Creatopy – The Ad Design Tool Unlocking Limitless Creativity

“Creatopy offers advertisers and marketers the tools they need to spark their creative journey and keep their visual content organized and always on-brand.”

Creatopy is the efficient and intuitive visual production platform, delivering a well-crafted creative experience. Here is its story and many adventures since embarking on a remarkable transformation process — going through a full rebranding during the pandemic, reorganizing the internal framework, and communicating a new positioning, new goals, and values in the competitive market of graphic design tools.

About Creatopy

Creatopy is an ad design tool destined for communicators, which allows them to easily create assets for their advertising campaigns. The company's mission is to build a world where people can unlock limitless creativity, aiming to revolutionize the way the world communicates visually.

Featuring advanced automation and customization capabilities, along with an ever-growing library of templates and original visual elements, Creatopy offers advertisers and marketers the tools they need to spark their creative journey and keep their visual content organized and always on-brand.

The Evolution

The product was launched back in 2008 by Romanian entrepreneur Gabriel Ciordas. At the time, it was known as Bannersnack and started out as an app that would help Flash developers create banners.

Like most tech companies, Bannersnack started very small, with only a handful of employees. It took them a lot of hard work and perseverance to break into the new and cutthroat market of graphic design tools.

On a financial level, the company started out as — and continues to be — self-sustainable. In the words of Gabriel Ciordas, the Founder & CEO, "I believed that we had a smart system in place since day one, strongly focusing on serving our community." The product was built on a customer-centric approach, which means that it grew and was adapted in accordance with the needs of its community.

In 10 years, the company reached around 100 employees, and as time went on, the team felt like the product had evolved so much that its name was no longer reflecting the assets it was offering. That is why, in 2018, they decided to embark on the long and adventurous journey of a complete rebranding: changing the name, the visual identity, the positioning, and the vision for the company.

Rebranding in a Pandemic

The rebrand was revealed internally in January 2020; the teams started working together to get every task done to launch the new, improved version of their product, which had the name—Creatopy.

In March 2020, COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, which complicated an already complex rebranding process even further. Everyone in the team had to work from home indefinitely. However, the team adjusted and carried on. Internally, they also adopted a new framework, the SAFe Agile methodology, to help them stay aligned during the rebranding process and maintain focus.

Creatopy was officially launched on February 8, 2021. The vision for the newly improved product was to deliver a tool that was all digital but with a human touch. A blend of two words, "creation/creativity" and "utopia," the company's new name stands for the concepts of perfect creation and vast imaginary potential, the best place for creativity.

In the words of Gabriel Ciordas, "Creatopy is the place where you can reach peak creativity and productivity. It's where communicators and teams can come together and create whatever they want in terms of design through a well-crafted creative experience."

The Product Suite

One of the core values of the team behind Creatopy is living and breathing technology. That is why they are in the business of constantly innovating the collaborative design process.

Features for Visual Communicators

In Creatopy, you can design display ads, social media visuals, print assets, and more, either drawing inspiration from the thousands of templates available or creating fully customized designs.

You can make your ads truly your own by taking advantage of premium stock photo, audio, and video libraries—including a Shutterstock library of 20 million photos—and various other elements such as fonts, shapes, and original illustrations. With the help of the HTML5 Animator, you can bring everything to life through various effects and transitions; no coding is required.

You can also upload your own assets and easily maintain brand consistency throughout your designs by setting up your own brand kit containing your logo, custom color palettes, and fonts.

Create at Scale

Creatopy's automation features help you eliminate dull, repetitive tasks and considerably speed up your workflow. For example, you can instantly generate entire design sets that feature all relevant sizes for your display or social media campaigns and tweak them simultaneously.

You can also rapidly create high volumes of ad variations starting from a CSV, useful for personalizing your ads and setting up A/B tests.

Team Collaboration

In terms of collaboration, Creatopy allows you to set up your team according to your specific needs, assigning roles and rights to each team member and organizing them into groups. In addition, you can share your designs with both internal and external collaborators without having to download and upload them again in an email or chat.

Newly Launched Features

Creatopy's team is constantly working on amazing features destined to make their clients' lives easier. Among them is the brand new ad serving add-on, which allows customers to update live ads in real-time and display them on any website, regardless of their size and format.

Another aspect Creatopy is passionate about is offering their clients the ability to simplify their design workflow, which is why the collaboration feature is very important. Clients can manage all their creative processes within Creatopy by leaving comments on designs, getting real-time feedback, and using shareable links, and this is one feature that the team is constantly upgrading.

Sustainability as a Way of Doing Business

With his team growing exponentially over the past three years, Gabriel decided to invest into building a new home for his employees. Since sustainability is a principle he strongly believes in, he looked into several possibilities for new office space before deciding to build one that would truly be green.

"I knew I wanted to create an office building made of wood, using cross-laminated timber, that would first and foremost be environmentally friendly; I also had my team's well-being in mind because I think it's one of the healthiest offices you can possibly work in," said Gabriel Ciordas.

This is how the Home of Glowing Ideas was born, or Eastern Europe's largest certified low-energy building. It's a passive building made entirely of wood, using cross-laminated timber technology. Situated in the countryside, in a green area, it blends well within the rolling hills landscape on which it was built.

When initiating this project, Gabriel carefully considered the impact the average office building has on the environment, which is why the Creatopy building has a reduced ecological footprint. While it measures nearly 2,400 square meters, it consumes seven times less energy than a similar building made of bricks and concrete.

What the Future Holds

Creatopy aims to be an easy-to-use, collaborative tool that empowers its customers to spend less time working on repetitive tasks and more time focusing on what really matters, which is the process of creation.

In its quest to offer its community the best solution for ad design, Creatopy is permanently developing innovative solutions and technologies that not only respond to their needs but also add value to the service.

The Visionary Leader Upfront

Gabriel Ciordas is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Creatopy. Working with great passion towards building companies that bring innovation to the tech industry, he often states that running several eight-figure businesses taught him hard work and passionate people are the foundation of achieving success. As for its visionary founder, sustainability is a practice he will try to embed into all aspects of the business.

“We want to inspire other businesses to choose sustainability over short-term gains because saving our planet has to be a joint effort.”