Happy Birthday… to us —
To celebrate our 4th birthday, we did our favourite thing – collaborate!
Having just gotten through the festive season, we knew our peers would have plenty of overheard words of wisdom and ridiculousness to share with us.
We teamed up with our excellent client Wild Life to make fortune cookies that house our top 10 collected idioms. Then, for you to laugh at when you should be working, we made a little website with our friends at Cinch to showcase the rest of the pearlers:
birthday.jac-and.co
We had a heap of fun making this, and hope you have a bit of fun playing with it too. With special thanks to:
The gentleman who built the website
Our favourite bakers, Wild Life
Jill Haapaniemi, our friend with the camera and skills
All the legends who loaned us their words, namely:
- Jac’s family and her Mum’s friends – they really came through on this one!
- Giselle Laming
- Jay Armstrong
- James and Kirtsten of Taylor’d Press
- Steve Gavan
- Max Rabbit Slim
- Patrick Ryan
- Ed Robinson-Beyerle
- Dave Carmody
- The crew at 43 Derby Street
- And many more on the ‘gram too!
Our word for 2020 —
Every year, we choose a word to keep us on track for the year ahead. In 2018 it was calm and in 2019 it was grow. Doing this for a third year in a row has given us great insight into where we’ve been and where we want to go. This year’s word feels like a natural next step.
Our word for 2020 is depth.
2019 was an incredibly busy and exciting year for JAC&, we grew in lots of ways. We hired, launched a new venture and partnered with the most wonderful clients, new and old. The most special way we grew was certainly meeting Rita and Hana (Sara’s beautiful twins).
In 2020, we’re looking forward to going deeper; listening more intently, thinking critically and acting strategically to help both our clients businesses (and our own) be the best they can be. We’re looking forward to a year of learning to better understand ourselves, our clients and the world around us.
Twenty Six —
We’re honoured to be included in Twenty Six; a fundraising exhibition bringing together twenty-six creatives to raise money for the Australian Literacy & Numeracy Foundation’s ‘Subtext: Art for Literacy’ children’s art program.
We designed the letter J (of course) and, to take our After Effects skills for a little ride, created the above animation for your viewing pleasure.
Very big thanks to Hungry Workshop, Bone Digital and Pop & Pac for including us in this incredible line-up. The limited edition letterpress prints are available to purchase online now.
Budgeting for your brand —
This week we sat down with a potential client to help them create a brand budget for their new business. We helped them explore all potential costs attached to building and growing a brand, including our own fees and also external suppliers like photographers, website developers and printers.
This isn’t something we get asked to do that often, but we wish it happened more. It’s empowering to have an informed and realistic view of what your brand and marketing may cost throughout the year for a business of any age. Regardless of the budget you’re working with – there is no magic formula, sorry – having a clear idea of where your money will be spent and why will help you make better decisions for your business. It will also reduce unnecessary stress and avoid waste (both fantastic things in our book).
So, with that in mind, we’ve added a simple brand budgeting spreadsheet to our Little Black Book. Within, we’ve covered:
- A list of all potential expenses associated with launching or growing a brand
- Tips on how/where to get a genuine read on costing (because Google can be more confusing than helpful here)
For potential and existing clients at JAC&, we do our best to create an environment where people feel at ease talking expectations and budgets. While money isn’t always the most comfortable subject, addressing the elephant in the room leads to greater comfort and positive outcomes for everyone involved.
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If you want us to help you with your budget planning, book a 10 minute discovery call and we’ll arrange a time to catch up. To do it yourself, download our brand budgeting spreadsheet over in our LBB.
No harm in generosity —
The creative industry in Melbourne can often feel quite concentrated and connected. Particularly in Collingwood where on any given corner, at any time of the day, you will likely find a designer explaining their strategic approach or the nuances of typography.
Given how many of us there are in this one little pocket, it’s fair to say competition is high. Despite this, we’ve noticed (what we hope is) a positive shift. It feels like there is more and more generosity around us and much less fear and protectiveness.
Recently we attended an excellent workshop by Richie Meldrum where he laid out his entire process, start to finish, giving away what a lot of people hold tight to their chests. As a response, we’re now writing about him and spoke about him at the Home School launch too. Through being open and helping others improve, we’re sure Richie will attract the great new clients and projects he deserves.
Our approach to business has always been one of openness and sharing and in turn this is essentially our marketing strategy. We use ventures like 43 Derby Street to bring together a likeminded community, Home School to share our process and make branding more accessible and our LBB to pass on our learnings/resources and support our suppliers.
These things are not only helping us grow the business, they feel good! Most of us know in our personal lives that it’s good to be generous – we help friends move house, drop people at the airport, all of those nice things – the same goes for business, because businesses are made up of people too. Being generous does absolutely no harm; it’s good for your soul, helpful to others and has the positive side effect of being good for business too.
We’ve loved noticing this shift. It’s exciting to be part of an industry that’s supportive, collaborative and working as one big ecosystem. Regardless of industry or expertise, generosity is easy when you ask yourself one simple question – how can I help?