Our kind of Manifesto

Written by Thomas Walker and Luís Medeiros

At Double-W, we have a clear vision in mind: the development of a new category of branding service, one that lives in the intersection of ever-evolving markets, ‘future of work’ paradigms and meaningful technology.

We facilitate truly collaborative branding, at scale; connecting talented professionals with starting companies to create strategically strong brands together, anywhere in the world.

Here at Double-W, we’ve just celebrated our first birthday and, while we have made considerable progress towards our goals, we still have a lot of work to do. So, with our launch drawing ever closer, we wanted to share some thoughts around the reasons we exist and our approach to the use of technology and automation in design.

So, lets clear things up a little bit; what do we actually mean when we say…

Ever-evolving markets.

With starting companies, we have come to understand that everything is subject to change; they are small and flexible enough to be able to move, grow and adapt to what happens around them. And, when placed in today’s context of exponential technology and exponential growth (and the constant redefinition of value that is synonymous with this), these changes can be — somewhat unsurprisingly — exponential, both for a business and its people.

But we believe there’s one dimension to these companies that should remain strong and coherent throughout all of this: the brand. Markets, technology and contexts change; but the values and personality that form the essence of a brand will allow you to maintain a clear and differentiated course of action, always. At Double-W, we aim to build brands not just for the company that you are today, but for the long and exciting journey your business will inevitably go on.

‘Future of work’ paradigms.

The more we think about what work will be like in the future, the more we identify aspects that we can adopt in order to enhance the ways we work today.

The concept behind Double-W is fairly simple: we connect talented professionals with exciting projects, regardless of geographical location. The way we achieve it, however, is a little bit more complex: our frameworks, tools and processes have been designed to enable highly collaborative and remote-optimised projects.

We involve clients not just as stakeholders, but as active members of our teams, sharing decision-making responsibility throughout the design process. We believe branding is a journey of discovery and definition, and that you will have a significantly greater understanding of your new brand if you design it with us.

The real ‘future of work’ is complex, but not that complicated. We believe that if we understand how people work, we can design systems and processes to enhance our individual capabilities and improve our working experiences. This is where meaningful technology comes in.

Meaningful technology.

We hire strategists, designers and copywriters to strategise, design and write. So, it seems obvious that the more material they have to fuel discussions, debates and co-creation sessions, the stronger their outputs will be. We like to use technology as a way to increase the time our team members can dedicate to adding value to a project. With this in mind, we developed our tools as just that, tools. They are designed to provoke and advise our teams, not replace them.

We believe that the more we refine, streamline and automate our process, the more space we give for moments of informed creativity. We don’t intend to create an automated branding service where you just fill in a series of boxes and receive a pretty new logo. The strength of our method lies in the interactions between the people involved; it is the questions that we are left with after the frameworks that make our process special, worthwhile and powerful.

This is what we pursue with Double-W: honest and relevant brands. Brands that reflect a connection between interesting people and interesting challenges, using technology as a means, not as the end.