Jono Holt - Founder of Otherway

0:08Claire:Welcome to My Life in Design, brought to you by the DBA and design-focused PR agency, Red Setter. I'm Claire Blythe, co-founder of Red Setter. In this series, I'll be speaking to more people who are shaping the world of design, finding out how they discovered that design was a thing you could base a career around, and how they got to where they are today. This week, I'm here with Jono Holt, founder of the communications and design studio, Otherway. With 70 people in offices in London and New York, Otherway has created brands for the likes of Lucky Saint, Butternut Box, Fortnum & Mason, Smythson, Hilo, Strongbow, Delivery Hop, Brixton Brewery and StockX.

0:50Claire:Jono, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Oh, thanks for coming on. When did you sort of realise that design was a thing you could sort of build a career around? Was it when you were a child or was it a bit older? I think, say, I came to design pretty late. I did 10 years in advertising before realising that, in my opinion, the sort of design comes before that. So I almost got it in the wrong order. I really like that. It does come before it, doesn't it? That sort of brand essence and the advertising should come off the back of it rather than being around, really. Yeah, I was always amazed.

1:26Working in an advertising agency called Karl Moran, which I loved, But I was always amazed the amount of briefs that had already gone to a design studio or just weren't being done together. Or, you know, you'd speak to clients and say, oh, we've got this amazing new packaging. But you won't see that for another six weeks. But let's get on with the comms. So I think I learned in my career quite early on that actually there was a sort of a phase before this. And I sort of trained in sort of, I'm actually not a designer. I'm a planner by trade.

1:57Claire:Yeah, okay. So you started out in strategy. So I started out in strategy. And so then I, yeah, so I realized there was kind of a whole stage of kind of brand positioning and brand design and packaging design. Yeah. That at a common or an ad agency or more traditional ad agency, we just weren't getting a look in. And so, so yeah, I think having done, you know, seven or eight years in that world and then sort of, I realized, okay, well, let's, I started thinking, you know, I want to get involved in the design bit. I want to be a bit earlier. Yeah. So that from a career perspective, that's what I learned about design.

2:30And then from an early age, I think, you know, I was one of those kids like drawing skate brand logos and designing football kits.

2:39Claire:Yeah, OK. I was always sort of had a passion for design. But I guess at that stage, I have no idea about how to make a job of it. Did you realize there was an industry there you could get into? I certainly didn't at this point. Did you know there was something you could build careers around when you were at school? Not really. I remember at A-level I did art, geography and business studies. Did you? I still wake up now freaking out that I'm not doing any geography. Oh my God, I am exactly the same. It's ridiculous. So yeah, I have this after I wake up, I haven't done geography for ages. So I definitely, I think going into my A-levels, I had sort of art, which I really loved and really enjoyed.

3:21And it was really conceptual. and then there was kind of like business studies which I really enjoyed just kind of understanding kind of the case studies behind how businesses worked so I guess yeah I guess when I was 17 or 18 I knew that I had these sort of two things that I was interested in fell to the start although

3:42Claire:you know continues to haunt me I think I have the same thought about all of my levels yeah so then so then really at that stage i started to think about where could i go and where those sort of two worlds could come together i remember at the time yeah and so sort of heading into that way or sort of looking for those it was it was actually coming back to those skate brands really and i remember i applied for an internship at burton snowboards in america real long shot got nowhere near it but i remember that was sort of the first thing i thought well actually these of the types of places that I'd go so yeah they were you know brands and businesses that were sort of like merging those two worlds together you could actually work there and so yeah that's true I don't let's say again I don't think it entered my head that those sort of brands you could actually get a job in and form a career in but so what did you do at university what was your so yeah funnily enough so I had that sort of art one side business studies the sort of the other side and then I flirted for a long time going and doing art and then my dad is an airline pilot and my mum is a doctor so it doesn't get much more professional than that yes definitely awkward conversation with my dad sort of saying yeah I'm really supportive of your art side but maybe you should just go and do the business studies thing and you'll always like keep your creative interest so in truth he wasn't wrong I think that's that's kind of how it's played out do you think it's helped since like studying business at university has like helped you set up a business yeah i think so i mean it must have just yeah i think there was a i went to bath university and it was one of the reasons why i chose that course was it had two internships into work so i think i was at that stage i sort of wanted to get in and start to like you know understand what business was like so it was a four-year course and then we had two sits on placements and then the first placement i didn't really pay much attention to so i got sort of like bottom of the barrel and then second one i can't i barely have him saying that i went into a sales role for a very well-known yogurt and drizz brand

5:54but then actually and then all my mates sort of went into like the city and started working for the big banks and things like that yeah so i remember when the second placement came around it's like i've really got to get my shit together and go something that's going to be genuinely useful and that's when i started to kind of think okay i'm going to go and try and get into an

6:14Claire:advertising agency and see what that's like yeah okay so which one which one did you go to what was your first well funny enough i actually turned up so there's i think a former dna president simon waterfall who ran an incredible company called poke yeah and then i think the that sort of like deep end as well which was like yeah very sort of mad brilliant design company and he his dad flew planes with my dad you know they were like pilots together it's such a bizarre yeah kind of link and so then when i was thinking about okay i really want to like go work in you know where kind of art meets business and yeah i remember being sent out to see simon and simon greeted me uh pope was in in the mother building and which obviously is an incredible building to walk into yeah this is like people come to work here um they had like everyone was having lunch to the left i was wearing a suit and a tie that's really sweet simon came down the stairs wearing a dress i think no joke did you fantastic so low through your mind and then he yeah he very kindly sort of like walk walk me around what the mother building and just sort of showed me what everyone sort of did which completely blew my mind and so once I'd sort of walked out of there I was like god this is if I can ever get a job in somewhere like this and it's amazing and then I sort of said oh can I come back and they were like well you can come back and be a runner and I remember my university course was like we're not gonna let you be a runner so so then Simon said well look get in contact with a place called Kamarama they're a nice bunch see if they've got a camp exec role for you and so I reached out to Kamarama and uh and met Ben Bilbo there who's a great friend still and yeah and he gave me my first job that's brilliant so is that the first job after university so you could properly get into it so that was yeah so that was our that was a second placement so then I so I did six months and I had to go back to uni for a year to finish off my degree right and I sort of um then I there's sort of a moment where I was like I'll just I'll sort of stay here and carry on because I really enjoyed it yeah um so I ended up going I ended up actually working for the summer a very strange story in the sense that we were shooting an ad for pipex broadband with david hasselhoff and part of david hasselhoff's contract was he needed a pa for the time that he was in london and so they thought it'd be funny if they um they gave him me so not by the last sort of two weeks of my contract with karmarama i was david hasselhoff's pa That's a good claim to fame.

8:46He hasn't shot five things before.

8:48Claire:What's he like? Yeah, he was hilarious, bizarre, funny, like everything in one go. I can imagine. We got kicked out of Wimbledon, actually, which was Arkansas, or his claim to fame. What were you doing? It's another podcast. Yeah, okay. So I went back to uni, finished my degree, and then pretty much called up Kamarama and said, I've graduated, can I come back? and they just won the Nintendo account. Ah, fantastic. And they went, look, we just won the Nintendo, do you want to come back? And so I was like, so yeah. Brilliant. And you were there for, you were there for quite a long time. Yeah, so I was there for about, pretty much for 10 years.

9:26Claire:Yeah. So you could go in as a junior strategist. So I went as an account exec. Right. Again, I turned up, I don't, I think I'd taken the tie off, but I turned up. For anyone listening who's going in for a job interview, a designer, a consumer, a conference agency, you don't need to wear a tie or a suit that is genuinely good advice because i used to think you just had to wear a suit if it was a job because that's what adults did yeah well i also on the first day of carmara i i went to make tea for everyone and they had one of those taps they're sort of the ones that you sort of pull and they and they come out really quickly like big lever tap yeah and obviously not knowing this i remember i'd sort of the kettle then just like exploded with water and i sort of wasted it like i'd wrecked myself and so as i walked out and i walked past he's now a good bait of mine called aaron but i remember him just walking past going you don't want to do that on your first day brilliant thanks yeah so i know so tell you so 10 very happy happy years at karmarama it was an incredible time they went through amazing growths on nintendo nicola mcgillson came in as chairwoman who is now yeah i think you know really high up in meta and in in the uk she was on a world a real inspiration in terms of her ability to kind of like win business and you know like just create some hype and noise around around the business and yeah and then yeah and then three sort of bosses in sort of sid ben and dave who were all in sort of different ways and were very sort of cool to work for and obviously sort of learned a lot so yeah so yeah i I got to the towards the end I started to see brands that were sort of emerging out of America and sort of going from sort of nothing to everything very quickly so Casper mattresses do you remember that yeah absolutely so they were the first ones that did the like mattresses in a box yeah and then sort of like Wolby Parker was the sort of the glasses business and there was this new sort of generation of brands coming and businesses coming and I remember sort of thinking these are they're really interesting they're growing like really fast and and at the time i'd sort of seen it i was like none of them are using ad agencies or none of them were using all of them were being born out of design agencies yeah and that's all birds and stuff like that always makes me think yeah all birds was another one yeah so out of red antler so and then before that what is now mythology but i always looked at kind of partners in spade as a It's a huge sort of reference point.

11:56And so, yeah, so I guess having had sort of, you know, that period of time in advertising, then I'd started to kind of learn that, okay, well, actually some of them, like the next generation of companies are being born from design agencies. And that was really the kind of the beginnings of either way.

12:13Claire:So is that when you started thinking, I could do it differently and I could do something myself? Yeah, well, I remember going out to New York and I went to meet the good folk at Red Handler and said, oh, I could start your UK shop. And I'd be like, no, we're okay. Fair enough. I remember sort of coming back with my sort of tailbone to my legs thinking, okay, well, maybe I could be inspired by what those guys do. And we very much were. Like in the early days of Otherway, we were really interested in doing that sort of fee-plus-equity sort of model. So is that how you started out with Otherway? Yeah.

12:45Claire:Yeah, interesting. Yeah. It was very, I think Otherways for us has been in a relatively reluctant agency in the sense that the business model at the beginning was like, oh, we'll give, again, being a sort of a planner, I was sort of, we'll help entrepreneurs and founders sort of create, think about, create and start their businesses. And I started that on my own and then quite quickly realized I'd get to the end of this deck and they'd be like, so what do we do now? And I was like, well, now you need a name and now you need a logo and now you need a website so quite quickly i worked out that i was never gonna be able to do this on my own and i needed some people around me to come yeah help and and that yeah that was the beginning and and we got off to like an amazing start we helped create and launch cycle the spinning studio yeah absolutely that's some brilliant brand so that was a that was a great start and and with the kind of the investors at the time they really sort of allowed us to you know in In fact, we ended up designing the first studio.

13:43Wow. We did sort of the marketing strategy. So that was very much like, that was the first time that it had been like, it was first client and we'd almost been given the keys to everything. Yeah. Which felt very exciting. And we were choosing what shampoos went in the bathrooms.

13:58Claire:Brilliant. That sort of lovely. So it was really lovely. And then pretty much the second one was Moju, the two-shot brand. yeah okay and so and then the third one was a watch company called farah which we're still involved with today and so yeah i remember that first three things that we did had all gone you know really well yeah you know we did have a stage at one where this is fucking easy um and then we got a big reality check um for the next like nine years but um but now it was yeah so very much like we like cut our teeth and and actually that was where the passion was in that sort of in creating something from scratch yeah that's what we loved and and actually quite quickly after that i remember the sort of the team at fortnum's we went in and met them and and we didn't really have any credentials that would we thought were particularly relevant yeah fair enough we were like here's another brand or here's a startup we just launched and i remember the sort of zia at the time who became our client for many years that she was she just said yeah know we're really interested in your like the way that you approach this from kind of an entrepreneurial perspective and the way that you work with startups and yeah you know we are you know that's what we want here you know like we're a 300 year old business but we want to innovate and we want to do things differently i take it you can't quite take equity and um no

15:20definitely but no and actually that gave us a lot of confidence because suddenly we was we were we were like oh we can sort of be interested in what we do and and these bigger companies will sort of will you know want some of that start to notice you whereas yeah we always thought that we weren't quite right for that you know we're just like a startup agency and that's what we're good at whereas yeah fortnum's really sort of like helped us and still do you know we're 13 years into a client relationship which we're incredibly proud of yeah to have you know especially in these times to have to build such like a long-term relationship but but they've that that business in particular has really helped us sort of become who we are and yeah what's great about that is we get to kind of help out on packaging through to christmas through to yeah sustainability strategies through to windows so like it's really varied it's really varied which

16:12Claire:is good so do you the majority of your clients now is it basically you do it for a certain amount of investment in their company so you'll take shares in their company and charge them less is that like young people that are sort of listening if they don't quite get the investment model yeah yeah i'll try and i barely understand it myself i'll try to get you from him so so what we started out doing was obviously with startup businesses typically you work with founders and entrepreneurs people with ideas to do something you know different and they were coming to us and a lot of the time they can't afford the full thousand whistles of an agency so so what we were saying to them and a lot of agencies do this nowadays which is like look we we all bring our fees down so you can afford to work with us but in return we want a bit of ownership of your company yes yeah so that's how it started so essentially we were sort of doing a sort of yeah a reduction for equity which is great and we've done a lot over the years we then got to i'd say that's like chapter one for us and then we got to chapter two where we were starting to think about okay well if we like an idea so much like we're happy to put some money in interesting and so investing yeah and so then we so and that that becomes really interesting because suddenly usually the agency is kind of right you know the there's a client and then there's an agency and the client tells the agents and actually what we loved about investing in brands was it was like suddenly there was an agency that was like really backing themselves and yeah i remember we we had we had a few moments when we were like pitching on work and we sort of went in and we said you know we'd absolutely we love what you're doing like we love it so much we'd like to invest and so that completely changed the dynamic relationship and suddenly any supplier dynamic that would have been there suddenly your business partners and you've got so suddenly you're like yeah so suddenly of your partners and some of your investors and yeah there's no sort of question you know like what's beautiful about the that model is everything you're doing and you're bringing to the table is just for the benefit of the business yeah and that's something that you know we've always wanted to you know to make sure that we do from other ways perspective so we like every idea we're coming to is like we think this is going to work and here's why and by the way if you don't believe of us like we're investors yes um so that was nice and it created like a really lovely way of working as well because it for us it didn't matter if we invested in one brand or all of them or not yeah we didn't change the way we worked with so it did really sort of define who we were so we did a bit of that we invested some money into lucky sink just which has been a good one yeah tell me about that how did that come about and it was such an amazing brand so it's yeah so that's almost like chapter two where we and to be honest with you we only did this with sort of two or three brands but we got to the stage where we liked it so much that we'd like oh we'd like to put some money yeah luke the founder is a friend of a friend funnily enough he came in on a friday we don't tend to go for beers on a friday lunchtime but this particular friday we decided with myself and stew would go for a pint yeah and um and luke came in he met us on friday afternoon and he He brought what at the time was called Not Another Beer Company and a bottle.

19:28And he said, oh, you know, can you try it? Let me know what you think. And so we ended up sort of opening it and it was, you know, amazing liquid. It is.

19:37Claire:It's good. We have it in our office. I think it's really nice stuff. And we really liked it and we really liked Luke. And then I think probably because we might have had like one or two pints that he said, come on, give us the honest truth. And usually we're very sort of like, oh, no, this is what you could do. this is what you could do and nudge it here or do that take that over there and i think we just said look we just think the brand's a bit shit and i think luke was like yeah i'm not sure it's kind of ready to go and then he called that was friday so then he called us on a monday and was like would you be open to having a go and yeah we were like yeah absolutely and so so you created the name lucky saint yeah it's quite funny i mean we got i mean i think we got to the name saint pretty much in the first meeting we had with luke yeah it took us about three months he tells his story a lot better than i do she gets asked it more but i think it was like it took us three months but lucky on the front in front yeah we couldn't get the trademark but no we very quickly we had this idea around sort of saintly and yeah and being able to sort of feel good about yourself you know whilst having a beer that's it there aren't that many brands that immediately come to mind when i can think of the brand and then i can also think of the advertising and the yeah stuff that i've walked past on the tube and all that kind of stuff that kind of relates to all the comms around yeah i think there's a real and you know credit to the lucky saint career as well that you know they've really kept the consistency which i think a lot of young brands especially the ones that are growing really fast sort of forget to do and we've always you know we've always said to luke you know if you want to be iconic yeah i think brands that you take a choice early on like i think iconic is built through frequency and definitely so it's like don't change it if you treat it like it's special then gradually other people will and then yeah it will build into something else and so so i think that sort of lack of sort of you know and it's not without you know desire like everyone wants to sort of like oh what next what next let's change it yeah i mean agencies like our business model is built on change me yeah yeah so yeah keeping that consistency i think has been brilliant and yeah i think coming back to that what other way was sort of built for is that where design and comms sort of come together i think yeah when i sort of moved from advertising and run you know started other way i didn't i didn't want to kind of never go back there yeah i just felt that it was in the raw order and so start in a different place yeah start with the design and the brand and yeah and so that sort of extension that lucky saint has managed to kind of beautifully kind of capture and it's had lots of other people help along the way so it's not just us but i think it yeah that that brand world with the tone of voice that the business has managed to create with their pub which is yeah beautifully yeah absolutely i think that's yeah it's like it's definitely one of the strongest pieces of work we've ever done definitely can i ask about like how you launched in the states yeah because you've got a split now between what the 70 people yeah over london and new york Yeah, well, it's funny.

22:33I mean, we've got a handful of people in the US and I think it's about to do sort of 20 or 25 % of our revenue this year. Wow, brilliant. It sort of shows, obviously, the kind of the scale. But also, I think for us, the excitement of trying to really kind of keep pushing in a new market. Definitely. How do we do it? It's interesting, actually, when a lot of those early stage brands in the US, there's a few of them that just started looking elsewhere. where the cost of creativity and design in the US is just bigger than it is in London and Europe. And we'd met a few founders, one of which is a company called Cabinet Health, which is an incredible, sustainable, over-the-counter medicine business in America.

23:16It's definitely worth checking out. And they had just raised some money. What are they called again? Called Cabinet Health. Cabinet Health. So they had raised some money and they were like, we want to work with someone who's looking in at our market. yeah which we thought was super interesting so we were like great and so we won that piece of work which is our first body of work in the u.s and we did a you know pretty good job of it again as well we named it we designed the packaging we launched the site did all this strategy for it and it was yeah it was it went really well and i think once you've got that sort of body of work it's suddenly people start to see it and it's like oh you're the guys that did cabinet we'd love you to come and talk to us about yeah so we so since that moment we'd had like project by project work come from the u.s and and it was kind of coming thicker and faster but the reality is it's like there were so many projects that we'd lost because you know some would say oh so you know you're going to do the majority of the work out of the u.s or some of the work out of the u.s and and so after that 10 of them we're like we have to if we if we want to continue to do this you just need we have to have people in the us and so definitely um and so yeah so that's been pretty much like the last three years of other ways so we've built teams out of firstly we started kind of west coast then we've gone to dunbo in new york is that where you're based in yeah yeah was it j street i saw you're based in that yeah yes yeah yeah absolutely yeah and many other agencies yes yeah a lot of times so now it's a lovely a lovely spot and it is nice yeah we've got Javi who used to run Mullen Lowe out of LA and he's come to become our US president out there fantastic he's sort of building the team as we speak which is super exciting and and yeah we've managed to we've won Rocket Mortgage which we've been with the brilliant Jonathan Mildenhall on for sort of two years as they go on this epic transformation journey that's brilliant um so So being able to sort of have Rocket, a company like that, as a bit of foundational client, means we've managed to kind of build a team out.

25:24Claire:And it's exciting. Lots of bigger conversations now. We're there, which is good. So we're sort of gradually moving away from that sort of project by project stage and starting to get our teeth into a few things that are a bit bigger. Yeah, okay, that's interesting. So do you think that's where the majority of growth is going to come from? Or is it a bit of London as well? We're always optimistic. so we'll always yeah i mean we've i think for our company or studio sort of our size i think we've always done well especially because we've got that sort of comms piece to our we have that yeah we talk about kind of walking the line between design and comms and i think there's a lot of bigger brands sort of looking you know where their budgets have come down and they're looking for more interesting ways to kind of use their money definitely i think we've benefited from that where some of the i guess larger more traditional ad agencies have sort of lost we've managed to kind of pick up a lot of those um types of kind of accounts so yeah so and that's made that sort of driven our uk business as has the fact that we've always said you know we want to be kind of big enough to be trusted and small enough to be interesting and i think yeah we've always as much as we've grown we we you know we if we really love an idea or we love an entrepreneur or a founder or a team that we've met we'll always we'll always do it yeah and that's because we want to and that's like that's always been the kind of the entrepreneurial spirit of our studio so it means yeah we will take on the smaller stuff but actually that's what you know we all have huge passion for it yeah so so yeah so now we think we think we can continue to grow the uk but yeah us if we get the us right we want to sort of double that studio year on year if we can Brilliant.

27:08Claire:That's really exciting. Can I ask you a final question about what would be your tips for young people going into the industry today? How can they stand out? I think the big one for me is to really just sort of study it. I think if you're passionate about the industry, then just go on all the blogs, listen to the podcasts, just and read up, understand, you know, what studio is making what work, find the new brands that you love, find the rebrands you hate. You know, you've got the time to sort of do the work. i think if you're passionate about it then that should come relatively easy because you should be kind of researching like what type of work do you want to be making what type of brands do you want to work on yeah what are the studios that you think are interesting when i was i remember i were following kamarama when i went back to uni i stole all of their campaign magazines which i just like took them out you know it's pretty sad but i think it's important you know and so it's yeah and we when we meet with young designers or people who want to be a designer like when they can come in and they've got real knowledge because they've just like research just gone deep on the whole thing and i think what you realize is a lot of people in the industry you know don't have the time anymore to kind of fall in love with everything and so i think if you can be the sort of the young passionate designer intern grad whatever who's just up speed with all the news all the i i think yeah i think it's a it's a huge value to any studio to have someone who's just like really on point and what's going on i think that's the thing isn't it definitely kind of way more qualified to do that than the older lot yeah that's the whole thing that i don't think when i was that age i realized that there's a huge value in that and you will you want you need that in your agency so like learn as much as you can and tell people about So yeah, I think like it doesn't matter if you're like 17 or 47, I think if you know the work that's coming out or you know the brands, then that's, you know, that's super interesting.

29:17I also think you should play to your strengths. So if you're a young person, then you should just know the kind of every brand that is doing a great job of targeting people like you or sort of your generation. so i i always think you know like play to your strengths because again you know we're we're in an industry which is you know obsessed about like what's coming next and who's doing what and so if you can sort of represent that in an intelligent way yeah i think it's it's again a huge benefit so yeah i i think sort of be try and work out ways that you can potentially walk into a studio walk into a conversation and and be like how could i be useful to this person because they're not expecting you to kind of design the next kind of brand that sort of they're expecting you just kind of to help you know them and the team do that yeah so definitely play your part yeah very good

30:07Claire:advice johnny thank you so much for coming on the podcast no thank you thank you i really enjoyed it