Craate Creative is a full-service brand, creative and marketing agency in Brunswick, Melbourne. Strategy, brand identity, production, websites, video, photography, social and digital marketing. Cesar Rodrigues founded it to take clients with big ideas from end to end. A recent build was a couples therapy practice in the same building, taken from strategy and branding through the website, the content and the marketing, down to how the space feels when someone walks in.

Every change was a phone call

Before Framer, the agency’s own site ran on WordPress, and so did most of what Cesar understood a website to be. Anything outside the CMS meant contacting a developer: a friend, living overseas, running his own business, replying when he could.

The cost was not money, it was latency. Deciding to pivot the agency’s messaging, because they were finding traction with a particular niche, meant weeks of back and forth to change words on a page. And the loop carried a quality tax on top of the delay.

More often than not, typically you’d just be like, it’s 60% of the way there. I’m happy with that.

He is straightforward about where he sits. His background is creative direction, not design. He used a little Photoshop, InDesign, Figma and Miro, but he was prototyping with them rather than producing anything.

The click was when Ryan walked in the door

Cesar was introduced to Ryan for creative direction on what was then a young business. Ryan introduced him to Framer by rebuilding Craate’s homepage and handing it over.

The handover is where it turned. Cesar expected the usual arrangement: stay out of the back end, manage a CMS, learn to press publish.

What I realized once I opened Framer was that I was able to go in there and shape things myself. That was the initial unlock moment.

The consequence, which he describes with some amusement, is that an idea at midnight is live at midnight. Both the good and the bad of it.

From Squarespace to a service worth charging for

Client sites had been Squarespace. The agency rebuilt its own site in Framer first, then started offering it outward. Clients arrive with a WordPress or Squarespace site and a fixed idea of the trade-off: serious means hardcoded, easy means Wix.

His pitch is a live demonstration. On a call, without preparing, he opens the Craate site, edits it in the browser and publishes, showing a prospective client how their own staff would change copy without ever opening Framer.

It answers the real objection, which is rarely technical. Clients arrive anxious about changing platforms, some sitting on ten-year-old websites purely because updating them feels frightening. Craate now hands over six or seven short videos walking each client through their own site: change an image, change copy, add a video.

An agency where everyone is signed in

The structural change is who is allowed to touch the website. Developer, designer, project manager, marketing manager and Cesar are all in the same tool.

We’re not relying on 1 or 2 people in the business. We’ve got an agency of varied skills that can jump into the website and update things and push things live.

A copy brief that used to route from project manager to designer to developer can now be actioned by the project manager directly. More often than not, one person owns a project from start to finish. He reckons Framer covers about 90% of what they need to deliver a client an amazing website and exceed expectation.

To keep the whole team capable, Ryan’s course is available to everyone in the agency, and Cesar uses it himself when he needs to execute something specific. What he values is that it maps out how to deliver websites at every scale.

The part he was afraid of

There was an element of fear late last year about what AI meant for an agency like his. It did not last. Opening Claude, he says, gives him the sense that anything is possible.

Practically, it means he now briefs his team by building the prototype himself, close to what he wants, then handing it off to be finalised and deployed. The tedious work happens roughly ten times faster, and the time that frees goes to the problems that are actually hard: messaging, brand, and the things a client is really paying for.