One brand, 100+ markets: how a small studio scaled a rebrand without 100 photoshoots

Warsaw-based Properly Studio has rebranded Axi, a global online trading brand with 1.4 million users across more than 100 markets. The scope shows why this one is worth studying: a brand identity, a 150-plus-page website and product UI, tailored market by market — delivered by a six-year-old studio, not a global network agency.

Axi’s brief was a contradiction many small teams will recognise: be globally consistent and locally connected at the same time, while adapting to the requirements of different markets and jurisdictions. Properly’s answer was to treat the identity as a system, not a single look. The logo and the red stayed; nearly everything else changed, up to a globally scalable character system. Markets were grouped into four regions — Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, Europe and South America — each with its own landscapes and personas, and the site itself shifts by jurisdiction.

The production story is the most transferable part. Rather than booking a hundred separate photoshoots, Properly built a custom AI-assisted workflow that generated imagery finished by hand. The same persona can step from a banner into an animation or a new market without a crew or a reshoot, and the system carries into the Axi app, the client portal and Axi Select. Co-founder Mateusz Piątek puts the real challenge plainly: it was never the look, but building an identity that adapts to every market and jurisdiction — from what it shows to what it is allowed to say.

Why this matters to independent teams: scale is usually where small studios lose to big ones, and this project reframes the contest. A small team wins a 100-market job not by pretending to be a hundred people, but by building a system — regional rules, reusable characters, an AI-assisted pipeline with human finishing — that makes scale a design problem instead of a headcount problem. The discipline to note is the finishing: AI generated the raw material, people finished it. That distinction is what keeps the output feeling like a brand rather than a template.

For studios pitching work that looks too big for them, the Axi case is a useful precedent to cite: the client, Axi’s global head of marketing Julie Sharova, says the team would choose Properly again without hesitation — the kind of endorsement that travels further than any capabilities deck.

Source: GlobeNewswire / Properly Studio, “Axi Rebrands Across 100+ Markets, Designed by Properly Studio” (October 15, 2026).