5 minutes of eComm Wisdom: Pete from CENTER

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I would say from the past, we have just launched a case study for a brand called 'ghostwrite'it's a super exciting opportunity.

It came to us from the co-founder of StockX and he's doing this new venture with collectibles. If you're familiar with like "Bearbricks", he was a big part of bringing Bearbrick the the United States, really through the StockX platform and he's making his own collectible that does a lot of collaborations with some super relevant brands, and he came to us and first of all had to explain what the whole world was, which is super exciting.

And part of the reason why we were really into it is it was something we had no familiarity with. But I would say, the collaboration with him and his team was super fun. And the work that came out of it, we're incredibly proud of. It feels like we were able to push the work in a great way.

It's very much like this street wear drop concept. And that was his thing too. Like some of these collectibles are really big, some are small. And he was like, 'listen, I'm not really launching it to the world in a traditional way', like it's just going to

show up at a shop and people won't know what it is. And won't even know how to look it up for a while. And we're like, that's awesome. like it was just so radical to not feel like you need this epic launch, like you can kind of be sort of secretive about it. And that was part of the exciting part for us for sure.

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What we've been realizing, the toughest part is finding the right clients, really. It's finding the ones that trust us. It's finding the ones that we feel like we just have a good relationship with.right at the start,it's all those criteria you have for clients. It needs to pay something. And, you know, of course we have different criteria based on what type of client they are, but

we're a powerful machine, we can come up with some really creative work. And I believe that, but I'm starting to realize that work will never see the world, unless there's a lot of trust And to be fair, there's a lot of things that happens on the client side. I realized that, we're working with people who they need to talk to their people who need to convince the other people and it needs to go into a boardroom and then they need to talk about it to make sure the work gets the world.

So I totally have understanding there, but I just am starting to realize that, it comes down to the right people that are able to, to trust us. So sometimes we realize that it takes a lot of work just to get the work, there's this pitch process that I don't know if we anticipated would be so gnarly at the beginning or oh, wow, like we just spent 3 months trying to get this job so that now we can get paid to do the job. I guess crazy, but, realizing that's what it takes to get the good ones. So we're here for it.

I guess for some clarity: The majority of the studio is based in Brooklyn and comes to the office most days. Not every day, there's a pretty flexible work policy there, but,out of the 11 of us I think 8 are in the office.

And then, there's this funny thing where there are now 3 of us that are not based in Brooklyn: One is based in Utah, one's in Mexico city. And then there's myself in California. Part of what made that work, I will say is that the 3 of us, the design director who's based in Mexico cityhe was the 2nd employee. I was the first. So we really, had a lot of trust built into the relationship already. So it was one of those things where he's just so integral and,knows the way things need to work. And there's that trust built into the work. So that allows for people to really be wherever they want.

It's true you can totally make it work. But I think the second there's something in your mind, where like, 'what are they up to today?' Or you're like, "Am I sure that they're going to deliver that in the right way that I expect?" That becomes a little hard and I would imagine it'd be difficult to just hire remote right off the bat

just because it's hard to build that trust from afar. And some people are really good at building that really early. Other times maybe it'll just take time. But I think for now we're trying to be flexible, but also prioritize time within the studio. And partially that's just for personal reasons just to get the vibe of the person, to be together is really important. And it doesn't have to be every day, it's not like that at all, but,I think the way that we've been able to manage having a studio that has people that work apart

is just, we were able to instill pretty early on that trust. Part of it was even through COVID, we had a couple of years there where no one really was in the studio at all. But those are some really formative times where we built trust as a team. And but yet again, if we were to hire a designer today, they'd be starting in Brooklyn.

so it's a bit of that funny thing. I would love to say that we're like work from anywhere, but. You'd probably start in Brooklyn and then, hey, who knows? If you needed to make some moves, I'm sure we could talk about it.

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