Anthony and Natalie, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
After a tour in New York City, we decided to move back to Austin for a change of pace. After leaving Evernote, I freelanced for a bit while Natalie worked at Fjord. Once she finished her time there, we decided to start a little mini-agency of our own. The goal was to have the flexibility to travel, work with friends and take on cool but limited projects. As time went on, we built a reputation for our culture and doing good work. The clients and projects grew, necessitating a bigger team, so we started carefully adding people we trusted. That was more than eight years ago. We now have a design team approaching 30.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It would be hard to say that owning a business is “smooth.” There are always challenges and new things to learn. Becoming parents during Funsize’s growth was, of course, an adjustment and growing our personal relationship while building a business certainly takes intentionality.
As any team grows, the company begins to shift a little and take on new attributes. Because of that, we’ve put a big emphasis on hiring well and have had to consistently focus on handling the complexity of team structure and titles as we continue to grow.
We’ve also expanded our services over time to meet the growing needs of enterprise clients. That means that we’ve had to broaden the skill sets we look for and develop in our team members. Internally, we’ve started new departments (such as Marketing, Business Development and Operations) that have each brought their own learning curves.
And finally, COVID-19 has presented challenges. From big accounts having to cancel due to budget limitations, to losing the culture of seeing one another in the studio every day, we have had to adapt the way we work with one another to stay productive and keep things fun.
We would say that there have certainly been challenges to solve. But the whole thing has been an incredible, rewarding learning experience. The people we’ve added to our team, the clients we’ve gotten to work with, the projects we’ve taken on, the people we’ve met, the trips our team has embarked upon and the events we’ve gotten to be a part of have all made it an awesome journey so far.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Funsize?
Funsize is an experience design agency that serves as a champion for inspiring in-house design and development teams. We help companies — both startup and enterprise — create new digital products, evolve existing services, conceptualize big ideas and prepare for the future. We have different generalists and specialists on our team, so the work can be wide-ranging. Although we have taken on marketing and branding work in the past, the bulk of our work comes in the form of large-scale enterprise service or product design, Visual Design projects, Design Language Systems work, initial market releases of start up businesses and services, research and strategy, and staff augmentation.
We feel that our emphasis on relationships makes us special. That includes the personal relationships we build with our clients as well as the relationships we have with one another. We take time out of the year to create experiences and memories with our team (during our Method Weeks) so that we grow together. We also look for opportunities to get involved in the community, whether that’s through investment in female, minority and local startups (Funsize Ventures) or pro-bono work for nonprofits (Funsize for Good).
Where do you see things going in the next 5-10 years?
The way design agencies work with clients should change, and is changing. Many organizations need a true design partner who can help them grow, develop their people, move complicated projects forward, sustain performance, and even help their clients build their internal team. It’s about relationships with a holistic service approach.
We stay in close communication with all our clients and have adapted the way we work to be as effective for them as possible, often acting as more of an in-house team extension than an outside vendor. Sometimes we’re asked to simply increase output on existing large-scale projects, and other times we’re there to provide leadership, fill in expertise gaps, or execute conceptual work.
We believe that companies doing design at scale, in-house, need an agency partner to help them on their journey. We feel that the agencies of the future are those that can work well in existing systems and cultures while bringing additional value to the table.
Contact Info:
- Website: funsize.co
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/funsizeco/?hl=en
- Twitter: @funsize
