São Paulo – A service firm has found its way into the global market and proven that Brazilian exports can go beyond commodities and manufactured goods. Fastdezine has ventured overseas by providing matchmaking, marketing and communication services, taking its solutions to 18 countries. Its focus is now in breaking into the Arab market.
The enterprise was chosen as the Best Organizational Model in the latest survey on the internationalization of Brazilian companies by the Dom Cabral Foundation and ranked first in International Value Creation as Women-Led, Small Enterprise and Startup.
Active in markets such as the United States, Germany, China, and India, it now aims to operate in the United Arab Emirates, a country that is adept at digital ideas like Fastdezine’s. “Arabs are quite open to new solutions. They offer incentives for foreign firms to enter their market, and that serves us well,” said Ursula Aleixo, CEO & cofounder of Fastdezine.
Established in 2012, the firm is headquartered in Brazil and the US and seeks a business partnership to reach the Arabs. “We’re open to do business with clients in the UAE, so we seek to break into that market. We seek a firm that could bridge this gap between us and the Arabs,” says Aleixo.
The interest in developing projects for UAE clients isn’t new. “We started thinking on the Arabs when we first understood that firms based there are very much like firms in the US, where we established our first head office,” says the cofounder of Fastdezine.
Despite having intended to expand business into the UAE for quite some time, Aleixo haven’t made any move towards that goal yet as she isn’t familiar with the country and doesn’t know how to approach UAE firms. “The Arab nation is certainly a potential client for Fastdezine.”
In the beginning was the design
Fastdezine develops projects to several countries, but its services are mostly present in the US and Brazil. Whereas now it provides different types of communication and marketing solutions, the firm had different goals when it was first established in the North American country.
“I’m Brazilian who’d worked for over 20 years in the US. While working as an international director of sign making and printing franchises, I identified a bottleneck in the production of design firms. With that in mind, I decided to establish a platform to develop on-demand design projects for the sign printing franchises there,” she recounts.
After that, the business expanded until it became the current enterprise, a matchmaking platform that delivers on-demand online and offline marketing and communication content.
The company opened its Brazilian office in 2016 in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais state. Its in-house staff consists of 30 workers. Additionally, Fastdezine has over 400 service providers including copywriters, designers, developers, and project managers to cater to the clients’ requests.
Marketing solutions provided
Services provided by the platform include graphic design, branding, video, animation, posts, social media, strategy, campaign, and performance. “As digital marketing and the demands for marketing agencies grow, there is now a daily demand for daily production of multi-channel content. As these agencies don’t always have skilled professionals or enough personnel to meet these demands, they end up relying on Fastdezine.”
The firm’s flagship is a matchmaking service called Presto. It serves for bringing marketing and artificial intelligence experts and firms closer to potential corporate clients. Via LinkedIn, the US- and Brazil-based platform connects the two sides of the business.
“By using a customized lead generation service, Fastdezine connects the firm to the decisionmakers, the clients. Via specific filters like industry, size of the enterprise, and location, we create a list of top potential clients,” says Aleixo.
However, before this connection is made, an upgrade in the LinkedIn profile of both experts and firms is carried out, including profile optimization, post creation, and definition of the target audience. “Presto acts as a solution that brings together talents, technology and processes for B2B firms to work on LinkedIn. Our ultimate goal with Presto is to schedule meetings between the two sides of business,” says Fastdezine’s CEO & cofounder.
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Translated by Guilherme Miranda
