Coffee with our Customers: Ep 1: Crush + Lovely
“Look, it’s not for you, it’s for our customers” — Jesse Pinkman
This week kicks off our first series of Coffee with our Customers. The series is aimed at learning more about the producers, project managers and resource managers behind some of the world’s best studios, firms and agencies and how Float is helping them in their jobs.
We debut the series with Natasha Eng, a Senior Producer, from the talented multidisciplinary digital studio, Crush + Lovely.
Introducing Crush + Lovely
Natasha’s coffee of choice is a Soy Latte. And nearby Oro Bakery does a bang up job at short notice. Crush + Lovely is based in the heart of Little Italy, on Mulberry Street in Soho, NY. So I dodge my way around restaurant hawkers and outdoor seating, with two coffees, tripod and camera bags, and wind up a flight of stairs to see Natasha greeting me at the top with a smile.
Their office space gives me office-envy. The office you dream about before you’ve worked in an agency, thinking about what an agency might be like. Open-plan, arched entryways, brick exposed walls. A classic Soho studio loft. And a fitting environment for what goes on there. It reminded me of my old home at Fantasy Interactive, which shared a similar aesthetic only a few blocks south on Franklin St.
When I visit on a sunny Friday afternoon, the office is quiet. Their motion team, who creates original content for the screen, is on the road. However I’m fortunate to find Nathan Heleine, the Co-founder, in the office, and he drops by to say hello.
Nathan founded Crush + Lovely with Matt Blanchard, as developers during the Flash-dev-heights of the early 2000s. More recently he’s turned his attention to head up Crush’s production studio MOTION with equal success. It’s inspiring to see a company and it’s people morph into new areas as their interests evolve, while still managing to maintain the quality and passion that made them successful to start with.
Introducing Natasha Eng
Natasha Eng is a Senior Producer and heads up the digital production team. The team ranges from 10 to 15 at any one time and are based both here in NYC and remotely in California. Like many who share this title, Natasha doesn’t quite know how she ended up a digital producer. But she’s happy where she landed. She now applies her years of experience in TV & Film to the digital world. And she also appears to have leveraged her years at Crush to secure one of the best desks in the office, by the light-filled corner window. It’s here where we see Float, on monitor one of two.
Float & Crush + Lovely
Float is used to manage their incoming projects and availability of the digital team. Being a smaller team, it’s common to have people gravitate around Natasha’s large monitors to see who’s working on what when. This is where Float sits in a permanent browser tab.
Natasha chose Float because it’s “the most simple but robust”. Remaining in a permanent tab, highlighted how often things change. Natasha is always ready to make adjustments, citing Float’s click and drag feature as one of the most important to enabling quick change. Having a combination of project and maintenance work, Natasha also sometime uses the Task Name as a sub-project name for work that falls under a single Maintenance project.
Alongside Float Natasha uses Basecamp Classic for project management, to-dos and messaging. They’ve decided not to switch to the new Basecamp, preferring to maintain private messaging, an important feature for agencies when not all need be revealed to the client.
They’ve struggled to find the right process for tracking the team’s time. Time tracking always seems the unloved chore in agency world. I’m convinced all agencies may need to go the way of JWT and install an automated beer fridge to reward their team on completion.
When shifting discussion to learning about producing in agencies, Natasha agreed there aren’t a lot of digital destinations to educate you on the craft. Digital production is most commonly learnt through experience, and joining the dots on skills developed from years of experience in other areas, whether it be coding, designing, video production, or a combination. Natasha is attending the DPM Summit in October, from the team over at Happy Cog, and one of the shining examples of a community that’s pushing the Digital PM community forward.
Where else does she find inspiration out of work? She enlightened me on two sites, Smitten Kitchen and Miss Mustard Seed which I now have bookmarked to brush up on my poor home-skills. Look out Key Lime Pie Popsicles.
Thanks to Natasha, Nathan and the team at Crush + Lovely for their time and for being a supporter of Float. Are you a Float customer and free for a coffee? Hit us up at cwoc@pixelpaddock.com
About Crush + Lovely
Crush + Lovely is an NYC-based multidisciplinary digital studio that seeks to improve the relationship between people and technology. Their tagline is one of my favorites:
“Digital products to improve people’s lives.” Simple, unambiguous, aspirational. And they back it up. From their work with Greenlight Planet, bringing affordable energy to those that need it, to videos for Skillshare, or Thankful, a product I’ll use when it comes times to prep that wedding registry!
