Learn how to begin your personal enterprise
There are a million things to consider when it comes to starting your own creative business, but the joy of being your own boss easily outweighs the disadvantages for many business owners. If you're considering starting a business alone or with a business partner, we've rounded up some of the key pieces of advice that people with first-hand experience should consider.
Ollie Olanipekun co-founded Superimpose in 2014 when he was 20 years old and quickly cemented the studio's position as a novel agency model with his first project: a global campaign for the launch of adidas Stan Smith coach. Six years after starting Superimpose, he closed the studio and founded the spin-off company Futurimpose, which describes itself as the “new world creative and strategy cohort”.
Co-founded by Creative Director Imogen Snell and Design and Art Director Riccardo Castano, ISSTUDIO is a creative leadership and design practice active in the fields of music, art and fashion with a client list that ranges from HAIM and The XX to Madonna and Ellie Goulding is enough.
Here, Olanipekun, Snell, and Castano offer advice on how to take the plunge at the right time, reject the status quo of the industry, and put people at the heart of your business.
ISSTUDIO represents artists from all over the music world, including HAIM
Give yourself a good reason to start
While not all business ideas emerged from a niche in the market, if you want to get involved in the process of starting your own business you must be able to validate the existence of your own business. In Olanipekun's case, the establishment of Superimpose was a direct result of his frustrations with the advertising industry and his desire to change it for the better. “Myself and my ex-partner had probably spent ten years doing this, and the creatives and clients were so far apart that the audience insight wasn't strong enough and the strategy wasn't executing the way we'd done hoped to see it, ”he says.
“These were frustrations we had hoped superimpose would be the answer. With our incredible network of creatives, we have set this manifesto for ourselves, in which we reinvent the team according to the task, so that a new team is created with each task. Customers are smart enough to realize that if they can reduce the team in terms of the number of employees, their bottom line will look a bit better. So we wanted to run big brand campaigns with a lean core team. ”
For Snell and Castano, ISSTUDIO was the obvious way to combine their individual talents as creative director and design or art director. “We got to know each other as a couple, both worked very intensively as individuals, and then realized that our work flows were similar. Riccardo worked in advertising and I worked in music, doing the same, but as a self-employed person. We found that our skills were complementary – we shared a vision and there was an opportunity to work together and turn it into a studio, ”says Snell.
“For me I was always in this place where I could work with a few artists, but to work with more artists and to be able to go further, you obviously need a team and a studio and you have to outsource certain things. I have a great passion for translating artist messages into visuals and helping people express their album. The motivation behind this is still to achieve more today, and a studio makes that possible. "