How DesignPickle helped Basata Built a Scalable Brand

In the healthcare technology space, where credibility and clarity make or break adoption, presentation is everything. For Basata, an AI‑driven healthcare SaaS company, branding wasn’t optional — it was survival.

Basata’s product automates administrative workloads like referral management, patient communication, and scheduling so clinics and care providers can focus on patients, not paperwork. But for a company built to simplify operations, building a visual identity was its own challenge.

One‑Person Marketing, Endless To‑Do List

At the heart of the company’s marketing stood Christina Kehoe, the startup’s lone marketer.
Her days combined strategic planning, campaign execution, and design delivery — often all at once. With limited time, dual responsibilities, and big ambitions for Basata’s identity, she faced a perfect storm of startup constraints:

• Limited bandwidth: She needed everything from brochures and event collateral to sales decks, yet had no in‑house support.

• DIY fatigue: Tools like Canva helped for quick edits but failed to achieve the professional polish required for healthcare credibility.

• Agency costs: External design retainers were too expensive, often exceeding early‑stage hiring budgets.

• Partial volume: The workload fluctuated — not quite enough to justify a full‑time designer but far too much for one person to juggle effectively.

“I was building a brand and pipeline at the same time,” Christina explains. “Design was slowing both down.”

Enter Design Pickle: Scalable Creativity on Demand

Design Pickle stepped in as Basata’s long‑term creative partner — a subscription‑based design service that provides expert designers as an extension of internal teams. What appealed most to Christina was the combination of speed, consistency, and affordability.

She could brief projects through Design Pickle’s easy‑to‑use platform, collaborate with designers directly via Slack, and receive on‑brand deliverables within 24 hours — no contracts, no hourly rates.

With incredible flexibility, she seamlessly transitioned from crisis management to brand development! Design Pickle took charge of design execution, freeing her to dive into strategy and supercharge customer growth!

Building a Brand with Illustration as Identity

The collaboration not only met deadlines but also established a unique visual language for Basata’s brand. Christina sought custom illustrations to replace the generic stock imagery common in the healthcare sector, but her previous agency failed to deliver within budget. By partnering with Design Pickle’s illustration team, she crafted a comprehensive illustration guide that detailed color palettes, line style, and tone. The result was a visually warm, human style that transformed Basata’s communications from clinical to compassionate. These illustrations became integral to Basata’s brand system, featuring in presentations, events, social ads, and sales materials. Most importantly, they unified the brand’s appearance and voice across all platforms.The results spoke for themselves:

• Developed a distinct visual identity for a new category of AI healthcare software.

• Rebuilt sales and marketing materials to project trust through design consistency.

• Saved 10+ hours per week, redirecting time to partnerships and growth campaigns.

• Doubled creative output, from flyers and booth assets to blog visuals and case studies.

For a lean startup, every hour and visual success adds up quickly. Design Pickle was a great help to Basata, allowing them to maintain their brand while keeping operations running smoothly.

Slack as the Creative Command Center

A significant distinguishing feature for Christina was the Slack integration offered by Design Pickle. This integration allows her to provide feedback in real-time threads, eliminating the confusion of email attachments and version discrepancies, and enabling her to view progress updates directly within her workspace.

The team at Design Pickle meticulously tracks revisions, archiving assets into Stockpress for future use, and seamlessly links deliverables back to Basata’s shared folders. This efficient feedback loop has nearly eradicated the endless back-and-forth that once devoured half of her week. "The platform feels less like outsourcing and more like a secret department within Basata," Christina remarks. "It keeps everything flowing smoothly, even when I'm not able to."

The Bigger Picture: Why Lean Teams Need Design Infrastructure

Basata's story is not unusual; it reflects a growing trend in new industries. A report from Creative Services Market Insights predicts that by 2025, 85% of startups with fewer than 50 employees will use a Creative-as-a-Service provider within the next three years.

The benefits are undeniable: subscription design cuts out fixed hiring expenses, guarantees consistent brand quality, and enables non-designers to create visually compelling brands.

For health‑tech startups like Basata, those advantages are transformational:
- Fast visual delivery supports investor pitches and trade shows at startup speed.
- Creative templates turn design into a repeatable asset.
- Better branding helps earn trust in highly regulated markets.

This model also helps designers. Platforms like Design Pickle link artists to various projects, steady income, and international brands, without the uncertainty of freelance work.

A Lean Team for the Future

For Christina, Design Pickle means more than just creating visuals. It's about gaining creative confidence and independence.

A lean marketing team can achieve remarkable growth without compromising on design quality. By utilizing a system like Design Pickle, small companies can brand themselves with the same impact as larger ones, effectively showcasing the human side of technology that customers crave. In a market filled with impersonal interfaces and corporate jargon, this visual warmth not only sets them apart but also fosters trust.

Key Point: Basata's experience demonstrates how design systems like Design Pickle are transforming creative work for the AI age. With just one marketer, one platform, and a supportive team, it's possible to create a brand that is as trustworthy as the product it promotes.