How an Award-Winning Packaging Designer Used Heepr.ai to Find Better-Fit Creative Leads
Aja Marie Johnson, an award-winning creative director and packaging designer, tested a Heepr lead-research agent for the hardest part of creative business development — not finding companies, but finding the right creative-fit clients. She got 25 researched prospects with fit rationale and ready-to-use outreach.
25 researched creative-fit prospects — each with company context, decision-maker, project triggers and ready-to-use outreach, delivered as an Excel report.
Aja Marie Johnson has strong inbound demand after 15+ years designing premium brands. What she doesn't have is an efficient way to proactively find companies that are the right creative fit — not just the right industry. Here is what happened when a Heepr.ai lead-research agent built her a targeted, creative-fit prospect list.
Buyer background
Aja Marie Johnson is an award-winning creative director, graphic designer, and brand builder specializing in gourmet food, beverage, wellness, beauty, fitness, and lifestyle brands. Her work spans brand identity, packaging design, visual storytelling, creative direction, logos, typography, packaging systems, brand decks, illustration, and full visual identities for brands that want to look more polished, premium, and market-ready.
Aja brings both creative and entrepreneurial experience — she has built and operated companies herself, including a marketing and design agency and a healthy grab-and-go snack business. That gives her a practical understanding of what founders need beyond design alone: strong shelf presence, clear storytelling, and a visual world that supports retail, investor conversations, ecommerce, and launch campaigns.
Her ideal clients are founders, CEOs, CMOs, brand managers and creative leaders at food, beverage, wellness, beauty, fitness, café, specialty grocery and lifestyle companies that are launching, rebranding, entering retail, raising capital, expanding SKUs, or trying to become more premium and differentiated.
The challenge
Aja already has strong inbound demand — after more than 15 years in the industry, clients come through reputation, Instagram, Pinterest, awards, design press and the strength of her portfolio. The challenge was never simply finding companies that might need branding or packaging. The harder challenge was finding companies that were the right creative fit.
For Aja, a qualified lead is not only a company in food, beverage, wellness or beauty. The company also needs to value premium design, distinctive packaging, creative strategy, and a more progressive, trend-forward visual style. In creative work, there has to be a strong match between the client's taste and the designer's style. Even when a prospect checks the right industry boxes, there's still a major question: do they actually connect with the kind of work she creates?
Because of that, proactive lead generation had historically felt too large and inefficient to prioritize. Searching manually for companies, checking their stage, finding the decision-maker, verifying fit, and judging whether they'd appreciate her creative direction can take hours — and, as Aja put it, "weeding through" prospects has not always been fruitful.
The Heepr test
Through the Heepr.ai buyer beta, Aja tested a lead-research agent designed to identify relevant prospective clients for her creative direction, branding, and packaging work.
The agent delivered a list of 25 potential clients in an Excel spreadsheet. The report included company names, contact names, roles, categories, locations, emails, LinkedIn profiles, niches, why each company was a good fit, company stage, "why now" context, trigger events, likely project opportunities, suggested email subject lines, outreach email drafts, and DM openers.
The strongest part of the test was that the agent did not simply deliver a generic list of food and beverage companies. It attempted to explain why each company might be timely and relevant, what kind of project Aja might be able to help with, and how she could begin the outreach.
Deliverables
The prospects included companies that appeared to have real reasons to need branding, packaging, signage, retail presentation, launch assets, or creative direction — brands launching new products, opening café locations, or expanding into new brand opportunities (specific prospects are kept private to Aja).
Every prospect arrived ready to action, with:
- Company, contact name & role
- Category, niche & location
- Email + LinkedIn profile
- Company stage and "why now" context
- Trigger events and likely project opportunities
- Why the company is a fit
- Suggested email subject line + outreach draft
- A DM opener
Results
The beta test changed how Aja thought about using AI for business development. She had already integrated AI into her creative workflow — image generation, mockups, illustration support, stock imagery, vectors, icons, font development — but had not previously considered AI as a serious lead-generation tool.
The Heepr.ai test opened a new possibility: AI could help her access a researched list of potential clients without spending hours manually searching, filtering, and qualifying companies herself. Aja validated that the leads were generally relevant and that the spreadsheet's information had value. She saw the use case clearly — especially for lulls between projects when she wants to introduce herself to new companies. The test also surfaced a bigger opportunity: an agent-supported creative business, where AI handles repeatable research, marketing and operational tasks so she can focus on the highest-value creative work.
Buyer feedback
I have to say, first off, it opened my world up. I've integrated a lot of AI tools into my day to day, but this is a level of support I didn't even consider.
— Aja Marie Johnson
I've always put a pause on this type of lead generation because it felt too massive to tackle. The idea that I now have access to this is really cool.
For creative work, the fit is sensitive. It is not just whether a company needs a designer. It is whether they understand my style, value premium work, and want something more distinctive.
Product learnings
The beta was promising, and Aja's feedback pointed to clear ways to make the agent stronger for creative buyers:
- Fit refinement — a good lead isn't only industry, stage or budget; the company must also match her aesthetic and market positioning. She works with premium, modern, design-aware brands, not mass-market or basic-design buyers.
- Buyer intent — screen LinkedIn and other signals for companies actively hiring freelancers, seeking designers, launching, opening locations, or preparing for retail.
- Taste matching — evaluate whether a brand appears edgy, progressive, premium, and visually aligned with her style, i.e. creative compatibility, not just a business opportunity.
- Outreach control — she's open to AI-assisted outreach but wants a Mailchimp-style controlled system where the message stays mostly fixed and only certain fields change.
- Pricing model — for lead generation specifically she'd prefer paying per list over an ongoing subscription, since one strong list can take a month to work through. She estimated $25–$50 for a strong, well-filtered list.
Next opportunities
Aja's test points to a larger opportunity: creative professionals don't only need leads — they need an agent-powered support system that helps them scale without becoming a traditional agency. She specifically raised the idea of an AI-supported agency model, where she stays focused on pure creative direction while agents handle repeatable research, outreach, organization, marketing and operations.
One lead-research agent could naturally create demand for others: a prospect-qualification agent that scores taste, aesthetic fit and buyer intent; an outreach-writing agent that drafts curated pitches in her voice; a portfolio-matching agent that pairs each prospect with her strongest relevant case study; a CRM-prep agent that organizes leads into stages and follow-up priorities; and a creative-operations "ringleader" agent that coordinates the smaller agents and summarizes what actually needs her attention. This is where Heepr.ai moves beyond a single-agent transaction and becomes a connected workflow marketplace for creatives, consultants and independent experts.
