Hello World, we are MakeReign.
We’ve been kinda busy crafting some pretty rad work with our clients, so haven’t quite managed to introduce ourselves just yet. But we think we’re finally ready to say hello!
We are a digital products studio based in Cape Town, South Africa, with a strong focus on user experience and user interface design. We are driven by a simple belief in the power of design to elevate the user experience. We love what we do, and we always work hard to become better at it.
Our story.
Our agency was founded in 2016 by Matt Thompson, Luke Engel, Justin Engel and Elize van Staden — three of whom happen to be brothers. As brothers, we’d always spoken about starting a business (or something) together. For the majority of our days, ideas reigned supreme and we talked about doing things. A lot. From food trucks, to a concierge service, to subscription-based businesses — we’d covered it all. Unfortunately, ideas don’t mean much. Let’s face it, talking is the easy part.
With that being said, the ideas were mostly feasible and really exciting, and we’re more than likely to revisit them at a later stage. We are entrepreneurs and will continue to be for the rest of our lives. We believe that starting a digital agency was born out of love, passion and, most importantly, gut feel. This is the direction we chose to go in, not just the one that fell into place.
What we also really needed was someone to anchor us and rein in the ideas — and that’s where Elize came in. Bringing a wealth of experience having worked at some of Cape Town’s most well-known advertising agencies and having a kick-ass outlook on life, it was a perfect fit. So, we all took the leap together and MakeReign was born.
Well, it wasn’t quite that easy.
One thing we all did have in common was that we were all working in the advertising industry in some capacity. Matt and Elize both worked at one of the top digital agencies in South Africa and have over 30 years combined experience. Luke recently graduated from the AAA School of Advertising, and Justin (who also studied at AAA) worked at one of the world’s biggest social messaging platforms. Our synergies lay in the digital world — and so it made sense to try pool our skills, experience and crazy ideas under one roof.
Getting up and running.
If we’re honest, the reason we were able to launch was due to Matt’s Dribbble portfolio. If you’re unfamiliar with the platform, it essentially allows designers to share work in a portfolio format and get hired. A lot of hard graft and pixel-tweaking went into putting this together. Seriously, a lot of people started asking “Who’s Matt?”.
Designing some beautiful interfaces had a few thousand people intrigued, and it so happened that a number of them needed work. This is where the ball started rolling. We realized there is a big enough gap in the market for us to exist. Add that to our desire to run our own business + the clients we’d started acquiring = a digital product studio called ‘MakeReign’.
We officially opened the studio doors in August 2016. Since, we’ve managed to acquire a number of partners both locally and internationally. Landing Woolworths SA in the first week was a massive win for us, and we’ve managed to become one of their preferred creative partners. The outcome of that is launching very soon. We’re excited.
At this point, we’re a growing team but we’ve managed to get some quality designers to agree to work in our studio. Some freelancers as well. We guess the vision behind the studio is to have this creative environment where we can bounce ideas off each other and also collaborate together on certain projects where necessary. We’re proud to say that we’ve got some serious talent sitting in this studio already.
So, what is it we do exactly?
Good question. Being a digital products studio means as a business we focus on designing and building experiences for brands on digital platforms or channels. So this can range from doing responsive websites to web applications or mobile apps — e-commerce websites, dashboards, chat applications, in-store experiences — the list really does go on.
We follow a user-centric approach that allows us to create products that are measurably valuable. Every project is unique and treated so, but we like to apply traditional UX design methodologies, such as rapid prototyping, ongoing usability testing as well as iterative design and development. This ensures we end up creating digital products that users will find value in.
We’re a team of makers / creators / designers / artists / collaborators / strategists. We’re not a full-service agency, a PR firm, SEO experts or social media gurus. We’ll never claim to be. We focus on what we do best — making digital products. And ultimately, we feel this focused approach will yield the best results for ourselves, our clients and their customers.
Why should you get in touch?
Well, if you own / work for a brand or business in any capacity and are wanting to improve the way your customers interact with your brand — then we should probably talk. If you have this ‘BIG IDEA’ and you want to get it to market, we can probably help. If you’re a brand manager, agency owner, restaurateur, serial entrepreneur, blogger — get in touch and tell us what you need. Who knows what will come of it.
We’ll look to share more written pieces as we continue to grow and evolve, so it you’re an avid Medium reader feel free to follow us. Our website is still currently a work in progress — turns out we’re quite a pedantic bunch. Feel free to reach out to us: info@makereign.com or follow our journey on Instagram.
