Indie Collaborates
Indie Collaborates connects brands like BVLGARI, Mango and Amazon with creators across Asia. We've been its web partner since 2019: brand, website and app, a lead funnel as it grew, and a two-site rescue when it needed one.
From the 2019 brand identity, website and social marketing app to a 2026 remediation programme across two sites, Chillybin has been the technical constant behind Indie Collaborates.
What we were solving
Indie Collaborates is a full-service influencer marketing and UGC agency in Singapore, founded by Kristen Leaman. It connects brands with creators and turns that content into measurable campaigns, for clients including BVLGARI, Mango, Cold Storage, Hunter and Stanley.
In 2019 the business needed a foundation to match its ambition: a visual identity that stood out in a crowded agency market, a marketing website that could win brand-side buyers, and a social marketing app to run the creator side.
The relationship has had chapters since. In 2025 Indie wanted a lead generation funnel for a new course offer. In 2026, after a period of rapid change on the site, the main site and a new jobs board needed a structured rescue: security tooling switched off, edits not publishing, spam flooding the forms, and 54 active plugins including two competing page builders.
Success meant sites that stay fast, secure and dependable while a lean agency team focuses on campaigns, not infrastructure.
How we tackled it
Brand, website and app as one foundation
The 2019 engagement covered the full stack: a new visual identity, a marketing website built to sell influencer campaigns to brand-side marketers, and a social marketing app to run creator operations. Building all three together carried the brand from the first impression through to the working tools. The site moved onto our care plan after launch (updates, backups, monitoring and security), which is why problems in later years were spotted quickly.
Growth tooling when the business asked for it
When Indie launched a course offer in 2025, we stood up a standalone funnel on its own subdomain rather than bolting pages onto the main site. A fresh WordPress install carried the opt-in, video sales letter and thank-you pages, wired into Keap for email automation, Calendly for bookings and Google Tag Manager for measurement. Keeping the funnel separate protected the main site and let the campaign move at its own pace.
A structured rescue across two sites
By mid-2026 the main site had been rebuilt on production and a jobs board added. We scoped the remediation in July 2026 as numbered phases with fixed estimates. On the main site we reinstated security scanning, resolved a caching conflict so edits published without manual purging, restored spam protection, audited all 54 plugins and removed the unused page builder. On the jobs board we reviewed three custom CRM and payment plugins line by line. The programme closed in September 2026 with a written completion report against the original scope.
What we delivered
Indie Collaborates now runs on two sites that are secure, stable and maintainable, with a documented picture of every plugin, integration and custom component it depends on. Edits publish immediately, forms are protected, and the risks in the custom payment code are mapped and priced rather than unknown.
Over seven years the same partner has built the brand's foundation, added growth tooling when the business needed it, and stepped back in when the sites needed it. For an agency whose own product is dependable campaign delivery, that continuity matters.
What we learned
A care plan is an early warning system, not just an update schedule. Because we had maintained the site for years, we knew its healthy state (which security tooling should be active, which forms had filtering, how caching should behave), and that baseline made the 2026 diagnosis fast and the scope precise.
Remediation sells on clarity, not alarm. Numbered phases with hour estimates, explicit exclusions and a written completion report gave the client control over every decision. Payment code stayed untouched until it was reviewed, documented and separately quoted.
