But I never applied for a new role and I’m still here 7 years later.

Since then we’ve grown into a team of 4 and are continuing to grow.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

An emphasis on customer service is always our highest priority! We are highly communicative and are proud that our clients have little to no feedback throughout our processes as a result. We ensure that we never leave a client surprised by the results. They’re always aware of our plan each step of the way, and know exactly when they’re going to receive something.

Additionally, we are really friendly! There’s a saying that you can be two of three things: affordable, nice, or talented. We consider ourselves all three. We’ve built our services to be reasonable for our client’s but still profitable for us.

As a result, we’ve built great relationships with our clients and they’re always coming back or sending referrals our way.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.tributarydesign.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tributary.design/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tributary-design-studio/
• Other: https://www.pinterest.com/tributarydesign/