Fastmarkets is a global commodity price reporting agency and information provider serving the metals, mining, and minerals industries. The company delivers critical price assessments, news, and analytics that enable businesses to make informed trading and investment decisions in commodity markets worldwide.
With a reputation built on data integrity and market expertise, Fastmarkets serves thousands of customers across the commodity supply chain—from miners and traders to manufacturers and financial institutions.
Fastmarkets had two in-house designers who were constantly overwhelmed with reactive, last-minute requests. Sales teams needed presentations urgently, events required materials on short notice, and the volume of day-to-day deliverables was relentless.
The design team had no breathing room to work on strategic projects or create reusable templates that could improve efficiency across the business. Instead, they were stuck in a cycle of firefighting—responding to urgent requests for PowerPoint decks, sales collateral, white papers, and event materials.
The company had previously attempted to solve this by using Fiverr, but the results were frustrating:
Fastmarkets needed a solution that felt like having an in-house designer—someone who understood their brand, could deliver consistent quality, and would be reliably available—but without the £50,000+ annual cost of hiring another full-time employee.
Their brand guidelines existed but hadn't been significantly updated since 2017, making it even more critical to work with designers who could interpret and apply the fundamentals consistently across different channels and deliverables.
Fastmarkets partners with Design Cloud, giving them access to a dedicated UK-based designer who handles their bread-and-butter work—PowerPoint presentations, sales collateral, sales enablement materials, and white papers.
Unlike the Fiverr experience, Design Cloud's dedicated designer model means Fastmarkets works with the same designer consistently. This eliminates the exhausting process of briefing new freelancers repeatedly and allows the designer to build genuine familiarity with Fastmarkets' brand guidelines, visual standards, and business context.
The structured delivery process provides the reliability they desperately needed. With predictable two-day turnarounds and daily updates on complex projects like multi-page PowerPoints, the internal design team can finally plan their workload properly instead of constantly juggling conflicting urgent requests.
Design Cloud's platform centralises all design requests, communication, and file sharing in one place—eliminating the scattered email threads and lost attachments that plagued their Fiverr experience. The marketing team can submit briefs, track progress, and provide feedback all within a simple dashboard.
Most importantly, the partnership frees up the in-house designers to focus on higher-value strategic work. Instead of spending hours on routine PowerPoint decks and sales materials, they can finally invest time in creating repeatable templates, refining brand standards, and working on more creative projects that truly leverage their expertise.
The flexibility to scale is another critical advantage. When busy periods arise—product launches, major conferences, or sales campaign pushes—Fastmarkets can temporarily add a second designer for just a single month without any long-term commitment, then scale back down afterward.
