Here’s a chal­lenge for a cre­ative art direc­tor: your account man­ag­er asks you to find a way of mak­ing it a cinch for mass brands to adver­tise their seri­ous­ly cool clothes through your agency and then tells you to come up with a killer idea to make it work.

But as our intre­pid art direc­tor march­es into this chal­lenge, he’ll find a Brook­lyn-based start­up calm­ly walk­ing out: Sup­ply Side got there first. Launched by its co-founders Adam Travis and Alexan­der Kei­th in 2010, it’s built up an impres­sive ros­ter of more than 50 firms in the space of just three years, includ­ing colos­si like Ama­zon, Need Sup­ply and Urban Outfitters.

From mobile show­room to brand­ing agency

That’s not bad for a firm that began life as a kind of trav­el­ling show­room. Mr. Travis, a pro­duc­tion man­ag­er, teamed up with Mr. Kei­th, a for­mer Wolff Olins brand­ing expert, and packed a van with a car­go of made-in-Brook­lyn gar­ments and acces­sories. Then they trav­elled the coun­try sell­ing them to boutiques.

Soon after, Travis and Kei­th were design­ing and sell­ing their own bespoke line of menswear, Gen­er­al Assem­bly – an ini­tia­tive which spawned two fur­ther brands, Mr. Nice and Super Nation­al. This devel­op­ment sig­naled a trans­mo­gri­fi­ca­tion in the firm: from its ori­gin as a man-in-a-van cloth­ing sup­pli­er, it was becom­ing an agency that white-labeled acces­sories and cloth­ing for oth­er firms.

Stay­ing lean and think­ing dig­i­tal

So far, one of the secrets of its suc­cess is to stay lean: all the work com­ing through Sup­ply System’s doors is han­dled by just three full-time employ­ees backed up with a rota­tion of free­lancers.  But to come back to that killer idea our imag­i­nary art direc­tor was asked to pro­duce, Sup­ply System’s solu­tion is to think dig­i­tal­ly through and through.  As Kei­th puts it, “Cloth­ing is con­tent. We hope a pic­ture of some­thing we design goes viral.”

Unlike most of its com­peti­tors, Sup­ply Side doesn’t get to work after the horse has bolt­ed – it doesn’t exer­cise its cre­ativ­i­ty after a prod­uct has already been devel­oped. Instead, the agency prides itself on being involved in craft­ing the mes­sages its clients want to con­vey with their brands right from the beginning.

Kei­th explains:

“We do every­thing from prod­uct devel­op­ment to graph­ic design, label­ing, nam­ing-for some of the small­er guys, we do man­u­fac­tur­ing as well.”