Further support from Designing Brand Identity by Alina Wheeler will be used.
Plan/Model
A business plan or model like this would often be taken to an investor or a bank if this was the route of funding one was to go down, they would want a basic summary of every aspect of the business with supporting financial projections to decide if what there investing or lending for is a safe return.
It also works as a guide for us to work too, a sum up of everything to work towards goals and a progression plan. The gov.uk site has a basic overview of that these plans help towards.
Company name:
North by North - Describes our Northern routes and suggests our multiple disciplines within our skill-set through the word "by" and its connotations with describing multiple dimensions and elements. It also suggests the idea of a group through the name, giving the client a nice piece of mind based on the fact that multiple skillsets will be involved in the production of there work.
Alina Wheeler suggests in the Designing Brand Identity book that name choice communicate the essence of the brand and is part of the USP and as its the first point of contact it needs to be memorable.
I believe this name resonates well with the focus of the studio and links well with heritage through referencing out location. This is important for creating a future oriented and timeless company as Alina Wheeler also suggests.
Business partners
Me/Johnathan Pell - 25% share in profits and liability. Specialises in Conceptual thinking, branding and editorial.
Niel Ghilchrist - 25% share in profits and liability. Specialises in traditional and digital illustration techniques, has a very contemporary and quirky aesthetic.
Joe Aucklands - 25% share in profits and liability. Specialises in web design, and digital media. He is very future oriented been a vital asset for the progression of the business within the growing need for digital technology within the creative industry.
Elliot Brodowski - 25% share in profits and liability. Specialises in Branding, Effective Logo & Type designer and conceptual thinker.
Type of business
A private limited company with equal 25% profit share would work out the best, we worked out the initial large start up costs came from equipment like Macs and printers, everything else was based on perishables and monthly outgoings which didn't carry a very high risk. So if the business did fail, financially we wouldn't have many assets that could be dissolved. Simply vacate the studio space, stop all monthly memberships for software, internet and insurances and call it a day.
Why where starting up
We see a gap in the current creative industry for agencies and designers that offer sustainable design work both across the digital sector and print sector. Design work today seems to be very trend driven, when trends die out the concepts used for these designs become misinformed and are no longer current and relevant and effective in communicating what the client wants to communicate to its target audience.
We want to create sustainable work for clients that are conceptually relevant to there services and resonate well within communicating to there intended target audiences. Maintaining this informed and timeless design style means the work we create for clients remains relevant for a longer period of time resulting in clients been willing to pay that little extra for more considered work.
Unique selling point
Our unique selling point comes from the diverse approaches to design we take, theres a current argument that printed media is dying out and the need for digital design is growing. The designers within our company specialise in traditional print media all the way to interactive design through exploration of Branding, Editorial design, typography design, web & user interface design and illustration all with a strong focus on conceptual thinking.
Tone of voice
Our communication with clients will be personal yet formal in its tone of voice, this will allow us to maintain a professional image but maintain a more casual relationship with the clients. We would sooner discuss work over a coffee or some food where possible rather than over the phone, email and skype. This cant always be helped but its more of a corporate way of doing things, having face to face communications will help build better relationships, long term clients and ideas spark much better in casual and relaxed settings.
Target Market
This brings us onto our target market, were going to be a startup company ourselves. So we want to offer new business's and small organisations sustainable and diverse design work relevant to there services and the target market there aiming at.
To maintain appearance of our friendly & formal tone of voice dealing with local business's helps us maintain these kind of relationships. Our location will be located close to local business's and train stations for clients that don't mind traveling.
Location
After looking at various locations we decided on Wakefield The Art House, its location was ideal for been a close by point of connection for local business's and up and coming business's due to its positioning near newly build office buildings, units & restaurants that are beginning to fill out. This will help us maintain that friendly and personal relationship with clients while also positioning us in an area with lots of potential new clients as there isn't many successful design studios in the near by area.
Been close to train & bus stations also puts us in a good position of meeting clients from further a field if they want to discuss projects in person.
The Art House has many different creatives using the studio space, this diverse range of creatives will help influence our diverse range of skill-sets further.
The vision of North by North
Through our sustainable, multi disciplinary conceptual approach to work combined with our friendly and personal communication with clients we want to maintain strong and long lasting relationships with clients. The result from this will be promotion of our services from recommendation through word of mouth while having consistent work from existing clients.
Using our location within The Arthouse we want to expand our recognition through external methods from the exhibitions both in-house and locally the studio get invited to contribute too.
Outgoings
£500-700 Per month
Job Costing
£40 per hour
Small Job - £80 based on 2 hours work, this could be like a business card or logo design.
Medium Job - £200 based on 5 hours work, this would include the likes of business cards, leaflets, logos and basic print collateral.
Large Job - £960-1600 based on 3-5 days work doing 8 hour days. This type of job would be a small rebrand with basic website.
Full Rebrands could cost between £3200-4800 based on 2-3 week timescales and consist of building a brand image from the ground up.
Promotions
After exploring possible methods of promotion outside the typical networking & promotion methods like Linked-in, social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, basic website presence and advertising collateral like business cars, leaflets etc we came up with a more abstract concept.
We want to contribute to exhibitions and print fairs both in-house at the Art House or outsourced, this will gain us external recognition without the need of big advertising campaigns and also gain us extra fund when we sell our works.
Another idea me and Neill came up with based on what we have been wanting to do for a while is create a pop up stand selling work created for #365directionsofnorth, a viral campaign that will use twitter and Instagram as a means of getting recognized through posting images of the work up and potentially selling online to gain extra funds as well as further recognition.
Supporting research that influenced this business model
Make Your Mark: The creatives guide to building a business with impact was the main resource I used for building this business model.
By working from the points "what are the unique talents of the organisation" and points made on defining a purpose for the business helped me arrive at a proposal for us to combine all out very unique abilities to focus and collaborate to create well informed ideas for the end user.
This passage made me think that we should treat clients like a friend rather than a client, listen to them, fully understand what they want within a relaxed atmosphere when interacting with them, maybe face to face over a coffee or something casual? Keep them involved throughout, after all were designing for them not us.
Learning from the points made on playing the long game made us all agree on the fact that we start off with aiming at small business and new startups as were new starters ourselves, we can then grow as they grow through our sustainable design work that enhances there business.
Attention to detail has always been a concern of mine, its highlighted here that customers notice these little additions so going the extra mile when carrying out a project will aid positive reaction from the client in turn gaining further work and having our services promoted through word of mouth.
We knew from the outset we didn't design for trends, so this was one thing we stood for, another thing we have settled on is sustainability. Producing work that lasts and is conceptually relevant without relying on trendy aesthetics and techniques is something we will stick by.
Know your onions is an informal guide to all aspects of running a freelance graphic design business, this short summary gave us an insight onto the thought process of a client and how we can learn from it.
The main points we took note from were thinking about the client rather than our creative ego, this resonates well with our conceptual approach over trend driven aesthetics. (Point 2)
Designing things that don't need revisions and adaptations at a later date resonates well with our aims of sustainability, it also makes us motivated to do the job right the first time through in-depth conversation with the client to fully understand there problem and create the best possible response using all our thinking process and design process's. (Point 3, 4, 5)
Keeping clients involved in the design process is something we will aim to achieve, it will be in our terms and conditions that they sign off every main decision we make within the development stage all the way to production making sure there satisfied at every stage.
Alina Wheeler's guide to : Designing brand identity covers all areas that need to be considered when creating a brand from the ground up, in essence this is the stage that where at so throughout the whole business model all the way to presentation and branding collateral I want us to go by this guide to create a focused and informed business model and plan.
Key points too look into from this book:
Voice and tone
Vision.
Values.
Culture.
Pricing.
Opportunities.
