Motion Design in Lithuania: How Baltic Brands are Using Motion to Catch Up With Western Europe

From the Field Perspective of INKLUSIVE, gathered from our work with Baltic SaaS, fintech, and product teams.

You have a good product. You have an excellent team. You have a clear vision. But somehow, somewhere, between your vision and the user’s screen, the message stops being communicated.

This happens almost weekly to INKLUSIVE, a motion design company in Lithuania: Lithuanian fintech rolls out a polished dashboard, Vilnius-based SaaS creates a carefully written landing page, Kaunas-based product launches a thoughtful brand system, and watches its activation graphs drop in the very first week. There is nothing wrong with the product, it’s the communication layer that fails. In most Baltic product audits that we do, it’s not the functionality that fails, it’s motion, helping users understand what just happened. And this is not a statement in defense of motion design as a discipline. It’s a working note, from inside our studio, of what we actually observe from recent Baltic projects, where motion makes the difference, where motion doesn’t, and how Lithuanian brands can close the gap with the Western European competitors who already think of motion as standard practice, not luxury.

Why Motion Becomes Crucial for Lithuania Today

Lithuania is no longer a hidden gem of a startup market. By the end of 2024, there are 282 active fintech companies in the country, serving more than 30 million customers within the EU and making Vilnius the second-largest fintech hub in the European Union after Germany. By the year 2025, Lithuanian startups raise a record-breaking €238 million and break their record of exits in history. Not coincidentally, the best motion design companies in Lithuania are helping power this growth, giving Baltic brands the visual language they need to compete on a global stage.

Here’s what this means.

The Lithuanian Market in 2025

This is the part people remember. The part that’s not getting enough coverage: most of these startups compete now not for the local attention, but for the global audience. Against Revolut, against N26, against Wise, which are already incorporating motion as the fundamental part of the user experience. When you present yourself via the static screenshot in your deck, you appear behind the curve. This is the gap you should close, and choosing the right motion graphic design company in Lithuania is often the fastest way to start closing it.

Where Motion Earns User Attention (and How Most Brands Fail Doing That)

Here’s the short summary of the first version of this article, split into three parts: the science behind emotions, the audiences’ expectations, and the cost of poor story telling. All of them were saying exactly the same thing. Here’s a combined version of the ones backed with data.

What we observe in our work

Across recent projects in Europe, users grasp animated onboarding sequences significantly quicker than static tutorials – especially those involving complex fintech or AI-powered interfaces, where it’s impossible to communicate the product value in a single static screenshot. Teams that collaborate with us often find out during the process that users skip the screens with static information but spend time studying those animated – not because the animation is funnier than static copy, but because the animation explains what the product is. Motion is simply a more efficient communication tool.

This pattern repeats frequently enough for us to stop seeing it as an exception rather than rule. We’ve learned that absence of motion in onboarding is a strong diagnostic sign, meaning that the product team underestimated the audience’s patience.

At INKLUSIVE, we’ve developed the habit of starting any discovery conversation with a single question: what happens in your product in the first three seconds after the user signs up? Most of the time, the team fails to provide any answer. And the absence of the answer is usually the place to find the motion gap.

Another frequent pattern that is hardly a coincidence: all the Baltic brands that we inherit from other agencies always have a Figma file named “animations – to do later”. Motion gets delegated not only to the last stage of development – it is deferred to the point when the team doesn’t have time for it. But there is another approach as well – the one that wins.

The broader data we have

According to Wyzowl’s State of Video Marketing 2026 report, based on 12 consecutive years of analysis, 91% of businesses use video in their marketing strategy and 99% of video marketers admit that videos increased user understanding of their products. And according to the separate LinkedIn Marketing Report 2025, B2B posts with animated explanations get 75% higher engagement.

Again, these statistics may be helpful but they are not the point. Their implication is. Animation is no longer considered a competitive advantage in most industries. It’s the norm. And this is exactly the benchmark Lithuanian brands are increasingly competing with internationally.

The INKLUSIVE Motion Intent Framework

After working with a certain number of projects as a motion design company in Lithuania, we’ve discovered one interesting thing about the best-performing brands. They don’t use more motion – they use it consciously. Most of the teams we analyze fail to do one of three following things.

Our motion audit is based precisely on this framework, going through all three motion layers from the bottom upwards. We haven’t seen brand motion working effectively without the functional one. But we’ve seen quite some cases when functional motion carried the whole user experience alone, without any brand-level implementation.

Case Study: What We Have Discovered About Onboarding Motion in One Recent Engagement

A short example from one of our Baltic projects, anonymized at the client’s request. But the lessons of this particular case could easily apply to any of our recent engagements.

It was a Baltic-based B2B SaaS platform in the financial operations area, targeting small to medium-size European businesses. Activation rate, the share of users completing the setup within the first week – stayed steady on low level for the last nine months. The team had tried various ways of fixing it: improved the copywriting, shortened the sign-up form, added the checklist… Nothing helped.

But the motion audit of the onboarding revealed a crucial problem. It wasn’t about the steps the user should complete, they needed animated help in imagining the final step. Each screen was static and abrupt. And users needed time to figure out what comes next, leaving halfway before they did it.

We don’t claim that motion redesign solved the problem alone. Usually, there is no single reason behind any particular onboarding process. But the support team noticed that the number of requests “what should I do with this screen?” dropped notably. Which was an essential clue for us.

Motion is not the finishing layer. At least when talking about the onboarding process, it often becomes the key layer, enabling everything else.

Why Lithuanian Brands Specifically Fail With Motion

There are a couple of common patterns we notice in our motion design audits of Baltic brand systems. These problems are common to any brand identity. But their consequences become more severe specifically for Lithuania because the competition here is not local but international, and the market is relatively small.

Pitch decks that look smaller than they should be

If you develop a product in Lithuania and are seeking funds in Germany or any other Western European country, it doesn’t matter whether your deck follows the German and Scandinavian standards or not. A static chart, a static product photo, a static description of the team’s members will convey to the audience that you are running a small operation. This happens often: we’ve had plenty of cases where the business was objectively better than the deck but the founders struggled to understand why investors stopped calling them. The problem was – the product was perceived as smaller than it really was.

Demonstrations that overexplain the concept

It is not unusual in Lithuanian culture for engineers to be overly respectful to the customer’s intelligence. As a result, the demonstration videos we review tend to be dense and elaborate. It takes time to explain everything. But the international audience usually loses interest after two minutes. And instead of watching the whole video, users need just a little teaser animation showing them the product value quickly. We see lots of teams who refuse to implement such an animation because of the false belief that they lack rigor. But actually, they just need a little intro in order to catch the audience’s attention.

Brand identities that remain static

A brand identity in 2026 that lacks animation principles is just as incomplete as the one that lacks typography rules. Several Baltic brand identities we’ve been inheriting from other agencies lacked easing language, transition behaviors, or any defined motion style. The identity felt static. It worked great as long as it was used statically – but in the product world, it didn’t fit. Engaging a creative motion graphic design agency early in the brand-building process is how the best teams avoid this exact pitfall.

What This Means For Baltic Entrepreneurs or Marketing Leaders

If motion is the communication layer that lets you communicate better, INKLUSIVE is where you need to look for help. In Lithuania, most of our engagements involve one of the two approaches: audit of an existing product’s motion or a motion identity built for the newly designed brand.

Both of them work equally efficiently.