DESIGNER SPOTLIGHT #2
Parklins Ifeanyichukwu is the founder & CEO of Lupark DC, a global UX design agency that crafts enjoyable human-centred digital product experiences. Previously the Head of Design at Chocolate City Group, Parklins has amassed half a decade of experience refining his craft in graphic design and product design. In this conversation, we discuss his journey into design, his experience as a designer, and his story of starting a design agency in Nigeria.
Tell me about your journey into design.
I actually started off with programming. I wasn’t interested in design initially. I was inspired by the tech geniuses I saw in American movies who were either hacking or building cool stuff. I thought to myself: “I want to be able to do things like that.” But then I heard about some design challenge in church where people were meant to design an MTN logo. After trying my hand at that, I went on to participate in a lot more design challenges. I think I did about four of them. One of them led to my joining Chocolate City as a graphics designer.
Seeing as you’re currently managing teams across design and business at Lupark, what do you think prepared you to manage people at just 21 years old?
Working as Head of Design at Chocolate City for a year gave me the confidence boost I needed to believe that I can actually lead other designers. I think it’s that confidence that pushed me to start my own thing. Also, I’m very passionate about training and teaching others. That has always been important to me, so managing my team at Lupark is really just an opportunity for me to train them and help them grow. Thinking about it like this helps me be a better manager without actually aspiring to ‘manage’.
What was your motivation for expanding Lupark DC out of Lagos to set up shop in London? And what did that process look like?
The main intention was to position the company as a global design agency, and not just a Nigerian one. But then I also noticed that there was a real opportunity to scale revenue with new business opportunities in the UK, so setting up a London branch made a lot of sense. Honestly, running a creative company is really expensive and it’s impossible to sustain a business like that with a limited budget. So being an exclusively Nigeria-based design agency is hard if you want to make money in this country because Nigerian companies will rather work with foreign design agencies than with local Nigerian agencies. So you really have no other choice but to become multinational because you cannot afford to depend exclusively on local clients. It’s also difficult being a Nigerian design agency serving international clients because Nigeria has a reputation problem when it comes to delivering quality designs. So when you present yourself as a Nigerian design agency, international clients might doubt that you’ll produce high-quality work or even that you’re trustworthy. But, on the bright side, being in Lagos has allowed us to get on-ground data about shifts in the market while running our operations in the robust tech community here.
What are some of the challenges you faced while setting up and running your design agency in Lagos?
The major challenge is the shortage of talent. It’s very hard to find good designers here to join your team because a lot of them are half-baked and many of the good designers are taken by international companies with the rest trying to set up their own design agency even if they know very little about sustainable business save for their freelance experience. But this is because most of them are self-taught despite the limited resources in the country. Unfortunately, we don’t have a specialised school for design in Nigeria the same way we have for things like software engineering. So we end up having to increase our operational cost because we have to first train the designers we recruit before they can really be of any value to the company or our clients. This then contributes to the second challenge of high financial cost because we have to allocate a significant amount in our monthly budget to purchasing diesel due to the inconsistent electricity supply in Nigeria. The poor governance in the country also doesn’t make it easier. Because, recently, there was the okada ban in Lagos which has blocked the use of motorcycles or keke (read: tricycles) in the state. Most of the people who work with us use these means of transportation to get to work. But because they’re no longer allowed in Lagos, my team has to then use more expensive means of transportation to get to work or risk arriving late to work due to the crazy traffic. Despite the reduced productivity we have to deal with, we’re now also forced to raise salaries to cover the additional expenses of our staff, which further thins out whatever profit margin we managed to secure.
You spoke earlier about the disparity in how local design agencies are treated in comparison to their foreign counterparts. How has that affected your business?
The main issue here is that Nigerian companies tend to pay Nigerian design agencies much less than foreign agencies even though they both deliver the same services. Even if you try to be strict with your pricing, they’ll still try to bargain so that they can pay less than you initially asked for. This is even worse when you’re young like me and most designers in Nigeria because companies will start to doubt your competence and then want to use that as a reason to pay you less for your work. Sometimes, you’ll have to attend meetings with someone who looks older if you want to be taken seriously; or you may even have to wear a wedding ring to appear mature or serious enough for companies to want to do business with you. In extreme cases, you might have to attend a meeting with expatriates so that you can get the gig and avoid being underpriced.
To confront these challenges you’ve mentioned, you must have a strong team around you. How do you go about hiring these people? What are the things you look for?
For me, the most important things I look out for are the willingness to learn and an openness to change. I feel like once someone has these two things, they have all they need to be able to grow. The willingness to learn will help them to closely follow trends or even set the trends themselves as a result of their own exploits. An openness to change will help them work well under pressure when so many different things are moving and changing at the same time. Once they have these two things, they’ll be able to be proactive in driving their learning and gaining the experience they need to develop as designers. At Lupark, we really don’t require one to be the most intelligent. So whether you have a first-class degree, it doesn’t really matter. Such things are not even a criteria for us. We’re, however, lucky to have access to a lot of such people. We currently have 70–80 designers in our waiting list who even expressed interest in working with us for free just to be able to get the experience they need to grow. But it’s sad because we cannot get every single one of them to work with us, which is why I launched something called Ductdemy. The name is a combination or ‘product’ and ‘academy’. So this is meant to be the Andela for designers that trains the most talented product designers in Nigeria and connects them with opportunities to work with Nigerian companies as well as large global tech companies like Google or Facebook. So for all those people who we can’t hire at the moment, we invite them to join Ductdemy where we can continue to train them and help them grow. The vision is that this helps solve the talent shortage issue we have in Nigeria when it comes to product designers.
From your experience, what were the most important factors you considered when setting up Lupark DC?
The first thing was capital. I was thinking about this from the perspective of how I was going to be able to afford the salaries of the people I’ll hire to join the team for at least two years. The next thing I considered was our supply of projects. I looked at how likely we’ll be able to create and sustain a sufficient pipeline of projects to work on from Nigerian clients and international clients. After that, I focused on the kinds of people to hire who will ultimately shape the company’s values, its culture, and its ethical orientation. This was really important because I knew the quality of the team would affect every area of the business. Another factor I considered was location; that is where to set up the company. I realised that the location would influence the overall working condition of the team and our access to projects and other resources. Lagos seemed like the best place at the time but because it’s getting saturated very quickly, I’m now looking at potentially expanding to Kigali, Nairobi, and other cities in Nigeria like Abuja.
From your experience working in design in Nigeria, what have you observed to be some of the most in-demand skills for designers in the country?
I think the most in-demand skills globally, not just in Nigeria, are the ones you’d think of: user experience design, user research, user interface design, interface design, interaction design, wireframing, and prototyping. But in addition to these ones though, I think there is a growing demand for designers who are comfortable with crunching and understanding complex data. Because, for example, things like user research are now very integrated into the overall design process. Regardless of the complexity of collected data, designers need to be able to make sense of them in order to make informed product decisions based on a thorough understanding of the users and their needs. So basically, data-savvy product designers are the people who are going to do really well in the future.
