How a solo founder built an apparel brand end-to-end with Kittl

Claudia Spiller Reed is the founder of Bespoken™, a Midwest-based, faith-driven apparel brand rooted in thoughtful design and conviction. With decades of experience leading creative fashion marketing teams, Claudia dedicates her time outside of her full-time career to building Bespoken. A powerhouse one-woman team, she designs, writes, and markets every piece on her own.

As an ambitious creator without formal design training and with no outside support, Claudia needed a design tool that enabled her to:

• design products,
• refine her brand identity,
• and create polished, production-ready marketing assets.

Enter Kittl. Claudia began using Kittl as an end-to-end creative platform and independently took Bespoken from an idea to a fully-realized brand.

Claudia now uses Kittl almost daily, supporting every step of her business’s growth, from initial concept to final mockups.

At a glance

• Creator: Claudia Spiller Reed, Founder of Bespoken™
• Use case: Apparel design, brand building, e-commerce marketing
• Results with Kittl: Faster execution, higher-quality output, creative independence

The challenge: Building a brand — alone

Launching Bespoken meant building an entire brand from scratch — without a design background, agency support, or months to learn complex creative software.

Claudia’s biggest challenges included:

• Filling skill gaps as a solo founder without formal design training.
• Moving quickly while maintaining a high creative standard.
• Creating consistent brand visuals that are stylistically-aligned.
• Creating professional, scalable designs across products, e-commerce, and marketing channels.

At the core of the challenge was independence. Claudia needed an efficient tool that could support her creative vision without limits to bring her brand to life.

The solution: Kittl as an end-to-end creative platform

“Kittl has been essential to bringing my brand to life. I use the platform end to end — from product design through marketing execution — and truly couldn’t have done this without it.”

Kittl enables creators to design, iterate, and visualize products and brand assets in a single platform. With advanced typography tools, vector editing, AI-powered Smartboards, and lifelike mockups, designers can move seamlessly from concept to execution. Which is exactly what Claudia does.

She uses Kittl to design apparel artwork, refine typography down to individual letter spacing, experiment with AI-assisted variations, and create realistic lifestyle mockups — all without leaving the platform.

Her typical workflow includes:

• Using templates as creative starting points or inspiration.
• Refining designs with advanced typography and vector editing tools.
• Exploring alternate directions with Kittl Flows — the tool that lets creators generate realistic visual variations from just one or two images using AI Smartboards.
• Creating production-ready mockups and marketing visuals for e-commerce and social.

Creating a product: From variation testing to mockups

Bespoken™ was born with a belief that faith can be expressed with beauty, restraint, and intention, pairing meaningful words and Scripture with elevated design and premium materials. One of Claudia’s most defining projects is Daughter of the King, an evergreen apparel design created for Bespoken™. She needed to ensure the design worked seamlessly across garments, colorways, and marketing contexts, while maintaining her vision.

“Kittl allowed me to experiment with alternate visual directions and make informed creative decisions without losing momentum.”

Using AI Smartboards with Kittl Flows she was able to quickly create variations to explore alternate visual directions without losing momentum. The ability to visualize how a design would work across real-world applications enabled her to refine the illustration, typography, and layout. Each step done entirely within Kittl.

The next step was professional photos of the product. But for small businesses and ambitious brands like Bespoken™, photoshoots are often out-of-budget. Especially before testing a new product. But Claudia didn’t let that barrier stop her from growing her business. She used Kittl to create production-ready designs and photoshoot-style mockups for e-commerce, enabling her to A/B test versions and launch confidently.

The benefits to an ambitious founder

1. Creative independence

Kittl allows Claudia to design, refine, and execute her vision without relying on outside help and with just one design tool subscription.

2. Precision and control

From kerning individual letters to fine-tuning hierarchy, spacing, and layout, Kittl offers a level of control that supports the detail needed for Claudia’s designs.

“What surprised me most is how much control and precision the platform offers.”

3. Speed without sacrificing quality

With an intuitive interface and fast learning curve, Claudia was able to start creating immediately — saving months of learning time compared to traditional tools, and dramatically improving both workflow and output quality.

Bringing product mockups to life with Kittl Video

As Bespoken™ continues to grow, Claudia has started experimenting with Kittl Video to add motion to the static mockups she already creates with Kittl Flows — bringing her products to life in ways that wouldn’t have been possible as a one-woman team.

For a solo founder managing design, marketing, and execution alone, video is often the first thing to get deprioritized. Traditional motion tools are time-consuming, complex, and require a steep learning curve. Kittl Video changes that.

After creating a product mockup with Kittl Flows, Claudia can simply select an image, enter a short prompt describing how she wants it to move, and let AI animate the visual in seconds. What was once a static image becomes a dynamic asset ready for her website, product pages, and social channels.

With Kittl Video, Claudia can:

• Experiment with motion without learning new software
• Create eye-catching animated product visuals for social and web
• Elevate her brand before she’s ready for big-budget photoshoots

The takeaway

With Kittl, a solo founder can do it all, moving faster, designing better, and building meaningful brands with confidence. And all of this can be done without compromising on craft, control, or creativity.

For Claudia, it made the difference between an idea and a fully realized brand.

“Before Bespoken ever existed, I didn’t know how I would build it myself. Kittl has been nothing short of a Godsend.”

Use the creator’s toolbox

For Bespoken™, Claudia primarily uses AI Smartboards with Kittl Flows, advanced typography tools, vector editing, and mockups to design products, refine brand assets, and create polished e-commerce visuals.