frame.work, Faina Danielian

01

The Research

frame.work was beloved by tech enthusiasts and invisible to everyone else. The current audience was tech-savvy insiders, but the real opportunity was everyone who lives the brand's values without knowing it exists.

The Numbers

A tower of stacked, cannibalized electronics and computer parts

80%

Of Millennials say sustainability is a driving factor behind their purchasing decisions. (Statista)

A person holding a handmade cardboard sign reading There Is No Planet B

61%

Of Gen Z shoppers look for used items first. The resale market is projected to exceed $100B. (Bilspace)

A shopper flipping through vinyl records at a record store

10%

Premium for sustainably sourced goods is a price that 54% of Gen Z and 50% of Millennials are willing to pay. (Redis)

Trends

People are done upgrading on someone else's timeline. The push for self-sufficiency, sustainability, and real ownership is reshaping what consumers expect from their tech.

Mega Trends

Political Tensions
AI Revolution
Wealth Disparity
Climate Concerns

Macro Trends

Control via customization
Self sufficiency over convenience
AI raising prices
Voting with your wallet

Micro Trends

Girlifying tech and making it fun
Nostalgia for the 90s and early 2000s
Sustainability product standard
Personalization to an extreme

02

The Strategy

The New Audience

Old CRT monitors abandoned in a overgrown field, one worn like a mask by a figure standing among the grass

Eco-Conscious Tech Casuals

The customer who cares less about performance, and more about the planet. The kind that avoid replacing their phone until their old one croaks.

A woman in black draped over a stack of vintage CRT televisions, filming herself with a small handheld camcorder

Nostalgia Tech Yearners

Longing for more tactile and fun design but can only find it via thrifting and DIY projects. They want to interact with tech in a more intentional way, creating more customization and character.

A woman in sunglasses and headphones surrounded by a DJ controller, keyboard, and tangled cables

Aspirational Cool Girl Artists

She's creative. She's hot. She's smart. And we all want to be her or be with her. The aspirational figure who pulls the trend forward and makes the rest of the audience lean in.

All three audiences play a key role, but a brand designed for everyone is bland. Instead, we have an excellent opportunity to design the brand around our most aspirational audience... the cool girl artist. Our secondary audiences will follow.

Overhead view of a bedroom studio setup, monitors, cables, and gear scattered around someone lying on the floor

Introducing our design target

She's not who buys the laptop first. She's who makes everyone else want one.

She treats her computer as a creative identity, not a commodity
She refuses to be boxed into one genre, one sound, one lane
She built her career from a bedroom, alone, on the internet, before anyone was watching
Where she goes, an audience that trusts her taste follows

Age

Early-to-mid 20s

Occupation

DJ, producer, multi-hyphenate creative

Location

Internet-native and geographically dispersed, not one scene or city

Education

Self-taught, often starting in early teens

Platforms

SoundCloud, Discord, TikTok, peer-to-peer discovery

Enjoys

Genre-blending, meme culture, DAWs as instruments, Y2K and 2000s EDM nostalgia

The Tensions

Bedroom Roots vs.
Festival Scale

She builds her sound with no formal training and no audience watching. Eventually, the stage gets bigger. How does she stay true to herself as her audience grows?

Genre Fluidity vs.
Categorization

The industry wants a clean genre tag. She refuses any labels, carving out a spot that aligns with her identity. Staying genre-fluid is the part of the appeal, rather than a marketing challenge.

Screen Intimacy vs.
Disposable Tech

Her creative identity lives inside her laptop. This device that holds multitudes is treated as disposable by the industry that makes them, not allowing for evolution, only replacement.

Their Values

Self-taught production setup, learned alone from free software and internet tutorials

Self-Taught, Self-Sufficient

No formal training, no gatekeepers. She learned production alone, from free software and internet tutorials, often before her teens.

A computer setup treated as a personal creative identity, not just a tool

The Computer as Identity

Not a tool she uses, but an extension of who she is. Her creative history and her hardware's history are the same story.

Genre-blending creative work that refuses to fit one category

Refusing One Lane

Genre-blending isn't indecision, it's the craft. Standing out matters more than fitting a category built for someone else.

An internet-native, peer-to-peer community built online before the industry noticed

Internet-Native Community

Discovered and built her audience online, peer to peer, before the industry noticed. Her community isn't centered in one city, it's distributed.

Design Target Influencers

Nina Jirachi

DJ & producer, Central Coast, Australia

Started producing at 12 on GarageBand with no formal training, now signed to NLV Records. Her 2025 debut album, I Love My Computer, is explicitly about her relationship with her computer as a creative identity, not just a tool. She swept the 2025 ARIA Awards with eight nominations, winning Best Solo Artist, Breakthrough Artist, and Best Independent Release, and has played Coachella, Lollapalooza, and EDC Las Vegas.

underscores

Producer & songwriter, San Francisco, USA

Began releasing music on SoundCloud at 13, entirely self-taught before later studying at NYU. Spans hyperpop, pop-punk, and dubstep without settling into one genre, and frames her own origin story around the idea of "computer music" as a movement she grew up inside of.

Brand Voice

Personality, not product. These three traits shape how frame.work writes, talks, and carries itself.

A woman with dramatic purple eye makeup soldering a circuit board next to an open desktop computer tower

Nerdy

The OG touch

We're nerdy and unapologetic about it. We love what we do, and want to share it with others. We don't let jargon get in the way of reaching people, but we don't dumb it down either.

A woman seen from behind in a white tank top and furry black boots, holding two DJ controllers against her hips

Cheeky

The elevation

We know how to get your attention. We're pretty and we know it, you know it, and it's one of the things you love about us. We're smart but that doesn't mean we can't also be hot.

Two DJs at a dark, moody club booth, one throwing up a peace sign toward the camera

Electric

The new

We get you excited. We keep it interesting by creating trends, not just participating in them. We're on our Pinterest board, in PCMag, and at our favorite DJ's boiler room set.

Positioning

frame.work empowers savvy creatives with the forever laptop, providing portable electronics that can grow with you.

03

The Identity

The name worked, but needed help to take the logo from utilitarian to holding deeper meaning. "framework" was updated into frame.work, which is both their domain and a programming term.

In code, parentheses hold things. They wrap a function, group an expression, contain a value. The asterisk is the wildcard: any value, any outcome.

Before

After

frame.work(*) is a container built for infinite possibility. The forever laptop.

The identity system.

Animated demonstration of the frame.work pixel icon set

The graphic system: a pixel icon set.

04

Applications

frame.work laptop mockup shown in context

frame.work(*) laptop on left, social media post on right.

frame.work poster pasted on a graffitied city wall

The poster in the wild.

Campaign video, with direction, edit and sound handled in house.

frame.work