Our drama
One sunny day of April 2019 (almost everyday in Valencia is sunny) Kalte and I decided it was time for us to jump into the void and start working on side projects. We were a bit tired of products where design and development were treated like antagonists and where somehow everything was a bit wrong because the requirements and functionalities had drifted and were not properly alienated.
We decided to jump in any case. We didn’t even had the name Dunkelheit and Draper at the time but when we were able to finish our first project together alongside Marina Goñi Studio we were hooked. Working on your own terms, with your own rules, being able to produce a real change or improvement in real time is addictive. D&D was founded there.
As I said, in early summer 2019 we launched the first project with the D&D seal, a website implementation for Serifalaris 2019, a design conference in Bilbao, a project where we worked for Marina Goñi Studio, developing the website s well as designing the mobile version. They are a great studio by the way, amazing work.
Anyway, we decided to create a digital product agency with the product quality and user-centric approach in its core. We thought the best years of our professional lives were right ahead of us: lot of clients, an office in a soon-to-be gentrified area with adopted dogs and cats and a huge amount of amazing and recognized projects. Started very well.
We were having a lot of meetings and budget requests, and everything seemed to be going on pretty well by the end of 2019. So well, we decided to stop working full-time on our respective jobs and we decided to give everything to D&D. We got a couple long-running clients that would support D&D along the way and we got a really big meeting with a very important company by the end of January 2020. We thought the universe was hearing our prayers. That project would’ve meant a year of work. A complete year. However, the universe like to play a game called “Mmmmm how about not?”.
That meeting was off from the moment it had barely started. We tried to sell our idea but marketing was just not sharing our vision. You know when you’re on a Tinder date and you can tell from minute 1 it’s not going to work? those were us. We left the meeting devastated. The previous months had been so good and the work we dedicated to that meeting was so deep we thought it was a huge yes before the meeting. We drank something, we cried together and we kept working.
And, you know what’s funny? that for the next two months that meeting looked like an outlier. We were having more meetings, more budget requests and we even signed a couple more projects. But then, the most funny thing happened. The universe was not feeling like it and after that slightly bad call in a meeting in January it changed its Facebook status to “It’s complicated” for everyone and everything changed.
I know there has been many many losses in the pandemic. And that’s why we treat our drama as a joke. Mainly because its almost purely professional but also because it was all we lost. Only material stuff, things you can recover with work and maybe a bit of better luck. From here on: enter the drama.
By the time Spain was facing its third week of lockdown we had only one project left with us. Most clients gone, all projects in standby or simply cancelled. We were in the middle of knowing what to do. The client left with us was very underpaid and was not keeping our stuff together on the long run. We barely had meetings and everything seemed to be on halt for a while.
In this situation we had to move on. We looked for full-time jobs again and decided to let D&D on the side for some time thinking on what to do with it. We gather a list of possible collaborators (our partners in crime) and we re-imagined Dunkelheit and Draper. We liked design and developing so we decided to dedicate it to content creation. It didn’t last long because, somehow, we were incredibly tired after our full-time jobs to do any content.
We decided to focus on the daily stuff hoping things would improve.
A year later Kalte decided to go freelance again. A few (maybe too many) experiences looking for jobs on top tier companies had left her with no energy for the recruitment stuff and we said “Let’s take side-projects again” and we started accepting a couple of websites.
That was a good move. It was September 2021, we decided to give it a try. We were less excited and more cautious. We built our website using Oxygen: fast, reliable and simple. We started seeing everything moving again: a couple of meetings, a couple of projects… we felt it was starting to be the right time for us.
And then, Kalte found a full-time job and D&D was on the side again. Universe likes to do this things. At least, this time our small product agency was on the side for the good reasons. This time we didn’t think. We didn’t set it aside completely. We simply let it live with us waiting for a good project to come.
The fun thing is that after moving to Brussels I had to register it as a company so, now, Dunkelheit and Draper is alive, more than ever. We are still trying to figure out what to do next, where to move, where to start, what to work on. Kalte is right now busy working with other things so we’ll have to work with new partners in crime or in different projects, we’ll take it easy.
We have a company, we have a new place, a new market, a new language and, hopefully, new projects and products to build. We already have side-projects, we already have new energy and our little agency/studio/company is here with us. It’s been here for 4 years either active or on the side but the concept has been always alive with us. Hopefully will grow and hopefully will never be set aside again.
