One of my favorite parts of running TwoLips, apart from working every day with my incredible team (that’s a different blog for a different day), is that we’re able to lean into the things that we enjoy, and away from the things that we don’t.
Now don’t get me wrong, that does not mean that we are only doing the most fun things 100% of the time. But it does mean that we’re able to create hypotheses on what kinds of work we think we’re going to enjoy, give it a go for a while, and then reflect. If we’ve enjoyed the projects as expected, we keep going after those kinds of projects. If we don’t, we can start changing course after a simple internal conversation.
And this happened quite literally this week.
For the past 9 months or so, we’ve thought we wanted to move away from being so design-focused. Now, we’re designers at heart so design was always going to be a core part of what we do. But we feared that if we focused exclusively on design, we would essentially be a deliverable business and that could mean continuing to have a bunch of smaller, quicker turnaround projects. These projects can be great, but it’s also hard to scale and keep projects coming in the door.
And for about 7 of the last 9 months, we were definitely heading in that direction which was incredibly exciting! Except, it turns out that when you’re designers at heart, you genuinely love designing things, and we missed making a lot of new, unique, cool shit for clients. Then flash forward to the past 2 months and we’ve been in design + illustration MODE. Almost every client was a design client including 4 new illustration projects. I was excited to come to work every day to see what Liz and Laura would be creating. I was creating color palettes left, right, and center. We were in our element.
Now that we are on the other side of most of these projects, it’s easier to reflect on how different it has felt when we were design-focused rather than marketing and strategy. So at our monthly leadership meeting, Liz and I discussed this. And she agreed. Designing is what we love. Designing is our unique perspective. We live and breathe branding and how brands should evoke feelings. I love that we get to play in these different spaces. Try on different hats. And then decide what’s best for us right now. That’s what I love about running TwoLips.
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About The Author
Olivia Wisden is the Founder + CEO of TwoLips Creative. She has worked with dozens of brands over the years ranging from city initiatives to product launches and beyond. When she’s not fan-girling over the design team’s illustrations she can probably be found reading a novel or attending a boxing class.