Studio Bench for Agencies

Your extra
bandwidth.

Danny Hotea is the bench agencies call when the timeline is tight or the internal team needs a second creative brain. Production overflow, creative direction, or both — white-label, embedded in your process, invisible to your client.

Client Roster

In good company.

From Fortune 500 boardrooms to hometown storefronts, I hold every brand to the same standard.

  • ADP
  • Citi
  • Dell
  • General Motors
  • SiriusXM
  • Smithfield
  • Sony
  • USAA
  • Vrbo
  • Love ATX
  • Oregon Trailer
  • Plethuno
  • RCO
  • Silencer Shop

How I fit in

Four ways to tap the bench. Bring me in for one sprint or keep me on standby for whatever comes next.

01

Production Overflow

Extra design and dev hands when the internal team is buried. I work inside your file structure, your tools, and your naming conventions — not mine.

02

Creative Direction

A second point of view when bandwidth for concepting is thin. Positioning, art direction, and concept development, handed off in your deck format.

03

Specialist Gaps

Motion, web build, illustration, or whatever niche skill your bench doesn't cover this quarter — brought in for exactly as long as you need it.

04

White-Label Partnership

An ongoing bench relationship for agencies who need reliable overflow capacity month over month. Fully invisible to your client, every time.

Selected work

A few recent case studies — the challenge, how long it took, who worked on it, and what shipped.

Cox Automotive — Product Design + UX Design

Cox Automotive

Product Design + UX Design

Cox Automotive saw a market opportunity and hired me to create an app that let auto dealerships define segments of vehicle inventory based on vehicle attributes, in order to apply rules such as third-party marketing, seasonal pricing, and promotional events. The hard part: define what segmentation even means, then design an app that's intuitively useful with no need for support or documentation.

Duration6 Weeks

6-week scale, marked weekly

Team

Myself + Product Owner

  • Delivered a working, testable prototype in 6 weeks
  • Dealership testers understood segmentation without documentation or support
  • Testing dealership asked, unprompted: "How soon can I use this?"
NadineWest — UX Design

NadineWest

UX Design

Returns are the money-maker for NadineWest.com, and they were losing money because employees relied on software that was difficult, slow, and error-prone. The interface was too hard to scan quickly, so the core task — comparing returning items against what was retained — kept breaking down under real warehouse pressure.

Duration1 Week

6-week scale, marked weekly

Team

Myself

  • 10x faster returns processing
  • Sharp drop in processing errors from the redesigned comparison workflow
  • Delivered in 1 week
Dovetail — UX Design

Dovetail

UX Design

Dovetail's flagship product made everyday user tasks slow and cumbersome due to a convoluted, crowded interface. Every screen tried to show everything at once, and users had to hunt for the one action they actually needed to complete.

Duration4 weeks

6-week scale, marked weekly

Team

Myself + Product Dev Team

  • Clear, quick task completion across every redesigned screen
  • Established reusable layout patterns adopted across the product
  • Delivered in 4 weeks alongside the product development team
Dell ProDeploy — UX Design + Systems Design

Dell ProDeploy

UX Design + Systems Design

Deployment verification of Dell's servers, storage, and network solutions was lengthy, costly, and error-prone. The team needed to validate roughly 80,000 configuration attributes remotely to confirm a deployment matched its sales order specifications — a process that previously took weeks of manual checking.

Duration1 Month

6-week scale, marked weekly

Team

Myself + 2 Engineering SMEs

  • Reduced deployment verification time from 3 weeks to under 60 seconds
  • Saved Dell millions in annual revenue loss from delayed and error-prone deployments
  • Delivered in 1 month working with 2 engineering SMEs

How I plug in

  1. 01

    Brief

    Send the deck, the deadline, and the client context. I scope hours or sprints against your timeline — not mine.

  2. 02

    Embed

    I plug into your tools, file structure, and revision process within a day. No onboarding drag, no ramp-up billed to you.

  3. 03

    Deliver

    Production or creative direction, moving at your pace, checking in on your cadence — Slack, standups, whatever you run.

  4. 04

    Hand back

    Clean handoff in your file format, organized the way your team expects. I disappear the moment the client sees it.

Capacity, not packages

Priced the way agencies think — hours, sprints, and reserved bench time. Scope changes, the rate doesn't.

Mini Sprint

$2,499

flat rate · 10 hours, one week

  • A low-risk way to test the fit
  • One-off production or creative direction
  • Delivered in your file format
  • No minimum commitment after
Reserve capacity
Most popular

Sprint Block

$4,799

per block · 40 hours

  • Reserved capacity for crunch weeks
  • Production + creative direction, mixed as needed
  • Priority turnaround on requests
  • White-label, invisible to your client
Reserve capacity

Embedded Retainer

$8,499

per month · 80 hours reserved

  • Standing bench capacity, month over month
  • Priority slot before other engagements
  • Same team on every project for continuity
  • Scale hours up or down as pipeline shifts
Reserve capacity

Not sure what fits? Tell me the scope and I'll recommend a block.

Questions agencies ask

Always. I work under your agency's name, never contact your client directly, and never list the work in my own portfolio without sign-off. Your client never knows I exist.

Tell me what's on your plate

Deadline, deliverables, and how much bandwidth you're short. I'll reply within one business day with a scoped plan.