The best of MakeReign — 2019.
Super late! It’s February already. 2020 is off to a flying start! But, we did do some things we’re incredibly proud of over the last 12 months, so we’re doing a quick recap of our highlights for 2019. 🤘
If you’re interested in going back in time, you can check out some of our past reflections from 2018 and 2017.
There were some lows from this past year — things sometimes get messy, things are challenging, we don’t always get things right, we don’t always do things that make us proud— this thing (life+business) is a rollercoaster of ups and downs. But man, they’re also exciting. So for this article, I’m just going to focus on the things that get us excited, the things that make this all worth it.
Hired and worked with some amazing talent.
2019 was a year of rapid growth for us in many ways. Our team grew massively (we’re now 20+) and we added some amazingly talented people to our crew. One of the reasons we exist as a company is to collaborate with incredibly talented people.
Including some key hires at the leadership level — like Ally Behr, who joined us as a creative director. She was also announced as a Bookmarks Jury Member for 2020 — Go, Ally! Britta Graewe also joined us with heaps of experience and is now heading up our UX team with a focus on UX testing. There was also Kristen, Dane, Georgie, Linda, Nicole, Pablo and Maxine who all joined the band!
Parts of the world seemed to be noticing what our studio at the tip of Africa is doing, as students from HETIC school blew up our mailboxes with requests to join us for an internship. We hired Maud from HETIC for a 6-month internship program. She was the best.
We were incredibly sad to see her go at the end of 2019, but we managed to say goodbye by showcasing why Cape Town is just the best place with a special visit to the famous rock in Sea Point. You can have a quick squiz at some of the Cape Town experiences she had in this rad little video she put together. (If you’re a talented designer reading this abroad, consider moving here! We’re hiring.)
We did some other exciting off-sites too.
From bowls to kayaking, to a Hot Ones hot wings challenge, to Hint Hunt — we did some challenging, rewarding and down-right hilarious team building activities in 2019.
Held a number of team meetings & workshops with a focus on growth (one of our key values here!)
Notably, we introduced MakeReign Day. We set aside time to come together to discuss the company’s strategy; our key initiatives, give status updates to the team on those initiatives and present our focus areas for the quarter ahead. This, in an effort to be transparent about the state of the company and where it’s headed, so that everyone is clear and we’re all working towards common goals.
A key component of MakeReign Day is one of our growth initiatives — Ninja Skills! Everyone picks a skill (or two) to develop. The skill must have an objective and key results that help to push and grow the individual and the company forward. We work on these whenever we can find time over the quarter and present our journey on the next MakeReign Day. Of course, being the competitive bunch we are, the team votes on their favourites and we crown a winner — who receives the Ninja trophy, bragging rights, and a cash prize!
We also hosted monthly Townhalls (our team catch-ups where we share work produced recently), and introduced lunch & learns as part of our growth initiatives.
We began designing a framework for career paths for our team. This was an important initiative for us this past year — we know that one of the top reasons people leave companies is because of a lack of a clearly defined career ladder. We also restructured our performance evaluation process and wrote up formal job descriptions for the different roles and seniority levels within our company, and how to move up the levels.
We grew up, turning THREE! Naturally, we threw a huge party to celebrate.
With turning a year older, came some growing up as a company — from the new kids on the block, doing cool shit (at least trying to) to get the neighbourhood to notice us, to the mature adults in the room using experience to drive our decisions. We’re a company driven by informed design. In fact, it’s now our mission — we refined this year, too: our reason for being and our vision for the future of MakeReign.
We refined our UX process and service offering, in line with this maturity. (Keen to hear more about that or make use of our services? Drop us an email if you’re interested and we can share that with you!)
Our spaces grew — we now work from 4 different spaces, with our User Testing Lab having opened towards the end of 2019. Still, some way to go in finishing off, but we did our first user remote testings for various clients.
We shared some of our experiences on those testings:
Did some work we’re really proud of.
2019 was an amazing year for us from a partnership and work perspective. We worked with incredible clients, both new and existing, to produce design work that we are more than happy to put our name to. This is what it’s all about for us, and the few awards we picked up along the way area huge bonus.
We worked alongside the Woolworths team to redesign some key pages of their website; including new product listing pages, product detail pages, and the entire checkout process. No easy feat for an e-commerce site of that size, in our humble opinion.
Our relationship continued with the retail giant for the entirety of 2019 as the design team for their mobile application, launching some rad and pretty useful new features over the course of the year. We’re beyond excited for what 2020 holds for this project, so keep your eyes peeled for what’s to come.
We’ve also formed a solid partnership with the financial arm of Woolworths (Woolies Financial Services) and we’re currently assisting them in building digital products. We’re working alongside their talented team to bring customers vastly better digital experiences when applying for and managing their financial products and services.
We worked with the talents (and good friends) at Okalpha on their site in 2018, but got some love in 2019, with it being recognized as one of the Top 10 websites on Webflow for 2018!
Launched Kasbah, an eCommerce site for one of Australia’s largest importers, wholesalers, and distributors of exotic homeware, giftware, and furniture.
We partnered with Wolf&Whale to launch their new portfolio site and picked up our 2nd Awwwards Site of the Day for the project. The case study for the project was also featured on Awwwards. The site also received some love from the CSS Design Awards and won us our second FWA!
Launched Pantheone, which picked up some love from Awwwards and the CSSDesignAwards as we came back from our annual summer holiday! Great start to the year. You can read all about that below:
Did some more work with Pineapple Insurance, launching two exciting features in the coming months! Our work with them also led to them taking the top investment award at VentureClash of $1.5 million for their application that allows individuals to ensure their possessions with the snap of a photo. Check out the initial work we did for them here.
We also kicked off some awesome projects that we’ll be able to tell you more about soon! Including a pet insurance app for Pezo, an eCommerce redesign with Shelflife and a portfolio redesign for local branding company, Parsons.
We put some more love into our Dribbble. That work got featured a bunch of places.
We finished off the year with a fundraising initiative to spread some cheer into the lives of those who need it most. We partnered with 3 local organisations to assist underprivileged children and the homeless, and managed to raise around $1000, which will go towards buying toys for children currently receiving treatment for cancer, stationery for underprivileged children heading back to school and beds for the homeless! Thanks to everyone who got involved! We’ll be sharing more on that initiative soon! So keep your eyes peeled.
And that’s it from us for our super late round-up of 2019. Many lessons learnt, and maybe I’ll share those in another post, but here’s to an even bigger 2020! We hope you’ll stay tuned for the journey.
