8 Suppliers and Programs We Love and Trust

Every day at Crumpet HQ, we manage the balancing act between being a creative and a business owner. We go back and forth between creative flow states, deciding on colour palettes, tweaking pixel-perfect layouts, and reconciling our accounts, project management, invoicing, and client communication.

We’re not going to sugar-coat it: it’s been a learning curve for us to get that balance right and fine-tune the systems and processes that work best for us. While we love being in that flow state of creating and designing, we know that running a business also needs to be efficient and profitable.

Over the years, we’ve built our ride-or-die digital stack of online tools that do all the heavy lifting for us, allowing us to spend more time designing and less time on admin.

Here is our round up of online resources we can’t live without.

Heads up: Some links in this post are affiliate links. If you click on one and make a purchase, we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Also, we only list products and services we genuinely use and endorse, so these all come greatly recommended based on our experience.

💻 Tools for Collaboration and Design

1. Figma: The Collaborative Design Ecosystem

🤔 What it is: The industry-standard collaborative design ecosystem that is perfect for creating anything from UI/UX, full website designs, to digital templates.

🙋🏻‍♀️ How we use it: We use it for any web-based design, so this is everything from wireframing websites to brand presentations, and we can share Figma files and UI kits directly with developers. It is collaborative so team members can work within the same file simultaneously, and you can easily export assets from it so it’s a seamless workflow once you get the hang of the shortcuts and features. We also plan and design our own social media calendars and email newsletters with it because it’s great for having an overview of lots of frames (kinda like artboards) and assets at a glance.

💡 Hot tip: The Components feature is a game-changer for speed and efficiency – you set up one design that can be duplicated across multiple instances, and only need to edit it in the original spot. Especially handy for things like website header and footers.

🔗 Check it out 👈🏼

2. Canva: Rapid-Fire Content Creation

🤔 What it is: Another web-based visual asset creation tool.

💁‍♀️ How we use it: For clients who prefer to roll out their own brand assets after we complete a branding project for them, we turn them to Canva. We think it perfectly bridges the gap between designers and clients: we can set up document or social media templates, load in their Brand Kit assets with SVG files and brand colours, and they can create and export on-brand assets on their own. It is also fairly beginner-friendly for those who are not versed in advanced design software, or who simply don’t need all those bells and whistles.

🔥 Hot tip: We highly rate the built-in animation and video editing tools as beginner-friendly ways to add motion and effects on any element. Use it on your next social media post to inject some extra fun and engagement.

🤩 Check it out 👈🏼

3. Elementor: Our Web-Building Weapon of Choice

🤔 What it is: A powerful page builder for WordPress that lets us move away from traditional back-end coding to a visual, drag-and-drop, front-end workflow.

💁‍♀️ How we use it: Elementor Pro is our go-to for WordPress builds, where we use it to craft entirely custom, tailored frameworks from scratch. We use it to build all our websites where we want to add that extra special ✨something✨, whether that is complex layouts, animations, or dynamic loops in posts or products.

🔥 Hot tip: Supercharging Elementor’s existing global design features with the complementary plugin Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) takes things to the next level. By combining the two, we can set up flexible, repeatable layouts that pull in unique content automatically, keeping the site’s global styling easily adjustable in one single spot.

💻 Check it out 👈🏼

🗃️ Organisation, Storage, and Communication

4. Notion: Our Digital Brain

🤔 What it is: An incredibly flexible, and customisable, all-in-one workspace that we use for everything: notes, calendars, databases, and project management.

💁‍♀️ How we use it: It replaced three different apps for us: it tracks all our clients, projects, notes, and granular tasks, and can be shared as a portal hub for our clients to see their project milestones in real-time. We use it as a calendar to manage all our projects, pulling in milestones where we have set customised actions against each task. These can be ticked off and disappear, which is so satisfying! We also use it to brainstorm social media ideas in its Kanban board, which then feeds into the calendar view so we know when and what we need to post.

🔥 Hot tip: You can publish Notion pages as a weblink, letting you create a mini website for public view. We use this to share website documentation to clients, so it’s all within our project hub and we can make live updates without needing to share endless PDF revisions.

😍 Check it out 👈🏼

5. Dropbox: Files & Sharing

🤔 What it is: Cloud storage and file sharing that can easily handle large files.

💁‍♀️ How we use it: Beyond Figma and Canva, this is the single source of truth for all our working files and assets. We have a detailed folder and naming convention for everything, so concepts and change requests are precisely managed, and we have a clear record of all the work we create for clients. We also use this to share large files and final assets to our clients, which they can download easily even if they don’t use Dropbox.

🔥 Hot tip: You can unsync or hide the folders that you don’t often use so it doesn’t take up space on your local storage, but everything remains there ready to access when you need it.

🗂️ Check it out 👈🏼

6. Slack: Where the Chats Happen

🤔 What it is: A messaging app for internal and external team communication.

💁‍♀️ How we use it: As we work remotely 99.9% of the time, Amy and I use Slack pretty much every day to speak to each other. We use this for the incidental check-ins as we each work on different projects, quickly sharing concepts or ideas on the fly, and also we use it for Crumpet Club-wide announcements in the larger team chat. It’s a handy messaging tool where we also do our weekly WIPs through chat threads, and I often bookmark things to come back to later.

🔥 Hot tip: You can create channels and share with specific team members, which is super handy for project-specific chats between groups. I also ask Slackbot to remind me of things during the day, like to pay an invoice or to remind me of a meeting.

💬 Check it out 👈🏼

💰 The Business Engine

7. Square: The Moneymaker

🤔 What it is: A payment processing and invoicing platform.

💁‍♀️ How we use it: This is how we track all our invoices, and it integrates with our accounting software Xero for easy reconciling. We use it to send deposit and balance invoices, and it emails out an easy link for payment to clients, so it’s clear and easy to use.

🔥 Hot tip: Make use of their automated invoice reminders, where you can set reminders at time intervals after a due date, using your own on-brand messaging. This saves you the hassle of tracking overdue invoices or chasing up payments.

💰 Check it out 👈🏼

8. VentraIP: The Foundation of the Crumpet Club website

🤔 What it is: A web hosting and domain registration service.

💁‍♀️ How we use it: VentraIP manages our web hosting and domains, and we’ve put every client who needs secure, reliable and fast web hosting onto them. They have a really easy to use dashboard, and it is super flexible in how to upgrade or downgrade services as we need them. It’s the foundation that our online presence rests on!

🔥 Hot tip: Their 24/7 local support is like nothing else. If we ever have a question about our hosting, website, online security, or anything web-related, we don’t even bother with Google anymore: their support is live and they go above and beyond to find a solution.

💌 Check it out 👈🏼

🏁

In Conclusion: Set up your systems for success

When the days get busy and our workload piles up, I am so grateful that we have these smart systems already set up. Having a process in place relieves that bit of effort and mental load, leaving more time for us to actually do the work!

Using these tools have helped us to streamline our days, organise our brains, and makes things easier for our clients as well.

Let us know: What are the unsung hero apps in your business stack?