Rebranding Custom Made Direct
Client
Custom Made Direct
Year
2026
Custom Made Branding was changing its name to Custom Made Direct, and the brand and website needed to change with it. The tricky part was that CMD sells to five very different types of customers. They needed one brand that worked for all of them without feeling like five different companies.I handled the brand strategy, art direction, copywriting, and designed and built the new website.
Scope of Work
Brand Strategy
Art Direction
Web design
Copywriting
The Challenge
CMD has a lot going for it. Their prices are 10 to 20% lower than most shops, they have low or no minimums, and they turn around orders of 25 to 100 pieces fast. The problem was that none of this was clear on their old brand or website.
They also sell to a really wide range of people, from a small business ordering its first batch of shirts to big companies that order again and again. The new brand had to feel right for all of them.
The Approach
Before designing anything, I worked on the strategy. The first step was a simple brand promise that every decision could come back to: "Custom made simple." That led to the tagline, "Your design. Our craft. Done."
Then I wrote messaging for each of CMD's five main audiences:
Small businesses and startups
Sports teams and leagues
Event organizers
Individuals
Corporate and enterprise clients
Each group needed to see how CMD fits what they need, but it still had to feel like one brand.
The Logo
The logo is a custom wordmark with one small detail: an arrow that curls out of the "T" in "DIRECT" and loops back into the logo.
The loop is about repeat customers, since CMD's business is built on people coming back to order again. The arrow moving forward is about how simple the process is, from placing an order to getting it delivered.
The arrow also points to a big change in how CMD works. Back when they were Custom Made Branding, there was no mockup editor on the site, so most orders happened offline or through a lot of back and forth. Now customers can design and order everything online, on their own. That's the "direct" in the new name.
Logo Variation
For applications where the full wordmark doesn't fit (favicons, social avatars, small-scale placements), the mark simplifies down to just the arrow and its supporting curve, the most distinctive shape in the whole identity. Even stripped of any lettering, it's still recognizable as CMD once someone has seen the full logo, making it a flexible variation for anywhere the full wordmark is too much.
For small spaces like favicons and social media profile pictures, the logo shrinks down to just the arrow. Once you've seen the full logo, you can still tell it's CMD even without the letters.
The Identity
The visual system needed to feel professional and reliable without losing warmth. I landed on:
#E63D30
#1A1A1A
#F8F5F0
#1B2A4A
A confident color palette: Red (#E63D30) for energy, near-black (#1A1A1A) for grounding, warm off-white (#F8F5F0) for approachability, and deep navy (#1B2A4A) for trust.
A typography pairing of Plus Jakarta Sans and Mulish, balancing modern structure with readability
The Website
The homepage gets straight to the point: what CMD does, who it's for, and why you get good quality without paying more.
Each of the five audiences also has its own page. A sports team or an event organizer can click straight to the part that's about them, instead of reading through stuff that doesn't apply.
Behind the scenes, I built a full CMS collection inside Framer to manage CMD's catalog of 220+ products, making it easy to update, filter, and scale without touching code. I also designed a custom component variant from scratch to showcase the available colorways for each apparel item, giving customers a clear, interactive way to see their options before committing to an order.
The Result
I set up the site in Framer with a CMS that holds all 220+ products, so the CMD team can add, edit, and sort them without needing to touch any code.
I also built a custom color picker for each item, so customers can click through every available color before they order.
