- Zapiet
CANVA TEAMS
How tech company Zapiet swiftly scaled their branding and marketing during the e-commerce boom
“We pride ourselves on the teaching and learning programs that we have in place, and part of that is creating a classroom environment that’s not only safe and supportive for our students, but it’s also really engaging and inspiring.”
About Zapiet
Zapiet is one of the world’s leading store pick up, delivery, and shipping app companies for Shopify.
Founded in 2015 by Andrew Cargrill, who is also the CEO, the conception of Zapiet(opens in a new tab or window) began while Andrew was managing an agency creating Shopify stores. He quickly recognized a need for a solution that enabled merchants to offer their customers store pickup as an alternative to shipping and deliveries. Not only would this additional option relieve merchants from the frustration of constantly dealing with deliveries, but it also enabled them to bring more flexibility and convenience to their customers while integrating their online store with their brick-and-mortar business.
Inspired by the thrill of starting something new from the ground up — combined with his extensive e-commerce experience — Zapiet was developed to simplify and quickly automate the process of store pickup and delivery orders.
Today, Zapiet’s Store Pickup + Delivery app is trusted and used by over 10,000+ merchants in more than 150 countries, from pop-up stalls to Fortune 500 brands.
Zapiet uses Canva to create their social media content
Before migrating to Canva, Emili used complicated design software, and various cloud-based storage which came with many complexities — incompatibility with other cloud solutions, time-consuming uploads for high-resolution design files and graphics.
The Challenge
While the Covid-19 pandemic has stalled economic activity in the past year, it has fueled e-commerce and put it at the forefront of retail as it pushed more and more consumers online. The e-commerce boom accelerated the growth of Zapiet like never before, making it one of the most popular apps on Shopify.
Within a year, Zapiet went from a team of 6 to 27. It also meant that their marketing and branding efforts had to evolve quickly and adapt at the same pace to grow sustainably.
Leading Zapiet’s marketing team is their dynamic duo — Emili Maciel and Jonathan Roque, who manage their fully remote team. As the lead in design and marketing, Emili has a very intensive dual role. She says, “My job requires an incredible amount of multitasking. It ranges from being very creative with content and design, producing a multitude of creative pieces for the company, to ensuring the brand flows consistently and is seen everywhere, right up to juggling multiple marketing tasks.”
Jonathan, on the other hand, says, “I manage everything from marketing strategy, PR, social media, partnership, and PR activities right up to working closely with Shopify merchants to help ensure our app impacts positively on their business.”
Before migrating to Canva(opens in a new tab or window), Emili used complicated design software, and various cloud-based storage which came with many complexities — incompatibility with other cloud solutions, time-consuming uploads for high-resolution design files and graphics. It was also tricky for the team to email or share access to designs.
The Solution
With a marketing team of just two, Emili and Jonathan needed a collaborative platform. It had to support their wider team, accelerate the turnaround times, and help them create, manage, self-produce, and publish the multitude of day-to-day marketing, social media, website, and branding activities needed to keep up with the consistently growing needs of Zapiet. The team also needed a solution that could create and maintain brand consistency across all their multi-channel design and marketing efforts. Enter: Canva.
Jonathan Roque
Digital Marketing & Content Strategist
Here's how they did it
Like so many, both Emili and Jonathan had dabbled with Canva before their roles at Zapiet. Emili says, “Coming into Zapiet, the upgrade to Canva Teams has unlocked bigger features like unlimited access to millions of photos and the availability of a Brand Kit.” She continues, “Before Canva, it was a struggle to try and control my colleague’s work in terms of brand consistency and ensuring they stayed loyal to Zapiet’s branding as they were non-designers.”
With Canva’s Brand Kit in place, Emili could populate all the elements that make up all Zapiet’s brand identity and automatically store them as default selections. Brand Kit also enabled her to customize and brand any template and make them accessible to her team.
Jonathan added, “Canva is such a great toolbox for me. I can now go into the Brand Kit without the hassle of questions like, “Is this the right color scheme we’re using?’ I can get the exact colors, fonts, and know what I am using, plus have logos placed correctly.”
For Emili, the ease of creating beautiful, on-brand templates for the Zapiet team in Canva and efficiently collaborating and sharing them has been a game-changer. She says, “Anyone can update the doc without needing a designer. It’s also been huge for us to be able to keep branding consistent and not take time to redesign something new again. Canva has helped free up a lot of my time, so I can focus on more important things like working on the marketing, company strategy, and the business itself.”
The time savings Emili has gained from Canva is as much as 10-12 hours a week! Emili can also easily upload a gallery of her custom designs anytime onto Canva to compliment all the graphic elements and templates the team uses.
Another big plus for Zapiet’s fully remote team was Canva’s shareable folders. It enabled everyone to easily access and share everything from photos, templates to videos. Emili says, “For me, it’s such a valuable feature as I’m able to create, organize, and categorize different folders and make them accessible for my team. That way, they can get the right templates, designs, and images from the right folders. For example, I could set up a staff photograph folder or merchants photograph folder, and that’s the one-stop folder for anyone to pick a nice photo from.”
Jonathan continues, “And now, instead of sending designs via multiple emails, we send a link that connects straight to the folder in Canva. The designs all maintain the same high quality. Canva has really expanded for us as a toolbox.”
He reveals, “Before I only used it to create web assets, social media posts or partnership documents, but now it has become a place where we can even create templates we can always go back to, and change anything we need quickly.”
An exciting discovery the team has made is Canva’s video-making capabilities. Creating a mix of gifs, promotional videos, and video tutorials for all of Zapiet’s apps have been something they’ve started to take advantage of even more. Adding animations and effects to their videos has made them even more engaging. Jonathan says, “The videos have helped our YouTube page to stand out. And although we don’t have many subscribers, our videos get tons of views.”
“I think it’s awesome that a technology company like Canva is helping other technology companies like us,” Emili concluded. “With Canva, not only do we have a design tool that supports and empowers our business, it has helped ensure brand visibility. And saved us tons of time so we can focus our energy on what we do best – and that’s developing great apps for our customers and the e-commerce supply chain.”
