Butchershop on branding, collaboration, and solving creative problems

At Projector, we’re fortunate to work with brilliant brands to help bring their visions to life — and now you can learn from them, too. Tips, tricks, and insights, directly from the marketers, designers, and creatives who walk that walk, below.

We sat down with Trevor Hubbard, CEO of Butchershop— an independent strategy, creative, and brand experience agency— to find out how they use Projector to build their own brand and win over prospective clients.

Talk to us about Butchershop. What’s your overall approach to branding and what defines the work that comes out of your studio?

Butchershop is a global growth and transformation company with offices in San Francisco, Vienna, and Guadalajara. We use strategy, brand and content, performance and media, digital products and digital experience, and venture to connect brands, business and product for our client partners. With our entrepreneurial pedigree, we have turned an unwavering emphasis on clarity and the Beat Failure™ methodology into products designed to help companies steer through the challenges of inflection points, including moments of growth, scale, evolution or transformation. We measure success by our ability to change brand perception and increase awareness, retention, interactions, impressions, conversions, and revenue.

A little birdy told us you have an exciting new project you’re working on. Tell us more about Priio.

Priio® is a patent pending self-service SaaS platform that helps teams beat failure® through clarity of risks, potential failures, prioritization, and strategies. As an agency, we’ve scoped and kicked off projects for years asking one key question — “What will cause this project or your brand to fail?” You can’t succeed without talking about failure. This is true for everyone — from Fortune 500 companies to pre-seed startups. While we used to run this exercise with sticky notes IRL, when the pandemic hit, we accelerated the development of a digital tool to facilitate these sessions. Known as Priio, we officially launched in Spring 2021.

How has Projector helped with telling your story through visual design?

Projector has been essential for our internal communication and storytelling. Almost everything you see on social media, be it from Butchershop or Priio, was built in Projector. All of our monthly updates, unit lead meetings, and ImaginedBy projects start as decks in Projector.

It’s an incredible tool for the non-designers to quickly shape stories without having to pull a creative away from client work.

The tools and simple features allow you to up your game and communicate more effectively. The approach to multimedia that Projector has built is really simple, easy and powerful.

What do you wish every client knew about working with a branding and design agency?

Specifically for us, we aren’t for everyone. We are built to come in as specialists at inflection points that a company is going through. Those could be moments like recently raising a round of funding or about to raise, getting ready for an IPO, handling a big shift in the market or product landscape, or getting ready to break in or out of an emerging market. We always say that it is hard to read the label when you are inside of the bottle. Companies work on their brand. We work on hundreds of them.

More generally, there are a lot of agency variations, so finding the right one can be a challenge. A lot of agencies are hired for a single point solution. When a client comes to us with an RFP or to “rebrand” or to design a new website or launch a brand campaign, we have to take a step back. When we ask what can cause a company to fail, this question often reveals many other pain points that could use product-driven, creative digital or design-based solutions that we can use to prevent those failures from happening.

Lastly, what’s your favorite tool in Projector?

We love how easy it is to add media and movement to anything. The GIF and stock video libraries help to make any run-of-the-mill post immediately more interesting. Also, the simple way that you incorporated editing features like clipping masks, color and tint tools.

I would say that we save half the amount of time but double the amount of impact of each asset we build in Projector.

We don’t do everything in Projector, but for creative people who aren’t designers, the templates, content and tools are incredible for making everything we do internally meaningful.