You're at the in-between. A full-time senior designer is $150K all-in plus equity. You're not ready for that headcount. But one-off freelancers eat your team's time on re-onboarding every project, and the design system gets stretched a little further out of alignment every time someone new touches it.

The retainer fills that gap. A senior design partner who's embedded enough to know your product, your team, and your customers, but flexible enough to scale up or down without the hiring overhead.

Sized to your throughput: $5,000, $6,000, or $7,500/month. Priority scheduling, async-by-default collaboration, monthly strategic review.

Retainers compound. By month two, I know your design system, your tone, your team, and what your customers actually click on. By month three, the lead time on any new request is half of what it would be project-to-project. That compounding is the actual reason retainers outperform one-offs, and it's why I require a three-month minimum.

If you can't commit to three months, this isn't the right offer. Book the Product Design Sprint ($3,500) instead, see if we work well together, and graduate into the retainer if it makes sense.

Product and growth teams shipping multiple updates a month who need consistent execution across UI, marketing pages, landing pages, decks, social, and brand application. Companies between hiring a full-time designer and ad-hoc freelance. Founders who want a fractional design lead they don't have to manage. Teams with a real backlog that keeps slipping.

Current retainer clients: Vinca ($5K/month), Bem ($6K/month), Diamond Cross Ranch ($6K/month).

Not for: companies that only need one-time project work (use the productized engagements), or teams that need 60+ hours a month of throughput (we scale to a custom tier).

Strategy and execution, not just pixel work. Flows, hierarchy, conversion logic, design system thinking.

Multi-disciplinary scope: product UI, marketing pages, landing pages, decks, social, brand application, UX flows, prototypes.

Direct Slack channel. Async by default, weekly 30-minute prioritization call.

Monthly review: what shipped, what worked, what's queued, where to focus.

Senior leadership on every deliverable. Production support comes from my team (Disha on Figma execution, Marto on Framer development, motion and social specialists when needed). You get senior direction throughout.

Week 0 is the intake. I learn your product, your stack, your priorities, your tone.

From week 1 forward, you bring requests via Slack or a shared queue. We prioritize together weekly. I ship continuously. Monthly review at the end of each cycle.

Sized to your throughput:

$5,000/month (standard): ~25 hours, the entry-level engagement. The price most retainers start at.

$6,000/month (active): ~32 hours, more throughput.

$7,500/month (heavy): ~40 hours, max active engagement.

Three-month minimum, then month-to-month with 30 days notice to scale or stop. Additional capacity above included hours bills at the studio overflow rate ($150/hour).

Embedded design partners outperform freelancers because the cost of context switching disappears around month two. Embedded design partners outperform full-time hires for early-stage companies because the design problem is rarely full-time, it's bursty. The retainer is sized for that bursty pattern, with senior eyes on every output, without the headcount commitment.

If you've done a Product Design Sprint ($3,500) and want to graduate into ongoing work, the sprint cost credits against the first month.