We are re-designing our design studio
How do your re-invent yourself?
'“Casa de herrero cuchillo de palo” ( The shoemaker's son always goes barefoot.) is a Spanish saying, which refers to the paradox that certain things are missing in places where they should be abundant. Until now we always have done our own personal branding a little bit quick and easy. We are so busy working (for others) and doing the day to day things, that at the end we forget to really work on our own image and analyze our business. Doing our own branding is more complicated than for clients, because we are emotionally attached the studio. We put the bar so high, its hard to know when the design is finished. Anyway, this quarantine time was perfect timing to re-design Unbeaten Studio and see if and where we need to pivot.
Lockdown life (for over 1,5 month now in Spain) Covid-19 gave us time to work on our designer selfs. A little bit of history; we never really considered working together when we met back in early 2016, but it kind of started out of a necessity in the summer of 2017 when we started with a project called Design with Costa Rica. Although it worked out really well from the beginning, it takes time to find the right rhythm and to discover each others qualities and style. A big learning for both of us was we can’t work in doing the same thing. Jeroen does X and Marce does Y, and feedbacks come and go.
We have grown as designers and as a design studio, but we haven’t fully embraced that yet because we didn’t gave it time. Always jumping from one project to the next… rushing and working. Now is the time for a next step in our work and with that comes a more clear story, a new branding and an updated website. This time we don’t rush it, we take the same steps we normally take for our clients and a little bit more.
What did we learn working together?
The last 2,5 years we mastered remote working as designers.
We like to keep it personal, we take time to get to know our clients really well, and create a nice working relationship.
Creativity comes easier in a calm & relaxed environment
We are really good in designer-ping-pong, which strongly improves the quality of our work.
Nature and the mountains inspire us to do our design work.
We both love clean, clear and simple design work.
Our work benefits from our two different cultural backgrounds (Costa Rican & Dutch)
The old rules are no longer valid.
Our design work feels like business coaching.
Jeroen is the problem solver!
Marce has the imaginary mind.
We need to get better at marketing.
We are resilient.
We are not scared of change.
Turning our learnings into actions 1
We are rebuilding Unbeaten Studio from the ground up. We keep what is good, we leave behind what was not good or is not relevant anymore. In 2,5 years of working together we know what we are good at and what is important to us. Now is the time to re-create Unbeaten Studio. Watch all our channels in the coming weeks where we slowly will release the new Unbeaten Studio. For now we’ll leaf you with a little hint, inspired on the sunrise and sunsets we see from our terrace.
Author: Jeroen Spoelstra & Marcela Xirinachs
