We’re of the opinion that a design team’s work should do most of the talking for potential clients. Sometimes it's the things we’ve done outside of work and the interesting collaborations we’ve completed that helps decide if they do want to work with us.
But every company has a back story and we think ours is worth telling.
BAG of BEES is a collaboration between two designers (and good friends) who first met on their way through University. Barrie Holden was working his way through a Visual Communications course, specialising in New Media Design, and David Woods was smudging paint onto canvas in the Fine Art department. Following that, we were both up to our necks in the design industry and we had both set up our own design agencies.
We began planning how we could best work together on fun side projects and our thoughts turned to designing Tshirts, creating the label BAG of BEES to have somewhere to put them. A year or so later and after lots of really exciting jobs, we realised that our commercial skills would also be a great match and we took the bold decision to leave everything behind to go set up BAG of BEES as a brand new design agency.
We think it would be refreshing if more companies were honest and open — telling visitors to their website more about where they want to be and how they’re planning to get there. That’s bound to be more interesting than just a big retrospective of old work!
We’re not planning to be the biggest company around and we really don’t think our clients will want to deal with a horde of suited-up design managers. We are the plucky creatives and what still excites us is the feeling of pride when a job is done, when a client is happy and when they see results from our work.
We will devote a fairly weighty portion of our time to our non-commercial Ideas. As we see it, creative industries exist because there’s always an opportunity to unlock totally original solutions, simply by approaching problems from an unexpected angle. It’s why we do what we do, it’s part of the reason that our work works and it’s why our day job is still as interesting now as the day we first started. This skill is too important to be left to chance, so within our office there will always be a culture of creative experimentation. Creative stagnation is not something to be blasé about.
We want to work for and with people, not faceless companies. We want to become an open resource for all our clients to ask strange questions and collaborate to develop something perfect. If we can’t do everything our clients need in-house, we will work on their behalf to find brilliant people who can and offer our advice and opinions for free.
So that’s our plan. If you think we sound like a team you’d like to work with please get in touch.