LaM 0.25 FY23Q4: Delivering Profit
The one where employees own the company and we drop Toolkit™
Welcome to the Quarter WIP (recap).
What started as a convenient way to hit a couple of our OKRs last quarter (showcase our best work, share our process with the world) has accidentally metamorph’d into a regular pinnacle of Love and Money vibe. For 30 minutes at the end of our Quarter we open up our chatroom to share our progress across each department. And we’re literally all here for it (along with 50 strangers who tuned in).
It’s one of those things you just have to be there for. Or watch on the internet later, I guess.
Overview
The highlights? This quarter we surpassed our targets: we launched six new Toolkits™; shipped four new websites; got a bunch of features on The Brand Identity and Awwwards (among others); shot season one of a podcast.
We took the internal brand technology we’ve been building for the last 12 months (Digital Brand Platforms) and re-released them as Toolkits™ (more below.)
And in amongst all that, we also launched the next iteration of the LaM brand.
Our focus on OKRs and profitability led to a 40% rise in revenue, a 169% increase in net profitability (YoY), the expansion of our Leadership Team with 3 new Directors. We also made a new hire in London as we continue to expand our North Hem Team (if you know any great designers or developers in the UK/EU, please get in touch.)
More importantly, we’re moving more and more towards being an employee-owned business; more than half of our employees (across all levels of seniority) now have a financial stake in the company.
Here are the key takeaways across Brand, Digital, and Partnerships.
Partnerships
Our biggest (and most humbling) realisation this quarter was realising that we’re not the only “creatives” in the room. It took surprisingly little humility to wake up to the fact that our clients were every bit as creative as we are — whether that’s inventing an entirely new form of interior construction, creating paper from stone, or even creating the perfect mascara (we tried it once for Fluff, and we can attest to the fact that this is insanely fucking hard.)
Further, we’ve been as an organisation that prides itself on being Hypercollaborative™ and doing Work that Works™ we’ve been trying to figure out how to create brands that our clients can actually use. Not just something that looks good as a case study. That requires long term goal-setting with each of our clients on an OKR framework (we call these Couple Goals) and holding ourselves accountable to how the work is working in the real world. And then iterating on the work with the benefit of hindsight.
That means it’s our job not to give our demonstrably creative clients some creative, but tools to create with.
That humbling realisation? Our clients don’t need a “creative agency” to solve all of their problems for them.
They need creative agency.
Toolkit™ V1
Our biggest release this quarter wasn’t any one brand, it was our release of Toolkit™: the operating system for every digital brand we work on or with. It fuses Brand + Digital into one thing: Brand Technology™.
It’s the tangible outcome of our Memes™: what other studios call “Brand Strategy” and “Creative Direction”. And it’s the building blocks of all of our brand Expressions — from websites to internal presentations to launch campaigns to social media posts.
Even more exciting than what we’ve been able to publish to date is what’s to come: we’ve identified four opportunity areas for feature development:
Tools for Engagement
Tools for Explanation
Tools for Experimentation
Tools for Evaluation
Our upcoming releases include a Couple Goals (OKR) Tracker, NNL Roadmap Manager, DAM (Digital Asset Manager), CSS Pagebuilder Slices, Brief Builder, and Performance Dashboard... among others.
We believe any business can benefit from having their brand centralised in a single, digital space. So whether we’ve worked on your brand or not, if you’re interested in getting your brand on Toolkit™, reach out to us.
Brand
LaM V2,018,237,908,109.0
Working on your own brand is a whole time isn’t it? Choosing the most powerful memes inside your organisation and distilling that into something clear and compelling is hard af when you’re so close to (and emotionally invested in) it. Especially when a core function of your brand is creating space for the work you do: creating and promoting your clients’ brands.
Given how much we go on about Always Beta™ it’s probably no surprise at this point that we think of our brand — like all brands — as “versions”. And while we know this will evolve and (hopefully) improve, this version is the one we’re proudest of to date.
We updated our type to ABC Datatype which serves to make both bold, intelligent statements while also working to explain our richer content like “The Standards”, our proprietary glossary that fosters creative freedom within a shared framework.
Oh and of course we launched the next iteration of our site along with it. Because Brand + Digital are Beta Together.
Euphemia V1
This quarter one of our major projects was for Euphemia, a family office that’s invested in Awesome. Not just investing in today’s founders (which would be plenty awesome) but actively investing in tomorrow’s startup scene. Founding and facilitating a diverse, progressive, intelligent & ambitious community — a fertile environment — that’s going to build the future of Australia. So it’s not just about making Awesome, but about making the Awesome today that will make the (even more) Awesome tomorrow.
Make Awesome Make Awesome.
Core to the brand is our Tapestry of Awesome. We use colourful and flexible building blocks to construct letters and contain imagery. We use blend modes to create unique colour combinations representative of what happens when multiple perspectives come together to create something more awesome.
Yes, we’re aware that’s a lot of awesome.
Skinvolve V0.5
Another highlight from the quarter was our involvement in Skinvolve through our +Ventures program. Our brand meme was centred around The Return: a return to ritual, to history, to self. While this mirrors the personal journeys of the brand’s founders, it reflects something similar in all of us.
Having over a decade of experience working with (and creating) beauty brands all over the world, we were asked to help Skinvolve not just as a brand partner, but a business partner, taking a significant share in the business over a 2 year vesting schedule.
As such this was an opportunity to apply brand and business strategy together as one: The Return influences everything from the typography to the tone of voice, the packaging to the ecommerce experience, all the way down to the razor and blade subscription model, and ultimately the P+L.
Digital
Hydrogen
Our digital front has seen rapid growth, with tools like Gatsby, TypeScript, CSS Modules, and Sanity CMS playing a vital role in our projects. We're also looking to expand into Hydrogen for Shopify e-commerce sites, exploring its potential to create intuitive, user-centric accounts in our Best Practise™ e-commerce stack.
Built with Toolkit™
Leveraging brands as technology has obvious benefits for development. We’re not interested in presenting a project statically on a website. When we build Toolkits™ for our clients, we’re able to use the brand to explain itself– not just in how it looks or sounds, but by how it feels. Building Toolkit™ means that everything else we create (subsequent websites, campaigns, applications) come straight from the source, the brand on the Internet. It saves time and ensures consistency whenever we’re creating.
Always Beta
Looking forward, this coming Q is all about re(de)fining our creative agency, clarifying the plan for the next 3 years as we further integrate creativity and technology.
We’ll be restructuring the organisation under our new Directors, and moving from 4 departments to 6 with more fully formed Partnerships and Delivery teams, and the addition of two new teams: Human Capital and Education. Our Human Capital dept will also be re-igniting our +Ventures program, looking for new businesses to start or acquire (more on that soon).
But for all the change at the top level, our fundamentals will remain unchanged: we’ll be focussing on building Memes and Toolkits™ with the world’s best clients and continuing to expand into UK/Europe and the USA.
We’ll be launching our GOAT Affiliate Program, which gives a commission to anyone that sends us a client that fits our criteria. And because incentives are the most powerful force known to (hu)man, our commission scales in line with GPM (gross margin). This program is even available to clients; the commission comes off our rates if we can keep the project profitable. Win/win.
So if you know anyone who needs a Meme or a Toolkit, get in touch.
We’re also talking at Brand New Conference in September. So if you’re in Chicago, get a ticket.
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