Amy Gehling is not the type to sit idly by. Ideas and interests spring to her mind on a regular basis, and she can’t seem to help staying busy at all times. She spent her childhood surrounded by people, with four siblings and dozens of cousins, and from that upbringing her interest in other people has extended both inward and outward, prompting her both to seek out information on psychology and to emphasize the importance of building and maintaining a community in all of her professional pursuits. Her interest in psychology and her desire to assist and understand others steered her into the fields of marketing and graphic design, where her artistic skills mesh with her knowledge of psychology to help her discover novel, effective ways to help businesses appeal to different types of people.

Gehling attended college at USD and earned a B.F.A. with an emphasis in graphic design. She’s previously spent time working with companies in San Francisco and with Sioux Falls marketing firms Click Rain and FLUXXR, and for the past year has been self-employed as a graphic designer and brand consultant. Her work with FLUXXR led to her involvement in the formation of The Bakery, and through that connection she found and entered their business incubation program, The Oven. A self-described “serial idea person,” she had a multitude of options to potentially forge ahead on, but the strong support and clear market demand for one in particular made the choice of which to develop further simple.

Working as a designer, she noticed a problem common throughout the design community. Access to clients’ existing brand assets—logos, fonts, images, etc.—is crucial, but the seemingly simple process of providing those assets can become a massive hassle. The formatting of these files is both vital for a designer and difficult to explain to many clients, and the miscommunications and subsequent delays can result in missed deadlines and frustration from both parties. Gehling’s decided to confront this problem through the creation of her new service, Brand Box. With this service, designers and their clients will be able to store all the relevant materials in their original formats in one convenient, accessible place, ready to share through a simple link. The free version of the service will allow users to store logos, fonts, and images, while the premium version will offer expanded storage options for businesses looking to simplify the process of storing their brand assets. Gehling is confident that her product will save both designers and their clients a lot of time and maybe some hair-pulling.

Gehling hasn’t forgotten how valuable having a supportive community has been throughout her life, and she plans to build a similar community around Brand Box. Designers and developers understand that businesses often work with a variety of different professionals, and by using this product and recommending it to businesses they work with they can make both their own lives and the lives of their fellow developers and designers easier. To help build this community, Gehling has begun writing a free ebook and creation of a variety of other resources to help others in her field improve their relationships with their clients. She feels that the relationship building, business side of a career in graphic design is underrepresented in a typical designer’s education. In this way, she can share the knowledge she’s acquired through experience and from mentors.

The barebones initial iteration of Brand Box is currently in the development phase, with the coding process being undertaken by local software engineer Dani Ames. Gehling hopes to make the service available to a group of designers for alpha testing this spring. From there she plans to expand the service’s features as she expands its market, with a responsive marketing strategy ensuring that the product meets its users’ expectations. It’s Gehling’s most ambitious project to date, but it surely won’t be her last; even as she builds Brand Box into a success, she’s always be looking out for more problems she can solve.