MakeReign in 2018 — End of year retrospective.
Micheal Buble begins playing in the background. Holy 💩! Is it really that time of year again? 🤯 (Well at least it was when I started writing this article last year… Since then we’ve put Michael safely back in his den for the next 11 months. And I’ve finally gotten back to finishing writing this.)
As we start the new year, much like we did at the end of last year, we felt it a good idea to look back and reflect on the year that was, the things that happened and the lessons we learned.
“Without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences, and failing to achieve anything useful.” — Meg Wheatley
This past year had its ups and downs, as things often go. So much happens and changes over the course of a year. But overall, it was a great year. We did some great things — adding some new faces to our team, worked on some amazing projects, and had some fun along the way.
Experienced some growing pains — as you do.
Guess we’ll start with some of the downs (hey, it can only get better from here, right?) At the start of the year, our company was continuing to grow pretty darn quickly. This growth, at such a young age — we’d only been around for 18 months — certainly has its challenges. That rapid business growth fuelled by growing demand meant we needed to grow our staff and scale our business — with that we needed to maintain product quality, operational efficiency, whilst keeping everyone who works here happy. The hustle to scale our company into a flourishing business was no easy feat!
And that change was difficult for us. The year didn’t start that well for us. The team seemed to be in this lull that we couldn’t kick. The optimism, excitement and graft that went into the year before seemed to have worn us out and those scaling challenges were taking it’s toll. It was effecting our culture and we lost some good people over it.
It was a real kick in the ass, lead to a lot of reflection and was a call to get our 💩 together! And we did. We reflected, and learned a lot. We’re putting a lot more focus on the people side of our business. We’re still learning a lot (we are human), still trying to continuously improve. But we saw a massive improvement in the second half of the year and are bringing a number of new and exciting changes to ensure we don’t start this year in the same way.
Now let’s take this thing up and reminisce on the good times.
Added some new people. New faces.
We grew quite a bit last year, added a lot of new faces. And said good bye to a few too. We have even more new faces joining us at the start of 2019! We feel we’ve got a really strong team here of smart, talented, and most importantly — jovial people. Look at this bunch.
We dropped our new website. Finally!
It took us over 2 years to finally get to launching our website, but it dropped in September of this year. No, we weren’t working on it that whole time. Putting a lot of time, effort and love to some amazing client work projects, and the fact that doing your own work is always difficult, meant we kept delaying it. But we finally got to it and launched to some amazing praise! We were the first South African studio to win an Awwward, FWA and CSS Design Award in some five years.
We set out to showcase and elevate South African design on the world stage and produce something special for our own site. That was one of the main goals for us last year, beyond growing our brand internationally and getting new clients — of course, so were super stoked to do it! This year, we’re aiming higher.
It got some rad other features too.
Worked on some amazing projects.
We worked on a number of amazing things this year, here’s a small snapshot of some of our bigger drops—
The Woolworths application, a project we have been involved with for some time, launched in app shopping this year, making this application one of the most comprehensive retail applications in South Africa. The launch has been a massive success, with sales growth exceeding expectations and continuing to grow! 🚀
“The initial launch of in-app shopping has already exceeded our expectations from a sales perspective. We see mobile as the customer’s channel of choice and there is no doubt that mobile will lead the way towards an omni-channel retail experience.” — Liz Hillock, Head of Online. Woolworths.
Another big product launch that we were involved with was with Pineapple insurance. The app has launched to great reviews and has picked up some big accolades along the way, including at the MTN Business App of the Year awards, where it won Best Consumer Solution of the Year! They’re also up to almost 10 000 members in roughly 6 months. Check out the full case study here.
We launched the MVP of Publicist, a marketplace for Publicists by Publicists, early in 2018. We’re gearing up to bring some exciting changes to the platform in 2019.
The MVP worked, had great feedback and have learnt so many lessons to gear up for 2.0. — Lara Vandenberg. Founder. Publicist.
And worked with Gamedex, a company offering digital collectable cards powered by Blockchain, on developing their early stage creative — from their branding CI, to their website and some initial concept work for how different parts of the platform could work, in order to get them to a stage where they could seek funding… And they got it! Raising $800 000 through a funding round lead by Invictus Capital.
A number of exciting other projects we designed are launching in Q1 of 2019!
Introduced MakeReign Content.
Another big business decision was to expand our service offering to include more content-focused design work, allowing us to offer clients more value and diversify our skill set as a design studio.
We’re offering a range of expertise and creative outputs — from campaign strategy and conceptualization to creative look & feel or art direction to eventually rolling out all assets required across any digital medium. We’ll even put together a rad pitch deck or presentation should a business require it.
Got any creative content requirements? — hit up Justin (or Jett) at justin@makereign.com. 🤘
Got a second studio space.
We outgrew ourselves! Decided it was time to rent some additional space for our growing team. So when a space opened up next door to our current studio, we jumped at the opportunity to take it for ourselves. The space will be used as a meeting / quiet room (another lesson learned — quiet spaces for super important focus time!) for the team. Currently the space is being prepared and will be ready for use in early Feb! So no pictures just yet. Keep an eye on our Instagram though.
Our social media efforts paid off.
We passed 20 000 followers on Instagram. Not bad for a design studio at the tip of Africa. We invested a lot of time and effort on social media, especially our Dribbble and Instagram accounts. And this year it really started to pay off — winning us a lot of new client relationships that continue to grow. We slowed down a bit with our content towards the end of last year, but will be picking it up this year — bigger and better!
Did some other cool things that I’ll just group under one heading cause I’m lazy.
We celebrated our second birthday! (Oh 💩, does that mean we’re in the terrible twos?)
Introduced townhalls + retrospectives. This is a coming together of everyone in the studio discuss everything that’s happening within the company and allows everyone to have a platform to discuss their thoughts on how things are going, and most importantly how things can improve.
Did a number of really cool team socials; from clay pigeon shooting, to go kart racing, to an amazing dining experience at Lapo’s Kitchen (now Fable Kitchen).
We worked with some amazing interns from iXperience who helped us push development on some of our side hustles — keep an eye out for some MakeReign projects launching in 2019!
Celebrated the year end in style with our friends at okalpha. Went down to Table Seven in our beautiful home city, Cape Town, for an amazing private dinner experience. Highly recommend it to anyone.
And learnt a whole lot of important lessons.
I’ve shared a few short lessons learned along the way in this article already, but thought I would share some additional here. Some additional food for thought…
- Focus, direction + embracing the power to say ‘No’. Always a difficult one for a rapidly growing start up trying to find their feet and would take on pretty much any work that came our way. As Richard Rumelt writes in his book “Good Strategy. Bad Strategy,” Good strategy is about focusing and coordinating efforts to achieve an outcome, which means saying ‘no’ to some goals, initiatives, and people. We’ve since decided to begin saying no to certain things. Such as enquiries that don’t meet certain criteria we’ve set. We implemented a project minimum that we politely bring up whenever we receive an enquiry. Of course, there are always those projects that you really want to work on and you decide to skirt those restrictions a little bit. We’ve also begun prioritising the one or two feasible objectives that will have the biggest impact when accomplished and developing systems that lay out the steps of how we’re going to reach those objectives.
- The importance of managing people + keeping people happy. There are so many people considerations that need to be made — more than I think we ever could have imagined. From hiring, to onboarding, to day to day people management, to managing performance, engaging regularly… the list goes on. All with the view to keep people happy (and keep them here). Studies have shown that happy workers get more done, more efficiently, produce higher sales, perform better in leadership positions, receive higher performance ratings whilst they enjoy more job security, are less likely to take sick days, to quit, or to become burned out. So that has become a key goal for us, keeping our people happy — in the hopes that we avoid some of the same issues we had at the start of 2018. We’ve hired our first person to deal with People Ops and employee wellbeing, and are looking at a number of initiatives to drive happiness in our studio. If this is something that you can relate to, I highly recommend reading “The Happiness Advantage” by Shawn Achor.
- Cashflow will always be a bitch! Still the greatest bit of wisdom that someone has shared with me, “It’s not profitability that will sink your business, it’s cashflow”. Really important to stay on top of the inflow and outflow of cash. Our push this year is to grow our cashflow buffer and be even better prepared when some of our partners pay a little late.
- Importance of looking back, reflecting + taking the lessons learned forward. Guess that’s why I wrote this article, innit? But this can happen on so many levels — from daily, weekly and monthly, to the full project or even down to the feature level. Continuous improvement is key to success! The Kaizen approach.
So there it is, some of the things we did and some of the challenges we faced, in the smallest of nutshells, over the last year.
We don’t always get it right way, that happens — but we’re pretty proud of what we managed to do in 2018. Here’s to an even better 2019 — stay tuned. I’m going to try keep you more in the loop over this year!
(Personal goal this year — get out more content and not dwindle so long on writing it!)
