A branding request that turns into a project
An agency is ready to sign on one condition: vendors and tenants must see the agency's brand, not yours. Their logo, their colours, their domain, emails from their address. Your developer makes a copy of the stylesheet, hard-codes the colours, and sets up the domain by hand. It works.
Then three more agencies ask. One is a franchise with a brand guideline document. One wants the emails to come from their own domain. One has a logo that looks wrong on your dark header. Each is done differently, by whoever was free. A year later, a change to your main styles breaks the look of two branded agencies, and a certificate for a custom domain expires because nobody knew it existed.
Why white-labelling goes wrong
Agencies want customer-facing screens in their brand for good reasons: vendors and tenants are their clients, and a strange brand name looks like a third party handling their data. The trouble is treating each request as a one-off.
- Branding is done in code or copied stylesheets, so each agency is a variant to maintain.
- Custom domains and certificates are set up by hand and tracked nowhere.
- Emails are sent from your domain with the agency's name, which spam filters and recipients distrust.
- Screens were designed around your colours, so some agency colours make text unreadable.
- Agencies cannot preview or change their branding themselves, so every tweak is a ticket.
What hand-built branding costs
Each branded agency adds a little maintenance cost to every release, and the costs add up. Failures are embarrassing and visible: a tenant sees a broken logo, or a vendor's browser warns that the portal is not secure because a certificate expired. Emails from your domain dressed up as the agency land in spam, and the agency blames your product for vendors not getting updates.
Sales feel it as well. When branding is a developer task, your sales team hesitates to offer it, or offers it and then waits weeks for a slot in the development queue. A signed agency sitting unbranded and not yet live is revenue delayed, and the agency's first impression of working with you is waiting.
How we build branding as configuration
What we build makes each agency's brand a set of settings applied to one product.
- A theme model with the settings agencies need: logo variants for light and dark backgrounds, primary and accent colours, fonts from an approved list, and wording such as the agency's name for the portal.
- Automatic contrast checks, so a chosen colour that would make text unreadable is adjusted or rejected with a clear message.
- Custom domains per agency, such as a portal subdomain on the agency's own website, with certificates issued and renewed automatically and alerts if DNS changes break them.
- Branded email sending from the agency's domain, with the DNS records they need to add shown in the admin screen and checked, so emails are properly authenticated.
- A preview screen where the agency admin sees vendor, tenant and landlord pages with their branding before publishing.
- Group branding for franchises, where head office sets the brand and offices inherit it.
| Branding element | Set by | Handled how |
|---|---|---|
| Logo and colours | Agency admin | Theme settings with contrast check |
| Portal web address | Agency with their DNS provider | Custom domain, certificate automated |
| Email sender | Agency admin | Their domain, authentication records checked |
| Franchise brand | Head office | Inherited by offices |
| Your own brand | You | Small powered-by line, if you want one |
Setting up the next agency
The next agency's office manager opens the branding screen, uploads their logo, picks their colours and sees a warning that their light green on white would be hard to read, with a suggested darker shade. They add the portal address on their own domain and the screen shows the DNS record to add, then confirms when it is working. Emails switch to the agency's address once the authentication records check out. Your developers are not involved, and your next release does not need to consider their brand at all.
Is branding becoming a maintenance burden?
- Each branded agency has its own stylesheet or code changes.
- Custom domain certificates are renewed by hand, or not at all.
- Emails show the agency's name but come from your domain.
- Agencies ask for branding tweaks through support tickets.
- A change to your main design has broken an agency's branded screens.