What is ‘White Label Development’
The term ‘white label’ is used across industries. It is commonly used when referring to a fully supported product or service that’s made by one company but sold by another and this can be anything from notepads to software.
Here at SOtech we refer to our white label service as a way for our clients to use our team as an extension of their own. This can often mean a member of our development team will be employed by one of our clients for a long term project or fixed term and works directly within their business. This is different to using our full service where we take a brief from our clients and manage the entire project from scoping to project management to QA and testing to launch.
The reason why White Labelling exists within the digital arena is because so many digital services cross-over and often clients would rather have a single point of contact – for example they may have worked with a digital marketing agency for a long time, then want to re-build their website – one option is to then go and find a new agency specialising in web development, the other option is for the digital marketing agency already engaged and trusted to offer to manage the web development; in this instance they would come to someone like us and ‘white label’ our service. Meaning they would bill their client their normal rate and pay our fees from there.
This is very common practise for Digital Marketing and Creative Agencies, but also works the other way with some more Development focussed agencies white labelling digital marketing services. It’s simply a way for a single partner to offer more services than they have in-house capacity or knowledge for.
The other element that falls under this umbrella are businesses who have some level of skill set in-house and don’t really need the full agency service – strategy, Project management, Account Management, QA, etc but rather just want guaranteed good quality developers that are fully vetted and managed by an experienced team. This is where we come in, our developers can be hired full time under our white label service to insert themselves in-house and be managed by the client as if they were an employee – except they also get our senior team on hand to support with any issues.
In all instances the benefits of this service are that whether you are an Agency or Businesses, you can hire fully vetted, experienced developers at much lower rates than recruiting them yourselves and you also get a full team wrapped around them to cover off additional queries or challenges.
The other benefits are that you essentially can guarantee experience and skill and also know that you can scale up your workforce quickly without the need to interview, post jobs, review CVs – if you know the project and skillset you need – we do the rest.