I was thinking recently about how little has changed since that Easter breakfast in 1993, when Jeannine sprayed her food over my drawing from laughing when I said I had plans to launch an advertising campaign. I was going to start an advertising campaign during a time when we were eating at her parent’s house almost daily due to a lack of money and time. I think I was earning negative one guilder an hour at the time. I came up with the idea because the home and living magazines, which were sprouting out of the ground like mushrooms, shared a common problem: a lack of substance. I figured that, if I were to develop and create a whole bunch of new products, exactly what I enjoy doing, they would find their way to us automatically. A few months later, quite a few of our products adorned the interior pages of these magazines and, in fact, this has been the case ever since.
A while after that, when I was no longer such a fun young designer, the magazines felt I should be placing ads as well, since we were receiving so much editorial attention. Our answer every time was that we spent our money not on advertising but on new products, which in term allowed us to generate more advertising. It’s quite logical really; doing what you are good at and enjoy is in everyone’s best interest, and you end up with a product collection, as well.
For more than a year now we’ve been working from our new building – which, incidentally, is far from finished – in which we’ve invested all of our energy, talent, expertise and currency. A building like this is quite an investment, you might think, but it’s much more than that. Once again, the attention we’re receiving is overwhelming and, more than ever before, we’re providing content for magazines, journals and even newspapers, this time across the entire world. Of course, attention often only pays off in the long-term, but if you add up the total value of all those pages, you may very well find that our building has cost us virtually nothing at all (of course, like everyone else, the mortgage and monthly payments are like a millstone around our necks). Not only that, but it produces an effect faster than expected; never before have we received so many orders from around the world, from within the Netherlands, and even from our own location here in Eindhoven.
This post is also available in: NL
« Back to blog