CrowdSpring Review - Our Profile with Customer Feedback and Complaints

Are you considering CrowdSpring for your logo design contest? If so, read on as we have compiled a short profile of this company and its services. We have also searched the web looking for consumer feedback, reviews and complaints relating to this company and have reported on our findings below.

Overview

Founded by Ross Kimbarovsky and Mike Samson, Chicago based CrowdSPRING launched in May 2008. Kimbarovsky worked for a law firm prior to starting up Crowdspring and he has been recognized for his strong desire to protect the intellectual property of all of the site's users.

They have been profiled and referenced by some large media outlets like Techcrunch and Yahoo News. You can also learn more about CrowdSpring at their Wikipedia page here.

Along with the likes of 99designs, Crowdspring provides one of the worlds largest marketplaces for design and other creative work. They are a little different from some of the other logo design contest sites that we have reviewed in that they offer writing projects as well as design projects. They have completed work for many well known companies including Starbucks, Amazon, LG and Microsoft.

Products and Services

The services on offer at the Crowdspring.com site include design competitions in categories like graphic design, web design and industrial packaging design. Under their writing categories you can have a contest to name your business, write a poem, carry out editing work and much more. Naturally, we were mostly concerned with their logo design competitions.

How it Works

Users start off by placing their order with $200 being the minimum order amount for logo design. There is also a $39 standard listing fee and 15% added on as CrowdSpring's commission. You have a variety of options when you order relating to how much you want to pay, the time frame of the competition and how much privacy or promotion you want for your contest. You also have to compete a briefing form so that designers know what kind of logo you are after.

Once your contest is set in motion designers from a pool of over 92,000 located right around the world submit concepts for your inspection. According to their website, the average logo design contest receives 110 entries.

The next step is to provide ratings and feedback on the designs that have been submitted. You can also communicate with your designers so that they can make alterations to their designs that bring them closer and closer to what you are looking for.

Lastly, when your content deadline is reached you can appoint a winner and they will be awarded the prize money once they have finished your final revisions and delivered your files to you.

Guarantee Policies

As always, we recommend that you read over the small print on a website before you go ahead and place an order. It is difficult to find precise details on their website relating to refunds and we could not find any mention of this in their user agreement. While they do offer a money back guarantee on their site it seems that a portion of this that includes listing fees is not refundable.

User Reviews

We did a little research on the Internet to try and find some references to CrowdSpring and their services, specifically those relating to logo design. While it is easy to find reports from designers that are unhappy with the 'crowd sourcing' or 'design contest' business model we were more concerned with feedback coming from customers that have held logo design contests.

1) Rob Walker at Slate.com ordered a logo contest with CrowdSpring and then discussed the results with some design professionals. Responses were mixed but the results were generally better than what you would expect for a $200 design contest.

2) We found some CrowdSpring reviews at OneStartups.com. This discussion has some good feedback relating to Crowdspring and also has some interesting comparisons between them and market leader 99designs.

3) We did find one CrowdSpring complaint at RipOffReport.com. This user criticized their design process from beginning to end and felt that the designers did not create designs that were appropriate to the brief. This person applied for a refund but noted that after fees were deducted they had less than two thirds of their money returned.

Overall Rating - 2nd Place

To visit the website for more information - CrowdSpring.com