Andrea Orrego
CEO & Co-Founder
Senior brand designer turned founder. Spent years inside a growing tech company watching the approval process undo her team's best work — so she built the tool that should have existed. Based in Seattle.
Our Story
We're building the tool brand designers deserve.
Atelier was born from a real problem in a real brand team — and built by people who lived through it. Seattle, WA.
Founding Story
The problem I couldn't stop solving.
Before Atelier, I was the senior brand designer at a fast-growing technology company in Seattle — running brand system development, campaign rollouts, and quarterly creative launches. I was proud of the work. I was not proud of how the work got approved.
Every major deliverable ended the same way. We'd share a deck link. The VP would open a cached version from two days prior. The marketing lead would have a PDF from Tuesday. Someone in legal would have downloaded "final" last week and opened that. Comments would arrive against three different states of the same file. My team would spend hours triaging: which note is still relevant? Which did we already address? Which is pointing at a layout we changed three saves ago? That triage wasn't design work. It was damage control.
I looked at every tool that might solve it. Figma was for creation — the review and approval layer simply wasn't there. Frame.io was thoughtfully designed for video review but wasn't built around brand canvas workflows. SharePoint and Dropbox were file storage, not review systems. Email was the default because nothing else had decided to own this specific moment.
Starting in late 2023, I spent evenings sketching what the review step should actually look like: canvases that were version-locked before sharing, layers you could protect from stakeholder edits, comments that lived on the exact element they referenced and moved with it. In early 2024, I left my role and started building it full-time. Rohan joined to build the canvas sync infrastructure. Simone joined to make it feel like a design tool, not a project tracker.
Atelier is not trying to replace Figma. It is not competing with Notion or SharePoint. It owns one specific phase — from the moment a brand canvas is ready for stakeholder eyes to the moment an approved version leaves the room. That precision is deliberate. Brand designers are underserved by software built for other disciplines. Atelier is built specifically for them.
— Andrea Orrego, CEO & Co-Founder, Seattle 2024
What We Believe
Three values that shape every decision.
01
Craft
Precision over speed. Brand designers spend their working hours thinking through the difference between correct and almost correct — a kerning pair, a swatch, a margin. Atelier should feel like it was built by people who understand that distinction. Every interaction should be thought through, not bolted on.
02
Clarity
Design decisions should be documented, not assumed. Atelier exists to make the review record visible and permanent — who said what, against which version, at what stage. That clarity protects designers and gives stakeholders confidence in the outcome.
03
Trust
Reviewers and designers working from the same source of truth. Not a branched email chain, not a PDF cached from Tuesday, not a Slack thread that references a file nobody can find. One canvas, one history, one final version. That's how trust is built.
The Team
Four people. One specific problem.
Two designers, an engineer who has shipped collaborative editing infrastructure, and a growth lead who has taken design tools from early access to scale. We are a small team on a narrow problem — and that is exactly how we want it.
Rohan Mehta
Lead Engineer
Full-stack engineer focused on collaborative editing and real-time sync. Built the canvas versioning engine and conflict-resolution layer that makes simultaneous edits safe in Atelier.
Simone Adeyemi
Product Designer
Product designer with an in-house background. Responsible for everything that touches the canvas — the layer lock UX, the comment pin interactions, and the export flow. If it feels like a design tool and not a project tracker, that's Simone's work.
Kyle Strand
Growth & Marketing
Growth and marketing lead with a track record of taking design tools from early access to paying teams. Runs early access onboarding, content, and the direct channel to brand designers who need Atelier but haven't found it yet.
We're hiring.
Small team, real problem, early product. We're looking for people who have worked inside brand or creative teams and have strong opinions about why the tools don't fit. Get in touch.
Get in touch