Dare to design for life - Aporva Baxi

0:11Yeah, look, it's been a long journey, as I said, you know, from the school of hard knots to a certain way of working and to have self-reflection. I think maybe creatives have the opportunity to introspect and maybe not introspect too much, but certainly for us, we've very much thought about ourselves as individuals and about the company. It's the idea of design for life. So we're spending as much time designing the business as we are designing the work or the space for the team to feel excited. And certainly over the last decade, we spent a lot of time thinking about how to be better ourselves as leaders how to foster a healthier environment one that's empathetic to build a team blend that has people from you know with 55 people we have 18 nationalities

1:08welcome to the daring creativity podcast a show about daring to forever explore creativity that isn't about chasing shiny perfection it's about showing up with all your doubts and imperfections and making them count. It's about becoming more of who you already are. My name is Rajim Malinic. I'm a designer, author and eternally curious human being. I'm talking to a broad range of guests who share their stories of small actions that inspired lifetime discoveries, taking one step towards the thing that made them feel most alive. Let me begin this episode with a question. Are you ready to discover what happens when you dare to create.

1:55Today I'm speaking with Apuva Baxi. He's the co-founder and ECD of the global brand agency Dixon Baxi, where they focus on the power of creativity, fostering collaboration and challenging convention to develop brands. In our free-flowing conversation, Apuva explores the Dixon Baxi unconventional approach to client relationships, where they start with conversations rather than showing portfolios and their commitment to creating brands that compete with the future, not just each other. We also delve deeper into the concept of bravery and creativity, challenging the industry's tendency to talk about being brave rather than simply doing exceptional work.

2:34He also advocated for trusting instinct over following trends and the necessity of disrupting your own creative recipes to avoid complacency. it's my pleasure to introduce Apova Baxi.

2:54Apova, how are you doing? Yeah, great. Very nice to see you, Radim. And thanks for having me on this. I've got so many things in my mind when it comes to branding and the state of branding and the general state of the industry. And you are one of the people standing at the forefront of this and doing it in your own way, which I think we need to talk about because in my opinion, you and Simon and your company fits very much the topic of daring creativity, daring forever. So if anyone may have not heard of Dixon Baxi or Apoorva Baxi, who are you and what do you do? Well, thanks for that intro. Very kind of you.

3:30I think we're always on a journey. So I would say it's a continual learning journey. But in terms of me, I'm Apoorva Baxi. I'm co-founder with Simon Dixon of a global brand agency based here in London, working with large, influential, ambitious businesses all over the world. We're in our 24th year, so we've been doing this a long time. I was just saying to Simon the other day that this past February, I've known him for 30 years. So we've had a long relationship together, certainly very much rooted in respect for each other, but also pushing each other forward. And then in that time, we've been able to grow the business, not necessarily just in scale, but hopefully in influence in the things that we love doing.

4:10We've always had very strong principles from the beginning. I'm sure a lot of people may have heard this, but we did have a list of things that we would do and wouldn't do when we began. And although that list has evolved and changed, they were root principles. And I think we really like the idea of a principle-based business as opposed to one that just has a rule set so that it can adapt over time. And we've been working across many eras. So we've seen the industry change, culture change, music choice change, fashion change. And so it's amazing to be part of that journey. And it still is very excited to be where we are now.

4:48But even this morning, there's a slight, always a slight knot in anxiety of where we're going to go next and what we can do next. I think the idea of settling is the opposite of what we or the industry should be doing now. I mean I can literally take about everything that you've said so far and make a whole hour conversation about this because you said you met Simon 30 years ago you talk about different music choices you talk about different times how did you guys meet and how did you actually establish the list of choices like how do you establish your principles that you want to do this together amazing well we set the way back clock for February 1995 which is 30 years ago a long time ago I'd just graduated and I went to Middlesex University and I did a visual communication design course and I was an intern at a bunch of companies and actually we run an intern program here, an intern academy and everyone's very interested in how you find your way into studios and back then the way I did it was to create an introduction, a little kind of printed piece And I hand-delivered those to companies that I was very excited about, ones that I felt resonated with me.

6:03And that led me to a meeting at a company called Michael Peters, who was a really large company back then, probably 150, 200 people focused on annual reports and then that type of thing. And I did a couple of months there. It wasn't for me, to be honest, I've got to say. I realized that was one of the turning points where I realized that actually that type of approach, that type of design felt too constrained for me. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I needed to feel more expressive. But the reason I go back, there was a chap called Ben Tomlinson, and he was a designer there. And he took me under his wing and said, you should chat to this guy called Simon.

6:41I said, okay, that's interesting. And actually, a little side note, funnily enough. 30 years later, we have Ben's son in the studio this week doing an interview with us. So it's a small world and there's a really nice kind of rhythm to that. But going back to that thing, Simon, Ben introduced me to Simon. And so I met him in that early part of 1995. And it was in an interview. I was thinking about joining this one agency. and we ended up talking about everything from design to film to music and what was supposed to be 20 minutes and into two hours. And I think we hit it off then. And then I joined that company and it scaled very quickly and we got to work in New York, San Francisco, Sydney, London on a very large-scale project.

7:32So that was a really formative period. This is 1995 to 2000, so it was Britpop. It was rooted in the first PlayStation. it was the kind of the music culture you've got Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada and The Prodigy all of that is phenomenal so growing up in that time was certainly exciting so that was that formless period I had to google the best albums of 1995 and I literally got goosebumps because I'm just looking at the list and it's just like one of the best years on this planet when you look at it goldie timeless yeah you got max and key by tricky garbage garbage the great escape i mean oh my god yeah it was a soundtrack to life and i think music and design go hand in hand we have music playing in the studio all the time to bring some energy and that we tend to gravitate towards things that are a bit more fast-paced electronic and i think it's rooted in that time so when i design if i'm actually creating things i tend to listen to high tempo music and it was probably because of being rooted in that.

8:39And so it was a fascinating time. And so to answer your question, Si and I worked together for about a year in the London studio before he went to open for this company an office in New York. I stayed in London. That grew in an early age. I was a creative director, fairly young age, probably unskilled to do it, but about 27, doing all sorts of things. And then Simon went to San Francisco. I had an opportunity to go to Sydney, then New York and so on. So we'd never worked in the same studio in that time. But I guess what we had was a friendly competition. I always saw Simon as a phenomenal designer and he still is.

9:22His craft, his ability to make things, the level of invention is all fully baked. And we got to do a lot of that. And I would always see Simon as a colleague, someone I respect, but always someone to compete with in a sense, to pull me up. And we had that respect for each other. So then you fast forward to 2001 when we started Dixon Baxi. That respect was there. And because we'd seen each other and how we work and how we collaborate with our own teams at that time, we knew that there was something here. And Cy felt that if there was someone that he was going to work with, it was me and vice versa.

10:02And that was a sliding doors moment in that I could have stayed in New York. I had a pretty good time there. I had a pretty good gig. But there was this other opportunity of doing something new. And I didn't want to look back and regret that. So there formed Dick's and Baxi. And we spent the summer going back and forth figuring out what we would do. And we decided a couple of things. One, that we would be two. We'd go back to being two creatives with direct contact to the clients. So that was an A team. We decided to show no work and it was all conversation. So when we spoke to clients, it wasn't about portfolios, it was about ideas and principles and the way of working and how brands can exist in the world in a much deeper way and how we have to understand the audience, which seemed quite commonplace now.

10:53But again, back then you could talk about aesthetics or you could talk about strategy, But the overlap and the bridge of that was very interesting to us. And more than anything, it was about our creative voice, finding our story. And the reason for starting with a blank sheet of paper and some principles was to figure out what that was. And we've worked really well together. I think one of the things that probably makes us successful is that we respect each other, listen to each other. We have our own points of view. I would say we do things quite differently. but that's okay if there is room to adapt and I think that's probably the biggest thing to the company but for us as individuals is that we know that there's an opportunity for us to continue to grow and learn and that we're not perfect and although we grew up in the school of hard knocks and in a era and culture that is very unlike today in that it was you know work hard work 24 7 live work was just fused together and partly because we loved it but because that was how it was and I think that trained us to work a certain way and I think the thing that we tried to do and we've always tried to do is adapt to what's happening in the world and create a space for our teams to enjoy what we do in a different way that's appropriate to now but I'd say we we still sit side by side that's the other thing is that we still sit side by side and we talk every day and we've gone off and done our own things we made a feature film and side directed that i kind of focused on db but we always overlap and i think that's the strength we always talk about the space between dixon and baxi is the space that we want to create not dixon and baxi as individuals, which is hard to articulate when our name's on the door, but it's more of a concept and an idea that we're interested in.

12:54When you mentioned that work culture, that we were more embedded in our lives, when you think about it, the life itself was almost 24-7 because one thing was blending into one another. Therefore, maybe we're more happier to go with the fact that you work 24-7. That's right. One of the core things that we thought about was design for life. So for our lives personally. It's baked into who we are, but also designed for life as in the millions of people out in the world. And that design has an opportunity to do things that moves the world forward. You know, there's human progress in that. But I would agree.

13:28I think, you know, if I took you back to 95, 96, you know, we were lucky enough to work on the launch of the first PlayStation 1. That's the era of Wipeout. It's Ridge Racer, Tekken, and those types of things. But we would work. We'd go out and then I would come back after at the club and then go to the studio and then play Wipeout. Designed by actually the Designers Republic, which is a fantastic studio and still influential today. But that felt very natural. I would say, you know, with today's lens, work life or certainly the environment in which we work could have been more empathetic. But at the time, it just felt like that's what we do.

14:14And there was a joy to that. But as I say, you broke through walls, you broke through any imposter syndrome by making. So we were just constantly making things. And I think that is still a practice for life today, is I think through making, articulate my ideas through making. And I think, you know, whether that's a sketch, whether that's a coffee brand, whether that's creating things for yourself a way photography making film it's a way of expressing what's in here and bringing that to the world even if it's just for yourself and i think that's a brilliant practice when you mentioned the cure for imposter syndrome was the making i'm sure we can both agree that designers doing nothing or having nothing to do as a creative is important because you've got time to hear yourself however daydreaming hasn't got anyone anywhere because daydreaming just only lets the sort of negative thoughts seeps in and go like, I feel a little bit confused here because our purpose, our focus on doing things is what gets us moving.

15:15Making stuff is the best antidote to any kind of sort of problem and anxiety because you start with zero and you get to one at some time, but then you go from one to 100 and that sort of gives you something to do. Even I find it long into my career where you can either overthink, and I think the quiet moments are important. You need to get away from things to see things with new perspective or an objectivity or talk to others, but that's still doing something. And you can't be on all the time. So the subconscious mind is the valuable mechanism and engine to solve things. But equally, to push through something, as you say, is that small 60 seconds or two minutes.

15:57It's like any habit you want to form, do one minute or do two minutes and it becomes something else. And I think it's the blank sheet of paper syndrome or any of those types of things where you make the first mark and it's not going to be the perfect sentence or the perfect thing, but you're on the journey. And I found that liberating. And what we try and do is help our team feel like that. So oftentimes times we talk about creativity and the journey of making as a feeling and so we have exercises ways of working and operating system that we now call super futures as a means to bake the idea of feeling liberated and enjoying the pure sense of making and the feeling of that without an end result.

16:46There's something to get you going. And what happens, it opens up the mind. It creates something new. It allows you to see things differently. And so we really enjoy that. And we try and engender that in the team. And it's so exciting seeing it. I get really enthused by that. And it fosters an energy in the studio that feels palpable. And we make it very visible. So our studio walls have work on, which seems an obvious thing. But I was just talking to some folks at the, at D &AD had a panel and we're just comparing notes with other ECDs and business owners and so on. And they were like, oh yeah, you know, everything's in Figma at the moment or on a digital board and putting things on the wall has sometimes been forgotten.

17:32And there's a lot of power to that and that's how we sometimes find unrelated stories the way you and simon talk about your work and your principles your philosophies is 100 one of the key ingredients how you see creativity how we see the process because you said it a short while ago that at the beginning you were not sure in any work you were talking about it was a conversation you were talking about principles and you said now it's more of a commonplace i think it was a learning journey We had, as I said, these principles and the idea of language was essential to how we worked. And a team laugh when I talk about this, but our first project was, because I say it so often, but our first project was for MTV2.

18:18So we landed something pretty cool. And when we worked on that, when we came into the presentation, the original one, we actually took a painting rather than a presentation. and the painting we laid we took into the MTV studios you know we had made this triptych in Simon's bedroom actually back in the day because our studio was too small but it was just a desk at that point but the painting captured a feeling and of what it was like to be a 16 year old in the bedroom listening to rock music that was the root of the channel MTV too and it was an ethnography. It was us kind of getting inside and understanding what it's like to see the world through the lens of that audience, as opposed to at that point, I think it was 20, we were 29, 30, being a 30 year old designer, designing for that.

19:09And of course, you know, we wanted to bring some style and flair to it, but it led us to somewhere new. And ultimately, that the actual brand was all language it was statements that we found of of the fans from blogs and twitter didn't exist there at phones didn't exist in the way that they do those blogs and forums and we took hundreds of statements and credited to the handles you know things like mtv makes me want to smoke blu-tack stuff we couldn't come up with right just random stuff but it felt so right there was an irreverence and a maverick spirit and the reason i referenced that is that it seemed to it seemed like us figuring out who we were and we enjoyed the fact that language and expressing the value of the audience and playing it back in a new way and doing things that felt like they have swagger and attitude and didn't round the edges and i think that still stands true today.

20:09You know, we're lucky enough to work on brands of all sizes, you know, whether it's a global giant in international markets and so on, or, you know, we're currently working with an AI health business that's helping clinicians transcribe patient notes or early prevention of cancer. Very different. But what we're also trying to find is why they're relevant and valuable to the audience and how they can exist in the world in a distinct way, which again seems obvious for a brand, but everything can get rounded, you know, partly because we see everything, right? We see what everyone else is doing. And if that's successful, there's a feeling that should be emulated.

20:50And you get to this sort of sea of sameness that, you know, that term's been around for some time. And so what we're really interested in is trying to find the unique and the original. And that often is a recombination of things that exist in the world. But it's how you edit those reference points to create a new reference point, a new benchmark that can push the industry forward or create a new conversation. And that's why I cite that project. But that's what we continually try and do, either successfully or not. But that's the ambition. We'll be back after a quick break. This episode is brought to you by Lux Coffee Co.

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22:17Before we start the recording, I told you that my concept of daring creativity is not the things that you're scared to do or things you don't want to do is the things you don't want to regret not doing when you talk about a triptych of paintings that is to me like perfect example of daring to express or dare to try or dare to challenge or dare to think what could surprise people because you mentioned the word feeling and liberation like especially with your super features program and the way you do things and i just love that story i mean it's mtv2 is one of your first project you don't have almost any doubts of the fact that you did the right thing because you challenged to do something it comes down to how quickly things germinate in the world there's sometimes the opportunity for something to grow and take its time to grow and maybe because we see everything so immediately it's a trend and then it's gone whereas maybe there was time for things to grow and that's you know studios they have time to figure themselves out they're not on display all the time and they figure a voice out the same with music maybe you know i still think so there are subcultures and micro niches and so on but everything gets hyped to an extreme and it can lose its value and go mainstream much quicker, certainly with the social platforms that we have that make things very instant.

23:49So there's much more spikes. And there just generally is more of everything. It's like more, and it can prove a distraction, you know, and distraction then kind of can throw you off your game and throw you into losing while you're doing what you're doing. we find that you know if you listen to the noise it can start to dilute who you are and it's very important to kind of trust your gut and be centered and so we spend think about how we can delete the noise and focus on who we are and what we do but i think the same happens in every industry fashion music there is a very big mainstream and things can be mechanized or process-driven where it creates a hit, supposedly.

24:41Stars rise and fall, but it's really interesting going to the edges. And you could argue things like Spotify and so on have been not great for the industry, certainly in terms of remunerating artists and so on. However, we oftentimes discover new things because of the rabbit holes that we go down to find music and artists. And, you know, I personally, I know friends that then go to their concerts, buy their records and go that way. So I think it's a bit of both. And we should probably enjoy the optimistic nature of having, you know, all music. But then I think it's up to us to be daring or explore so that we don't fall down a rabbit hole that is the mess.

25:30It's a Spotify problem. you can see it from spotify and generally like platform problem we see it as a problem and obviously it's never run by a co-op things like spotify are very much a capitalist project right but when we talk about making money out of streaming when you go back on the stories of in excess guns and roses those bands were broke like they got rinsed by the same people who are renting them through Spotify. The music module wasn't exactly always working. We just now we've got more clarity about how little it's working in a clear view. You could argue that off any platform. And I think there is an equity that can be baked in and maybe there's a better model of that.

26:14I know that Ben Affleck and Matt Damon have tried to do that with their production company called Artist Equity, which is about giving a better and more equal share to everyone that participates. Now, I don't know the ins and outs of that, so don't hold me to how effective that is, but I like the idea. And I think you're right. These platforms can, in some senses, be good in the reasons that you state. You can choose, as you say, to participate and reach out. And I know I've certainly found artists that I would never have come across and that interrelation. And we've reached out to some, as you say, to collaborate with, but also, you know, to go to their concerts or recommend.

26:56And I think that must help the industry. But the thing is, there's just so much of it. So I think, like anything, the same with recycling your plastics and so on. You have to participate in that. You have to take responsibility. And it really depends how you value that. So I think all those are important. There's maybe a love-hate with that. On the one hand, it's all these things, whether that's getting the food delivered to a platform, Netflix or Spotify, those things are conveniences of life. They are baked into the world at the moment. And it would be amazing if they thought of a different way of doing that.

27:34And I think there is. But equally, they provide not only convenience, but they actually, the music and access to music and the democratization of that does benefit life, you know. And I think there's still a lot of conversation around that. As you said, we vote with our action. You know what you buy in the winter, if you buy strawberries in winter, voting for strawberries in winter. If you get that takeaway, you know, once a week, you vote in for plastic containers. You like the cascading effect in all of this. We make choices and then we look back going, oh, you hear people saying this industry is broken.

28:08And I'm like, nothing's perfect. We can agree that we don't have a prime example of going, look at that industry. It's hunky-dory. We should copy that. It feels like there is this need, certainly for certain businesses, to scale. And it's all about scale. And then scale equals new users or ultimately profit, if they can get to that. And that can lose sight of why they're doing it. So I think, you know, those craft-based businesses or businesses that say, actually, you know, We're going to limit scale because it dilutes the quality of what we do. I think they're really powerful and they hold on to their truth and their value.

28:47And I think with things like AI and so on, maybe that scaling is going to become easier. But I think there is a tension and a push and pull. And when you think about music, have their fan base. And that fan base tends to be very deep and very rich. And the same for the work that we do. We have an idiosyncrasy that is us. We do have to say truth to that. Otherwise, we'll lose our way as well. And in our 24 years, we found that. We've had moments, again, where when you look back at the archives, everything is smoothed out. It's like you went from this to this. It's very neat and tidy when you do a chronology.

29:23But in the moment, you know, their challenges, their missteps, things don't work. You realize that you said yes to things that you should have said no to. You said no to things you should have said yes to. And it's not that we don't have regrets. It's just that it's a journey and there are missteps and challenges. And there have been moments in our time when we have had to say, well, actually, you know, we're going to say no to these things. We're going to let these clients go, maybe give them to other agencies so they're not left in the lurch, but we're going somewhere else. This isn't where we think we should be, or the quality of work isn't where it should be, or the relationships don't feel quite right.

30:03And that's quite hard to do. But it's really important to do, to be objective and step out and say, well, hang on a minute, you know, why are we doing this? And go back to the original source, so to speak, and find that way forward. you said which i understand from my point of view like the anatomy of opportunity because we all go from what is the yes what's the no does the no turn into a yes or yes into a no ultimately you have to be daring and you also have to be a bit brave about what you want to do and how you want to move on that journey with your craft people because it's one of your first essentials is you guys saying brave brands change the world whereas i can't scroll on linkedin for more than 20 seconds without saying hey i've built brave brands this brave this brave that and i'm like okay it's definitely caught on so how do you define brave because i feel like you know you talked about the disgemination of the idea obviously it's propagated it's multiplying it's out there so there's a lot of brave on paper or brave in pixels how do you define brave how do you do that with brave brands?

31:11How does a brave brand exist? And are brands really brave? Yeah, it's a really good question. I think we've always felt that. We actually created a couple of books maybe eight years ago now called Be Brave. And we were reluctant to kind of put a term to something. We felt we were always that. We've had that within us that we're always pushing businesses and brands to transform and be really distinct and not iterate. It's very hard to iterate to invention, you know, and we talk about taking brands and businesses to uncomfortable and the process gets us to that Goldilocks moment of just right. You know, if you started safe, the process gets you to boring and no one wants to be boring.

31:52We don't want to create boring things in the world. And the idea of being brave stuck and it's something that we used, you know, for the last six or so years. But you're right, as with anything, transformation, optimism, bravery, all those terms become commonplace and they lose their meaning. They start to just become things that you say. Transformation at speed, all of these things had an origination. And at that point, they felt original, maybe, and true and unique. But as with anything, as with a style, someone comes out with something and suddenly it proliferates. it starts to dilute and lose its meaning so for us you know actually we just refreshed our site a couple of weeks back and we've taken that term off we don't use it not because we see it everywhere but just because the idea of it is very different and we think it's it's part feeling it's part the fact that it's about creating something that feels distinct and original for that brand but it's really setting that brand up for the future so what they're competing with there's not each other, they're competing with the future and the future is changing so rapidly.