How we are rebranding to three companies under one flag.

This is the letter we send out to our followers to explain why BrunsNiks is becoming VOUW.

Dear wonderful reader,

We are rebranding! This last BrunsNiks newsletter is all about our rebrand to our new company: VOUW! 🎉 You’ll read why we are doing this and also what kind of brand we are building to deliver our clients better services than we do today.

It’s a very big move for us. So if you have questions or you want to share thoughts, please mail us at contact@brunsniks.com.

Read on!

Justus, Mingus & Team

PS: Our new website will launch in the next weeks.

Bye Bye Bruns & Niks, Hello VOUW!

Say hello to VOUW (pronounced ‘vow’). VOUW has three meanings, expressed in three languages:

• Vouw means ‘Fold’ in Dutch — we’re unfolding new plans creatively
• Băo or 宝 in Mandarin, means treasure or jewel — we want to create ‘treasures’ as projects
• ‘Vow’ or ‘solemn promise’ in English — refers to our commitment to a long and lasting positive impact

With VOUW we want to build a more exciting world to live in. We are going beyond delivering just design services and include bolder projects such as replacing ads with art, organizing cultural events, delivering better learning software or finding ways to increase access to drinking water working with new technology.

Three Divisions: Design, Projects & Products

VOUW will exist of three divisions that each will be sharing profits, losses and its brand, some parts of divisions might run more independently than others. The new company will exist of:

• VOUW Design (previously BrunsNiks): a design company with extra focus on data analysis (read more below) 👈 we will launch this first in the next weeks (so stay tuned!)
• VOUW Projects (to find a place for existing projects such as Art Square, The Airplane Food Event, collaborations with the Dutch National Opera & Ballet and the Live Still Life)
• VOUW Products (new innovative solutions that people can buy or subscribe to, more soon!)

Here’s an infographic for you to understand the structure:

Three Reasons Why we are Rebranding

1. We are increasingly irrelevant

The problem:
BrunsNiks was founded in 2013 with the idea of finding more exciting projects through combining my work with that of my co-founder Thijs Niks. But our reason ‘to do more exciting work’ isn’t really resonating with our potential clients. Because our competition wants the exact same thing.
So we asked ourselves: “Are we still relevant? Will people miss us when BrunsNiks is gone?”. The answer was a hard but a true ‘no’.

Our approach:
It is time for us to step up and be more proactive and to be more relevant. It is time for real leadership. When research is telling us how the jobs are being automated and it causes the rise of nut cases like Trump, we want to be actively involved in finding a solution. Not being the company that was too busy making money, when the world fell apart. We want to be a company that people want to see growing because of the great things it does.

2. Technology is disrupting the traditional designer

The problem:
You have probably read articles on how a lot of jobs are disappearing because of artificial intelligence (we shared many in our previous letter). We see that our traditional design job as we know it will be gone soon: Logojoy is our competition now, a start-up automating the design process of an identity for just 65 euros.

Our approach:
We are therefore adding Data Analysis to our design process. We’re extending our team with data scientists. And from today on we will start delivering smarter identities, smarter websites and smarter visuals:

• Smarter Identities that are based on an extensive research on how your brand is perceived online (using data of Twitter, Facebook, search behaviour and other media)
• Smarter Websites & Apps that can eventually adapt to user behavior (eg color changes of buttons to increase more sales)
• Smarter visuals: simple reporting tools to turn online questionnaires or social media interactions into visual and interactive reports that adapt automatically on incoming data

There are very few creative companies doing what we are doing now: combining data science with creative thinking. Delivering both data driven and creativity driven design services (the best of both worlds).

3. Combining our ventures increases chances for success

The problem:
None of our peers is really excited when we as BrunsNiks rebrand the largest car magazine of the Netherlands or when we are doing a new logo for the Democracy and Media Foundation. You won’t be sitting at the dinner table and be like “You gotta see the new logo BrunsNiks has designed!”.
However people were talking about our movement to replace ads with art in Times Square or producing shoes in Kenya, a lot more people came to spread our message, however these ventures ended up being financially unsustainable.

Our approach:
By assembling all of our projects together with our services under one brand, we are going to get more exposure that can help increase financial stability. We want to offer clients a way to be part of something bigger when they work with us. They not only get a smarter identity, they’ll also indirectly contribute to larger projects and learn more about our creative thinking.

We have done an art project in Bangalore that none of our clients really knows about. The creative thinking there, really showcases also how we are can position us differently than a lot of other digital design companies out there. So as we are now bringing all our projects and services under one flag we believe that it increases chances of success.

VOUW Design is adding data analysis to the design process

We already started providing the automated data reporting service to an of our existing clients (CSR Europe). We imported results from a questionnaire directly in a visual reporting tool.

Learn more on the repositioning of BrunsNiks?
Read our full story on Data & Design

Things to check out

• We have now several existing and potential clients in Luxembourg, a country that continuously punches above its weight
• Thanks to Floris ten Have for this great crash course on Amazon and how its for example killing brands and advertising as we know it
• Unsplash’s COO explains perfectly why doing everything neat and sleek doesn’t always mean success
• Heard people talking about Blockchain or Ethereum? Did you understand it? We mostly don’t. Finally there is this great article.
• More on the blockchain and its cryptocurrencies: an optimistic piece on why they will increase in value
• The mother of all data visuals: OUR WORLD IN DATA, so cool, to counter all negative news items
• We are lately obsessed with China, specifically the Chinese Pearl River Delta, the new mega mega city of China

Thank you for your support

We want to thank Angela Moschetta, Alexander Klöpping, Walter van Maren, Christopher Prince Boucher, Johannes Mengel, Kendall Langford, Margot Lotz, Joe Elborn, Rosalinde van de Wall, Marjolein Kampschreur, Emma Bruns, Nida Oudejans, Sywert van Lienden, Thijs Niks, Thomas van Widdershoven, Gervaise Coebergh, Bart Voorn, Carolina Parisi, Stephanie Ranninger, Jan-Willem Heeg, Willem Dudok, Els van der Plas, Claire Thomas Daoulas, Gervaise Coebergh, Daniel Cramer, Jan Truijens Martinez, Nienke Venema, Merel van Garderen, Tessa Sterkenburg, John de Zwart, Edial Dekker and you for your continuous support and input to help defining our company.

We look forward to meet you in our newly designed newsletter from VOUW!

Best!

Justus Bruns, Mingus Vogel, Hannah Fuellenkemper, Olivier Metzler, Maarten Jansen, Thomas Ghys and Joris Tjaden