Tailor Brands Review
| Support | Help Desk, Email, Video Tutorials & Knowledge Base |
|---|---|
| Best For | New Businesses |
| Strengths | Versatile Designs |
| Weaknesses | Unclear Subscription Process |
| Promotion | Save 50% Promo BF2022AFF |
Tailor Brands is a suite of branding & design tools powered by machine learning for non-technical users founded in 2014.
There are plenty of Tailor Brands reviews on the Internet – some good, some bad. This Tailor Brands review will look at how the software works, the upsides, downsides, and ideal use cases for the product based on my experience as a digital marketing consultant.
Tailor Brands Alternatives
For anyone who just wants a custom logo or design, Fiverr has the best options by far without a recurring subscription. Namecheap also has a good, basic logo maker.
- Rating
- 8.0/10
- Price
- $5 - $3,945
- Promotion
- Save 10% Promo FVRR10COUPON
What is Tailor Brands?
Tailor Brands allows businesses, organizations, and individuals to create an entire “brand identity” with logos, typography, color patterns, and other elements across the web & print.
In other words, Tailor Brands is a toolset that makes your project “look good” everywhere from your Facebook page to business cards to a website.
They use software & artificial intelligence to not only create your business’ look and feel but also maintain that look and feel everywhere that you want.
Their main tool is their Tailor Brands logo maker. Rather than use templates or quiz questions like a traditional automated logo creator, they have you answer whether you like or dislike styles. Their AI does a version of NetFlix’s recommendation algorithm but with design styles.
Once you approve a certain design style, their software creates an entire brand identity and uses rules to apply it to applications ranging from a simple logo to a Facebook ad to a social media post to a Twitter profile to website headers to branded merchandise to even a seasonal logo version.
Background on Tailor Brands
There have always been a plethora of DIY design tools on the Internet. I use Stencil for my Featured Images. I’ve used Canva for social images. I’ve used native branding tools with Buffer & social networks to customize my logos & images.
I had a guy from Fiverr help edit my website CSS to match with my logo colors. I had a professional graphic designer on UpWork create a custom blog image for me. I’ve run contests for clients on 99designs.
In fact, an online logo maker that can create all sorts of different logo options is not all that special.
In other words, the world of DIY design has been here for a while. You don’t need a Mad Men-Esque setup of paying $$$ for graphic designers to create a pitch deck.
But the world of DIY design is also a bit of a frustratingly hot mess. It’s a world that’s good enough to be dangerous.
In other words, it’s accessible enough to let non-designers think they are designing a nice brand…when it’s a jumble of mismatched fonts, misaligned layouts, and conflicting colors.
It’s the difference between “Yeah, that’s nice” and “Damn, that is right on! How’d you do that?”.
Tailor Brands is an interesting product that is trying to use software, AI, and automation to take those details away from humans and just automatically apply it wherever you need it – to create a “brand identity with a stylebook” as it were.
How Tailor Brands Works
Tailor Brands works by moving you through its logo maker, which doubles as a brand identity developer. You are given options…and you can run the software as many times as you want.
Once you’ve approved your design, you’re taken to a studio with mockups & style guidelines. You then have a choice of 3 pricing plans*.
First, the $3.99/mo Basic plan provides access to your unique logo, social media tools, and graphic design library. You can also connect your domain to a basic landing page builder.
Second, the $11.98/mo Standard plan provides access to EPS vectors (for outdoor and print use) in addition to a full website builder and advanced design tools.
Third, the $25.98/mo Premium plan provides access to social media schedulers and analytics so that you can bring your social media management under a single platform. You can also accept payments and run an online store.
*Note – you can cancel and keep all your design assets. So technically, if you just need a logo – you can get that for less than $50 (the $3.99 is billed for 12 months). You just have to put the cancellation date on the calendar and go through their process.
The plans all provide ongoing access to tools to manage your brand designs. You retain full ownership of all logo files, brand designs & assets even after you cancel.
Pros of Tailor Brands
For a relatively new product, Tailor Brands’ actual product is well-executed. There are few bugs or real complaints that I found with the actual core product.
Their real advantage (and disadvantage) is their unique positioning as a tool suite. Here are some of the main pros of using Tailor Brands tool not only for new logo creation but as a design management tool suite.
Product Focus on Branding over Assets
As mentioned in the introduction, one big issue with the DIY design tool world is the focus on design assets. It’s easy to create a Facebook post on Canva or bulk generate Google Ads with Display Ad Planner. Those tools are easy and usually free. But they are inherently separate. *You* have to manage your images across different tools.
A huge pro for Tailor Brands is that they have an entire tool suite that focuses on unifying your entire brand everywhere. They focus on keeping that brand identity right on, rather than focusing on giving you the best kerning tool or biggest font library, or the most intuitive CSS editor.
If you look at some of their design tools one on one with direct tool competitors, they may or may not be “the best”. But Tailor Brands can keep everything looking good everywhere, which is their main pitch to customers who would benefit from their product.
In my experience especially with small and local businesses, it’s a consistent brand identity (paired with a good product / service) that allows them to compete with established big-name brands.
If you can just remove the infamous pixelated cover photo, you’ll probably beat your competition. And if you can ensure that your new assistant can quickly handle good-looking Instagram posts…all the better.
That outcome is Tailor Brands’ main focus, and it comes off well in the product.
Pricing Structure & Cross-Sells
Every software as a service (SaaS) struggles with business models and pricing. You want your service to be accessible, but also profitable.
This balance is especially hard to strike with design assets where it’s usually a one-and-done proposition.
Tailor Brands runs on a subscription business model. But the subscriptions focus on the design tools rather than the design assets.
This structure creates a couple of useful incentives.
First, it means that there’s no question of ownership of design assets. You own your brand, period.
In fact, it means that you can get a really cheap logo if that’s all you want. You can pay for one month, download your assets, and cancel. You’ve got a high-quality logo in a range of file types for less than $50.
Second, it means that while Tailor Brands has to keep optimizing their logo maker to bring in more customers, they also have to keep developing better design tools to keep customers around. There’s no disincentive to extort customers over their design assets or to drag their feet over product development.
Third, the subscription encourages use from customers rather than a one-and-done download. The real productivity boost for businesses is having a go-to design tool with everything in one place where you (or a new team member) can quickly create new designs & assets on an ongoing basis. And usually, the more you use a tool, the better you can get.*
*also you’ve got software that will adapt to frequent social media image requirements.
Ideally, there’s a virtuous cycle for everyone involved. Tailor Brands is one of the few companies where I think the cross-sells and upsells are not annoying, and generally useful.**
**also, small quibble, but do note that the prices are billed annually – so you are purchasing a full 12 months of access, even if you only pay monthly.
Turnaround Speed & Feature Versatility
Since Tailor Brands is fully automated, there are no constraints on time, speed, revisions, requests, or redos.
If you want to try graphic design a 2 AM Eastern, you can. If you want to completely redo your design, you can. They have a built-in customization option. If you need a mockup right now, you can get it. There’s no delay in turnaround or schedule to meet.
There’s no back and forth or waiting for your designer or virtual assistant. There’s just the software that is working 24/7/365. That’s a huge advantage for Tailor Brands. It works on your timeline.
And if you are trying to actually run a business, working on design any time means that it will get done. If you are a business owner working full-time, you likely don’t have time during business hours. And if you are working on a side project…you have to work on it outside business hours.
Additionally, since Tailor Brands has a whole suite of design tools, there’s no downloading or cropping or exporting or importing. Everything is just there to use.
Convenience generally beats everything. And when it comes to branding, Tailor Brands makes brand design convenient above all else.
Backend Quality & Usability
Even though Tailor Brands focuses on the branding aspect of design across their suite of tools, the tools themselves are high-quality and rock-solid.
They’ve built some tools in-house, but in others they’ve high-quality 3rd party tools and customized them. For example, their website builder is built on top of the Duda website builder, which is one of the best website builders that I’ve used.
Same with their social media tools. It looks like they’ve white-labeled a 3rd party tool. But whatever it is, it’s legit and high-quality. Same with the design editor and others.
Each tool is solid & highly usable on its own. But when they are all bundled within Tailor Brands’ suite, it makes each tool even more useful than it would be on its own.
Cons of Tailor Brands
Every product has disadvantages, but especially a relatively new product like Tailor Brands.
Here are a few tradeoffs & complaints that I found with Tailor Brands. Some are simply the flip side of an advantage, but some are inherent to their approach.
Branding Process & Revisions
Tailor Brands’ fully automated, AI-powered design process leaves humans out of the process deliberately. That choice cuts costs, increases efficiency, increases choice and makes the platform what it is.
But the tradeoff with this choice is that…it leaves out humans.
And humans are still critical to producing truly unique or truly outstanding brands. Brands are built on stories, and stories are what makes us human.
Humans can also ask pertinent questions, push back on scope, implement creative deadlines, and invent completely new concepts.
Tailor Brands’ software can create a brand design and a brand style guide, but it cannot assign meaning or purpose of symbolism or even provide a reason why a certain design works over another – it only knows what “works” based on other user data.
The story part of branding is either your job or a job for another human. If you assign it to another human, that’s going to cost time & money.
And if you take on the job yourself, it’s something to be aware of and learn about.
Either way, it’s something to keep in mind when using Tailor Brands. There’s no process of “brand discovery” or mapping your customer’s psychographic persona. There are no revisions based on client feedback.
All that is for better and for worse. Before online design tools, agencies gave away the process and sold the assets. Now, you can get the assets affordably, but you still have to understand a bit about branding.
And that leads to the next tradeoff.
Customer Education & Brand Identity
Even though Tailor Brands does a lot of the branding & design work for the customer, they still leave a lot of creative work up to the customer.
The tradeoff of any service that claims to do “everything” for you is that the customer’s expectations are not set correctly. When it turns out that there is *some* work to be done, it’s easy to bail instead of figuring the work out.
A Tailor Brands customer still needs to be prepared to think through where, when, how they’ll need to use designs. The logo maker sequence is great, but after creating the logo, there’s very little guidance for a new customer.
There’s a ton of options with no real onboarding guidance or customer examples. Their welcome email series is limited to deals & coupons rather than “here are common next steps” or “here are some common use cases”.
I can imagine that customers who don’t have a strong sense of direction would churn quickly after getting a logo idea.
If you do end up using Tailor Brands, do note that you should have an idea of what *you* need to get out of it, rather than just using it for using a new tool’s sake.
Platform Product Lock-in
Tailor Brands is a hosted platform that focuses on convenience. And there’s usually a direct tradeoff between convenience and control on the Web.
The more convenient a product is…the less control you have. And the more control you have…the less convenient the product is. Think about RSS vs. Twitter. Think about hosted website builders vs. self-hosted CMS’. Think about an Amazon Seller listing vs. your own eCommerce store.
Tailor Brands makes everything downloadable. And they ensure that you truly own all your intellectual property.
However, like a hosted website builder, your work is inherently tied to their platform in many ways. The longer you commit to their platform, the harder it becomes to leave.
That’s not a good thing or a bad thing. It’s just a disadvantage that’s the flip side of their big advantage.
But it’s an important tradeoff to understand. If you use the Tailor Brands’ platform over your own copy of Adobe Illustrator, email, or Paint, do ensure that you are downloading and backing up *all* of your brand assets on your own computer for the sake of preserving your own intellectual property.
This point is very important for when you decide to cancel.
Tailor Brands’ cancellation policy requires you to contact them, listen to their discount pitch, and then cancel. It’s up to you to remember to ask to cancel. I’m not a huge fan of this setup, but it’s how they’ve chosen to structure the service.
Company Structure, Age & Competition
Tailor Brands has been around since 2014. They are still considered an “early-stage venture-funded” startup. In other words, they are privately held and using investor money to focus on the product rather than profit or market share.
Like the platform lock-in tradeoff, this disadvantage is more of a consideration. Right now they are still at a stage where pricing & product can change rapidly. They also probably have a small team with limited resources. They also will have copycat competition from publicly held competitors like Wix, Fiverr, Squarespace, Vistaprint, Shopify, and others.
The upside to being a customer at a young venture-funded company is that you can count on more resources going into a better product. The downside is that there’s still a risk that they could get bought or “pivot” in the future.
Tailor Brand Use Cases
A service is only as good as its customer fit. Tailor Brands is not for everyone. But for some, it would be amazing.
Here are 3 use cases where I think they’d be a really good fit.
New Business or Organization w/ No Brand Assets
If you have a new business or organization with no brand assets and no large budget for a human-led design process, Tailor Brands would be a perfect fit.
Now, I would think through which features & tools that you’ll need from them. If you need a more robust website presence and/or email with lots of features, you might want to look at a dedicated website builder, eCommerce platform, or even shared hosting. You could use Tailor Brands strictly for design tools and social media. Either way, a new small business is their bread & butter. You can get try out their logo maker for free here.
Personal but Online Project w/ No Brand Assets
If you have a small personal project that you want to look just right – think resume site, hobby site, non-profit idea, family project, etc – Tailor Brands would be a solid fit. You can get try out their logo maker for free here.
Existing Business or Organization w/ Redesign
If you have an existing business or organization and you want to refresh your look without committing to a design firm or outsourcing to several providers, Tailor Brands would be a good fit. You can use what tools you need. You can also download & use the EPS file to get any signage or custom assets made offline.
Now, Tailor Brands is not for everyone. If you feel comfortable coordinating designs and brand assets across different platforms or if you have the budget to pay a human for graphic design, then something else might be a better fit.
Here are a few direct competitors to Tailor Brands and how they compare.
Tailor Brands vs. 99designs
99designs is a contest-led marketplace for graphic design. You set a budget and run a “contest” among human designers based on your design briefing. I wrote a 99designs review here. But in short, 99designs is sort of the halfway human point between Tailor Brands and an agency. 99designs is much more expensive than Tailor Brands, but you do get human ideas based on a design brief. 99designs also has a huge range of design contest options…but not the design management tools of Tailor Brands. Technically, you could (and should) check out both.
Tailor Brands vs. Fiverr
Fiverr is a huge marketplace for humans working on “gigs”. You think of a task that you need to be done, find a person to hire, and quickly get it done for you within Fiverr’s platform. Fiverr is also a halfway human point between Tailor Brands and an agency. The price range depends on skills and reputation. While you can great design assets from Fiverr, you are also in charge of managing all your design assets. You also have to expect to pay for several designs before coming away with a good one. Tailor Brands would be a simpler, more affordable, and versatile fit for managing a brand, even if Fiverr is better for getting a great logo.
Tailor Brands vs. Wix Logo Maker
Wix is the big brand name in the website builder world. I wrote a Wix review here. Technically Wix competes directly with Tailor Brands, even if they have a different focus. Tailor Brands focuses on how your brand designs are presented *everywhere*. Wix has similar tools, but really focuses their tool on website applications. In other words, Tailor Brands is a design tool with a website builder and Wix is a website builder with a design tool. Check out Tailor Brands and check out Wix’s logo maker.
Tailor Brands vs. Shopify
Shopify is a big name in the eCommerce platform world. They are the go-to choice for running an online store. Recently, Shopify acquired and integrated a logo maker for their platform. It’s based on a blend of AI and templates – very similar to Wix. And like Wix, it’s a great tool if you plan on using Shopify. But it doesn’t have the design management tools like Tailor Brands. Check out Shopify’s logo tool.
Tailor Brands vs. DIY Tools
Between Canva, Stencil, and every other random logo generator on the Internet, Tailor Brands has plenty of competition for DIYers. If you have the time and wherewithal, you could get everything that Tailor Brands offers for free. The issue would be that all your designs would be dispersed among a bunch of tools…and you would be relying on your own design taste rather than a professionally built tool. In the end, I think that Tailor Brands is worth the money for the convenience and the designs. But for a quick sketch up of something you have in your head, Stencil is the simplest for design and Namecheap for just a logo.
Tailor Brands Video Review
Next Steps & Conclusion
Tailor Brands is a unique and useful addition to the design world. In fact, for many businesses, it could do a full end around the traditional “upload your logo to a website builder” model.
By bundling design management tools, including a social media editor and quality website builder with an automated logo & brand designer, Tailor Brands has figured out something new & different.
If you are a non-designer trying to build a consistent brand identity across the Web & offline, Tailor Brands is worth a try.
If you are looking for a logo designer, be sure to check out Fiverr. If you want a basic logo maker tool, check out Namecheap.
You might also be interested in my review of 99designs, my post on layouts, and my post on color palettes, and my post on hiring a web designer.
