Paul Watmough-Halim and Jan Stein, the Co-Founders of Hyperfocus.

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.

0:31Claire:This week, I'm here with Paul and Jan, co-founders of brand studio Hyperfocus. Paul was named by Creative Boom as one of the top creatives of 2025 and has spoken around the world with Jan at festivals such as D &AD, Off, ADC. Paul was head of design at Clothing Brand Bench and has worked on German media channel Funk and the Olympic Games for Coca-Cola. Jan's the co-host of The Brand Review on YouTube and has worked on brands such as Google, Swisscom, Red Bull and Allianz. Jan and Paul, welcome to the podcast. Hey, Blair. Thanks for having us. Thank you so much for coming. Thanks for coming over.

1:09Claire:Let's start at the beginning of your journey then. Could you tell me a little bit about how when you were a child, when you discovered creativity and when maybe you thought you could make a career out of it? Paul, do you want to kick off? Yeah, sure. I mean, I found, I mean, I don't know if I would call it creativity, but I found solace in in drawing yeah of course I suppose that is that's creating but when you're seven or eight and you realize that you can you can draw it's not really something that you're thinking okay this is a thing it's you know it's eventually going to become a career this is what kids do yeah it's just it was a safe place and a safe space for me and I was much more into drawing than I was into reading so I was able to create all these magical worlds and go on these adventures through the drawings that I was making.

1:54So I was making like a lot of comics and creating characters and worlds and stuff. And I really loved it. And it wasn't until much later on that I realized that it could become a career. I realized that what I was doing was I could put a name to it, which was being an artist. So I knew that when I grew up, I wanted to be an artist. And that took a long, like a long way to actually figure out what that meant and how I could actually then think about turning that into you know something that would be then viable as a

2:27Claire:career further on how did that go down with your family were they supportive of it or were they kind of so my dad never really got it he would have preferred me to have done something which was a bit more like I know I would like to be a doctor or yeah traditional career accounting A more traditional career. But my mum was always super supportive. She was just like, yeah, you go off and do the things that you want to do and I'll support you. I mean, my dad always brought me paper home. So he did give me stuff to draw on. And then later on, he bought me my first computer as well. So he was also for me, like learning to code and stuff like this.

3:08But I think he saw that as just a phase and that I would go down this traditional path. but I never did. I always knew that I just wanted to do this thing that I really like doing and I wanted to do that forever. Yeah, that's brilliant. And luckily I have.

3:24Claire:You're making it work. It's definitely changed along the way but I still feel, and I think it's really important for, I hope anyway, anybody who is creative to at least put a pencil to paper. I think it's not that often these days that we're reminded to do that and it's such a tactile thing. and it takes me right back to my childhood. And for me, it's as important as being able to write. Yeah. I can draw something and explain something to you with a pencil and a piece of paper. Yeah, it's a very good skill to have. Yeah. So this was, so were your parents in creative careers at all or were they in something completely different?

4:01Claire:And whereabouts did you grow up? I grew up in Bradford. This is in Bradford, okay. Yeah. So yeah, it's quite an interesting time to forge a career in creativity. Yeah, but my mum, like, she saw the potential she sent me to a school which was very much like there was a lot of art around this school so they were specializing in in art and music so i was able to kind of major in art and media and design communication so i took all the creative stuff that i could and yeah i just kind of learned through school about painting and learning more about like a lot of the the background of more traditional forms of yeah of of art and also illustration and photography and all these kind of things and that's when I started to realize that this could be something after that I did foundation which is probably one of the most exciting periods in my my education I'd love to have done something like that it was amazing it's one year between university and school and just try everything and you know you're you're hanging out with people who are into pottery I would never ever you know get to you know spend time with someone who sees the world in that way or you know I learned how to do traditional kind of draftsman work and then also learned about perspective and then I was also able to do abstract expressionism And also this is when I first came in touch with really learning about graphic design and doing graphics.

5:39And I kind of fell in love with that because I realised, because I was really into oil painting. Oh, really? When I went to uni, I studied fine art.

5:46Claire:Oh, wow. Okay. And graphic design at the same time. So it was fine art, graphic design and photography. Where was this? Where did you go? This was at Bradford University. I actually wanted to go somewhere else. I went it was terrible and I quit that university and I actually wanted to come to London but too far into the semester so I actually came back to Bradford because they had a really great art school yeah I've heard yeah I've heard it's really good so I ended up there and I realized that actually pixels don't take as long to dry as oil painting I just became obsessed with like being able to you know be able to create in a kind of abstract way through using the tools that I was learning at the time.

6:32My early introduction to graphic design was really just me kind of approaching it like I would fine art. And it was a time when, you know, seeing, because back in the day I was designing like a lot of album covers and flyers for nightclubs and stuff like this. I remember seeing Stanley Don Wood's artwork for OK Computer. and that was one of the first times I'd seen you know almost like this abstract expressionistic approach to design like put in this context of art but it was graphics and that like blew my mind and that was really that was the point when I realized okay all the stuff that I've been doing all these years is something that I can actually turn into a profession in this graphic design.

7:15Claire:Yeah definitely that's a really key moment so many people are influenced by that kind of album art and I just heard it's come back as a category is it in the Brits or the Grammys this year it's come back as a category of album art so hopefully it can yes please definitely so yeah and how about you so you grew up in Germany and what's your background like I don't know much about the schooling system there or how far up creative it goes it's definitely nothing that really plays a big role like when you are like a teenager in school so it's more like a choice you do after school when you go to university but overall i think my journey yes i think i'm was very late to realizing that this can become like like a profession or like making money with it so i was born in east germany so i mean it's that was like we were very isolated there right so we were from everything around and so there were there was like culturally not much going on of course there were some artists but you know it was not like there was advertising for example or there were brands or you know there was graphic designs and very very rarely you you saw something like that so i always say like when the war came down i was like eight years old yeah for me that was like the world is changing from black and white to to colorful wow really kind of yeah can you remember it really clearly still i think yeah we like one of the first days the wall went down we went with my grandmother to some kind of shopping mall and i was the first time in like a wow in the kind of section where all the toys are i mean we didn't have anything like that in east germany yeah so there was like transformer toys for example that was because you got some like 100 100 d mark back in the days as a welcome money and you're from east germany and i spent it on on a transformer action figure actually move yeah yeah so that was kind of i think something that had quite an influence on me like realizing oh there's so much oh my god definitely going on in terms of yeah like culture and design and yeah i went to berlin with my school when i had my 16th birthday there and i think it was about six to twelve months after the wall came down and we stayed in east berlin so i can kind of i can see where you're coming from and i can imagine it was it was so different i'd never seen anything like it before it was no everything was like we had just three kind of cars that you could buy and all this there's like one product in a shelf when like there's sugar there's one kind of sugar there's one kind of cereals and one kind of cheese so that's it so that there was no need for making differentiation between products for example of course yeah everything just needed a gray box to put in yeah so everything was very pragmatic it's like going from black and white to color yes exactly yeah yeah and then afterwards so i got really quickly into like skateboarding actually you know i saw like some movies in america with these kids yeah from the 80s with skateboards and i really wanted to do that as well and i think skateboarding you know is a very like the graphic design part played a huge role in that so i think that also had a big influence on me like skateboard designs, stickers, skateboard magazines, all this kind of stuff.

10:38Of course, music that goes with skateboarding as well, hip hop music, rock music, and all these bands. And I also like drawing, you know, when in school, I did all these kind of doodles, and I was told not to do that. I wasn't allowed to.

10:50Claire:Really? Yeah, I was punished for that. That's crazy, isn't it? Shutting down that part of kids' brains. Yeah. Yeah. So actually, after I finished school, I studied mathematics did you so you study mathematics yeah but just just one like half a year and then i realized okay no that's not not for you that's not me that's not for for me and my actually i was very thankful for my parents that they allowed me to kind of readjust at that point so they really gave me the time to okay and like take a time look what you really want to do and a friend of mine also we went skateboarding together he went to the like hamburg to to the art school and studied illustration and he took me to the school and I just had a look and then I realized okay that's that's what I want to do oh wow so it suddenly fit together with all the skateboarding yeah it's just a vibe on that school like you know that was just so much different than what I've seen in in like the the mathematics department for example you can imagine there's a bit of a difference yeah so I really want to do it and then I went all in so I had you know spent some time on actually i mean i kind of could draw but to actually get accepted by the school in hamburg you need to apply and there's like i don't know like much more people applying than they have actually seats there so did you have a portfolio or anything at the time yeah i need to prepare prepare it i had nothing no so i needed to prepare it and wow i actually i think because i wasn't accepted the first time so i need to wait one more year till i got accepted and then yeah yeah finally got accepted and then did you apply once and didn't get accepted yeah oh wow interesting i i was i like stuff like that particularly because you then applied again and you yeah if you want something enough keep going for it yeah i went to some private school in between to to yeah keep keep developing the skills and then the second time it worked and was that in doing a degree and was that arts or was that particularly graphic design it was already into like communication design it was called so it was photography graphic design illustration you could kind of figure out where you want to in which direction you want to go at that time yeah digital became starting to be becoming a thing at that time or motion this kind of things yeah yeah okay absolutely yeah there's sort of early sort of parts of motion and yeah that kind of thing how did you both got on it studying at university did you did you enjoy it was it fun was it challenging well i mean i i've always had a bit of a problem with authority to be honest that's probably why i run my own studio with jan yeah that's a good thing but i also come from from the same background so i also skateboarded for many many years as well and that's kind of like a common thread between us and actually i think most of my university time i was skateboarding and not doing what I was supposed to be doing.

13:45But uni was good because it was, actually I learned more after university than when I was at university. But what university prepared me for was the social aspect of learning about my own independence and my own voice and trying to figure out what I want. I think it's the only time that I have, that I've had. You know, it was a real transitional period.

14:09Claire:It's amazing, isn't it? It is just the perfect buffer between school and sort of proper adult life. Yeah. Yeah. It wasn't the outcome. It was like that process of kind of growing. And yeah, I mean, I really, I enjoyed it. But I did other things. You had a good time. I had a good time. I mean, I don't want to like say that I wouldn't promote particularly that. But what I would promote is going into that space. And if you can, I know it can be very expensive. You know, you come out of it with like a lot of debt as well. Yeah, that's the difference, isn't it? Today, yeah, very much so. I mean, there are other ways of educating yourself.

14:51There's so many different ways of doing it. I don't know if the same institution and establishments really are as relevant and can move as quickly as they need to.

15:01Claire:They've got to be less relevant nowadays. I'm on the industry advisory board at the University of Brighton and trying to get we talk about ai and what's what you can allow the students to do and where to draw the line on it it changes so quickly by the time you draw in a guideline things have changed i find it it's a really hard thing to get right basically yeah i think mentorships and i know being able to get into spaces like things like this as well you know where you can actually hear stories and and ideas about things these are also like we never had access to that you know So that's another level of you self-educating yourself to find your own voice.

15:43Claire:There's so much out there that you can just access now. Yeah, my son's doing his GCSEs and just the number of different methods he's got. You can revise on TikTok. He's got BBC Bite Size. He's got his online Google Classroom. It's a similar sort of thing, isn't it? There's just so much inspiration around. but those um those times i met so many great people as well i mean i spent i mean i was a dj as well so i i put on some of the biggest hip-hop nights in the north of england really cool for a long time so it was really still do a bit i still dj i'm we're going to be djing at our open house next week excellent for the for the studio and i've done some little bits here and there but it takes a lot of commitment to be able to be doing doing that all the time i don't spend my adult life in dirty clubs anymore.

16:33I can dive in and dive back out again.

16:35Claire:Yeah, fair enough. But the whole, you know, the whole communication, storytelling, building brand, building community, that was like a really big thing, like through doing the promotion and also DJing because you were creating a destination. And that was one of my kind of first touch points with brand as well as skateboarding, you know. So during that kind of very pivotal point in my life, I was finding community through skateboarding. And skateboarding is such a creative space. You know, it's full of filmmakers, artists, misfits, loners, extravagant people, loners. It's like it's such an amazing community to be a part of.

17:16Yeah. That you really kind of you can cut your teeth there. it's not just about the skateboarding but it's about kind of finding acceptance and and feeling like you've you found someone where you belong where you're understood yeah for me that's really what brand is as well it's it's about feeling like a safe space and like your home yeah it's kind of diverging a bit from what you asked about about university but i think those were really formative a formative time yeah for me of how i kind of came in touch with understanding what brand really meant from a very very authentic place yeah it wasn't about buying a product well i mean it was kind of because you had to buy it was but it's not the purchase part it's more feeling part of that group to step into it yeah and of course there was you know there's transaction made later because you bought skateboards you bought clothes and you bought the videos and stuff yeah but it was about being accepted into a community so for me that was always is what brand and still today is for what we build is that safe space, that stepping point into a place that can make impact, can make real change.

18:22We always say we want to build brands that can change the world. And through finding a place where you can find your own voice, I think it can, you know, whether it's today hyper-localized or it's at scale, you know, there's all these opportunities to be able to do that. I think that's an amazing place and that came through skateboarding.

18:41Claire:yeah that's it's brilliant both got that similar sort of background in it as well tell me about your first jobs yeah and how did you get your first job after university how did you stand out and where was it that's actually when i started university that was like cool for for a year but i also got kind of bored yeah yeah because you know everything was you know like kind of okay we do an imaginary project for this kind of thing and i mean it's good to learn your craft and explore and try things yeah but i also then really quickly because again skateboarding i started working for the local one of the local german skate brands oh wow okay and because like their main art director designer then he just i think started working at an agency so there was this kind of job vacant and then i'll i just jumped in i had no clue yeah that's good and it became quite quite a lot very very quickly really in what way in terms of how much stuff needed to be done like skateboard designs t-shirts fashion lines catalogs stickers posters all this kind of stuff yeah there was a constant demand on on designing stuff which was great but i also was at some point kind of overwhelmed so yeah That's actually when I met Paul.

20:09Claire:Ah, so at that point you met Paul, okay. Yeah, and then we actually started working together on this back in the days. So that was at the skate brands that you met each other and... Paul, do you want to talk about... I know your story goes via Australia to get back to Hamburg. I was on my way to Australia. Yeah. You asked about the first job as well. Yes, tell me about the first job and then we'll go into that. So actually it's quite nice because it ties back into university. And so my first job was actually, I mean, I was doing the promotions for the nightclub for the nights I was putting on.

20:42And it got so kind of big that I set up my own design studio at university. So it was more like a design collective called The High Project. And The High Project was a collection of like-minded people, I suppose, kind of a little bit reminiscent of foundation. Yeah. So it was writers who were also poets and artists, musicians and designers.

21:06Claire:And we all came together to collectively kind of figure out how to make cool stuff for the clients that would come in to us and asking for more of the stuff that we were doing through the club nights. So what kind of clients would it be that other club nights? Mainly other club nights and also DJs and producers as well. Brilliant. So I was doing like a lot of album artwork back then as well. Who for? Anyone I'd know? Is it more in the hip hop space? I did some local hip hop stuff. I actually, I'll tell you who you might know. You know Dynamo? Yeah. Yeah. So Dynamo was like, let's say my kind of first, can I call him a client?

21:47I don't know. But back in the day, our night was called The Original Heroes. and I remember it was a there was a couple of nights this little kid was coming in he must have been like 15, 16 or something he kept coming up to the DJ booth and he was like yo yo yo check me out check me out and we were like DJing and stuff and he was like dressed in like a suit but he had his hat on sideways and he had like playing card symbols on his suit and stuff very skinny young kid

22:18Claire:and he'd be doing like body pop movements like break dance movements but with with cards wow from that age god yeah and we were and i was like man i was like talk to my the guy who used to put the night on with i was like man we gotta you know let's go talk to him so yeah eventually we talked with him and it was dynamo who went on to become who he is yeah magician and he said do you mind if i have like a residency with you and we didn't really know what to do with him yeah because what do you do and then we said look we have a merch stall at the back where we're selling all our t-shirts and and cds and stuff where people can buy stuff for the original heroes you can set up next to it watch the stall and you can also do magic back there you just got bigger and bigger and bigger till he became part of the whole thing yeah and i started helping him with like helping to do like the branding for him as well so help to promote him through our night and do all the design work and stuff around around dynamo so that's probably one that you all most definitely know yeah definitely I don't know if you know really Dynamo in Germany I don't know how big he was you taught me that's pretty much I didn't expect you to say Dynamo so yeah that was one of the kind of first and yeah some like other record labels and stuff so ah so did he become part of the group then yeah so he was part of the original heroes excellent so we had like break dancers scratch DJs and us who would do these nights and then it was one night that we got sponsored by Universal.

23:54And it was a massive gig that we did. Bonobo played for us as well.

23:59Claire:Oh, yeah, enough Bonobo. I don't know if you know the Scratch Perverts from back in the day. They were like a mixology crew. I know of them, but don't know their stuff. So it was like really big, like some really big acts. We also, did we have Massive Attack on that time? Wow. Daddy G from Massive Attack. I don't know if it was on that night, but like some of the guys from London came up. Yeah. And they saw Dynamo and they're like, dude, you're amazing. And he'd started to get some traction and stuff anyway, because he'd been like recording on the streets and some of his stuff. And yeah, they took him to London and then the rest is history.

24:35Yeah, absolutely. So he played like a little part in his journey. So it was really cool.

24:40Claire:So how did you move from there to working for someone else, getting your own, getting a job? Was that when you met Jan? No. So we built a design studio. And after a while, we really realized that, okay, the thing that was actually working with is a graphic design part. So we really concentrated on that. So with a couple of other people, we really focused on that. And I did that for a few years. And then I got the opportunity to work with the attic. So I went and worked with the attic for a bit. Right, okay. I really wanted some real world industry experience. Even though I'd done all this stuff myself, i wanted to see really how it was so i worked there for a bit and then with that also that experience i then tried to do another thing like design studio thing and then this job came up and this opportunity to work for for bench i see okay and i was like you know what it's if i look at what they were offering it was basically all the stuff that we talked about so it was like curation it was design it was culture it was fashion yeah it was lifestyle it was all stemmed from the stuff that i really loved and yeah would you like to work and do that for this brand so i was like you know what yeah okay yeah cool i was living in leeds at the point at that time so i moved from leeds to to manchester okay and worked for for bench for for a long time then i as i do i got disillusioned with it i was like you know what i want to go off and yeah see the world and yeah i jumped on a plane left all my stuff and went backpacking and my idea was to go around the world yeah two years go to australia that's where i thought i would end up and along the way in asia I met a girl with a little whirlwind romance and she was coming back to Germany Ah, okay So I was like, you know what, I can go anywhere at this point so I jumped on a plane with her and landed in Hamburg in October So you intended to go to Australia but it wasn't actually via there and ended up Have you since been to Australia?

26:53No, but it's still on there But I never went home I never came back yeah i never came back to it i just stayed there and jan was friends with her and we got introduced

27:05Claire:i see so that you weren't working together at any point but you just became friends and became friends and this is where our kind of paths meet jan's doing all the skateboard stuff and you know i've got the background and the skills and yeah we started working together brilliant so you what as a free two freelancers started working together and kind of yeah yeah so how did it lead to hyper focus does it how many years between that and what you do now a lot actually i mean that was around about 2007 yeah okay so a long time so we worked together for for a little bit on you know on the skateboard stuff but yeah paul was yeah a bit older i think also a bit like more mature in his craft just generally yeah so he moved then on to got other opportunities to work on i was then also like working with i also opened another design studio with some friends actually ran this for over 10 years i think yeah how did it go well tell me about that was it the experience of that must be really helpful now yeah i mean that was i mean that's always like you know you have like a couple of friends from university i guess there's quite a lot of stories like this yeah and then you either go to an agency or bigger studio or you start your own thing and we got together and said okay let's do our own thing i mean it's you know we wanted to just do great work i think that was always our main driver to you know make it get out out out there see our stuff actually in the real world but yeah you end up taking on take on everything basically everything that comes along your way yeah be it like a small restaurant a russian church or a shower for for unilever you did design for russian church yeah yeah did you again that's everything you know and you you know constantly over deliver you know yeah but it's fun you know again you know it's not so much pressure of course you need money but it's not like you need to provide for family or something yeah absolutely so it was a good time yeah and it also I think helps to shape your craft mature your skills so I think it's an important part of learning as well yeah yeah completely so I was I was bouncing around the the scene as a as a freelancer yeah and I basically was like going around Europe because we could yeah then absolutely Brexit it's a lot easier yeah it's a lot easier yes I was getting booked to all these different places so I spent quite a lot of time with akqa also worked in in amsterdam quite a bit there as well i'm such a shame that's not happening at the moment it was amazing amazing time of course yeah i feel so lucky to have been able to to do that just yeah feel part of that that bigger community definitely and yeah i freelanced like with like ddb young from matt yeah tribal and i ended up as head of design for jwt as well wow okay so they set up an international team yeah and yeah i they did like lots of like big projects working for volkswagen audi mini and doing lots of stuff around there so i was kind of really growing and i'd like really senior positions building teams and growing them and stuff so is it more on the advertising comm side of things as well then rather than brand design at that point at that point yeah but i was also like with young from matt it was i was kind of bouncing between the two worlds which was really interesting yeah and because hamburg is very much an advertising city yeah so there's a lot of the big agencies there as well so i was moving also moving between berlin and hamburg and and other places so even with like young format they also have like a branding department so i was doing like lots of different stuff which was really cool and i did that for a long time and i met a lot of people and then this opportunity came up which was kind of a bit of a game changer for me they one of the guys chris who i'd worked with akqa he had left akqa and he was putting like this crack team together for deutsche barn and deutsche barn are notoriously like quite conservative yeah i can imagine they're a big kind of institution you You know, they have to work.

31:37I mean, it's Germany, you know, things have to be on time. Yes, serious stuff, real life. They lose their shit. Yes. The nation, they're not happy about it.

31:44Claire:I can imagine. And so they're notoriously like behind in like innovation. And they started this project called BarnX, which was like an innovation hub for creating, because I spent a lot of time building digital products and also leading digital teams as well to lead this project from a design perspective and build like an entire team. to create products at a first market that innovative and like we can test them put mvps out there put like products out there and see what happens see how the public react to them what sort of things did you create the main thing that we built was an app which was kind of a mixture between like a news feed and then also like a shop but then also somewhere that you could buy your ticket so it was like a complete entertainment app for and it was also geo localized based on your geo location so if i landed in berlin for instance the app would change and it would pull in all the content from the area so if i want to like i know go for a meal tonight as soon as i i get in i it will understand the things that i like and push those kind of content to me and give me opportunities where I could maybe you know go eat here and then go to this place so it kind of it helped to like make your your trip much more complete so yeah okay and that was that was really cool because they've never done anything they've never done anything like that way an all-in-one kind of service it was a really amazing time because I built the design team so it went from around about 10 people to over 100 wow over a few years uh-huh and I I learned a lot about design thinking and also how to innovate and also build processes with inside of creative structure.

33:35After that, that had finished. This is, I think, what you're going to ask how hyperfocus came.

33:40Claire:Yeah, absolutely. I was at a stage, you can see I've done a lot. So I'd, you know, been head of design for design studios. I'd worked in advertising, worked in brand, done all these really big profile, high profile things. had all this knowledge and i was so in love with brand because brand played a huge part in the storytelling of these kind of projects it was never valued as much as it should be and this was always a frustration of mine that after this project i really wanted to figure out how we could bring these kind of processes into the world of brand me brand hadn't moved forward it was still quite static in the way that you like clients interact with brand studios it's not very there's not too much back and forth there's not so much how would i say what's the word what's the word like when you work so collaboration and that kind of yes yes there's nothing you can't forget this i can say all other words apart from the word collaboration there's not as much collaboration as there is in like product development and stuff so yeah we really wanted to try and build but I spoke with Jan Jan was also frustrated with where we were at where the industry was at and we're like well why don't we try and take the best of this world and try and merge it with this world and try and create something that is completely different at the time and that's really how we started Hyperfocus brilliant that's yeah I like the different angle on the whole thing what year was that when did you start it oh 2019 during COVID actually yeah during COVID perfect timing think so you launched it launched it basically as the whole world was going totally insane and shutting down wow how did you win new clients during that time how did you start i think we had a quite old idea back in the days yeah because we had no clients we also didn't want to really put like our like my portfolio and his portfolio together and say no this is our portfolio yeah that also felt like a bit i don't know weird we said okay that's different and new and yeah let's start to build this without a portfolio which sounds a bit crazy extra challenge okay yeah and then we decided okay let's that's where also the idea came from to create content i mean that's something we probably both thought before already that this is because i had like was doing a podcast with a friend already before at this time because we thought like like all these creative studios and agencies that tell their clients on you know how to communicate and what to do and they need to create content and be visible but they're not really capable of doing it themselves you know so we thought okay we we definitely will do it you know we create we want to create content that is kind of creates value for the people create visibility you know have an opinion and and share it with the people have a voice build yeah an audience and that's how we came up with the idea of yeah the brand review i mean it wasn't called the brand review back in the days but yeah what was it called initially it was just hyper focus i mean we were just like documenting our our journey i mean we were really influenced by other youtubers especially people like Casey Neistat or Marcus Brownlee or Peter McKinnon and these guys like were also especially the latter were doing like tech reviews so the whole tech thing was was really big and they were able to create entertainment around it and eventually you know we we figured out a format where we could also do a similar thing where we could also talk about brand but like in a in a format you know so we're able to start to you know find our way yeah great content around around something like that how did it go like did the audience build quite quickly was it no okay takes forever i mean we always had this kind of i mean you need to find a balance between doing actually work in a studio and creating content because we are not full-on design studio and we're also not a full-on content creation studio yeah of course so i guess our lack of consistency and maybe i guess we could have been much more successful if we go all in on the content stuff yeah and you know be like really consistent and you know make one video and create like short snippets of it and just pull all out that i think yeah it's it's a long journey and a slow growth but we reached the right people and we noticed that very very quickly i think we one of our first videos that got quite some attention was a brand review about burger king oh okay that's an interesting story i'd love to tell that oh yeah go on tell me about that well i just i just want to kind of like and just step back a bit like when you talked about how do we get clients yeah because it all kind of comes around so first of all it was like through our network because of all these years i've been working yeah as soon as they knew that people knew that we were doing something people you know started asking yeah brilliant once we serviced all those people then it was recommendations from those people yes once we'd done that so it was like this kind of ripple effect yeah and then you could only get to a certain like level and without that then you need to invest in pr or you need to invest in marketing yeah because there's people right over on that ripple over there naturally gonna reach how are you gonna get there exactly but through the youtube channel we were able to do that interesting okay because we were able to talk to many more people I mean, YouTube is a 24-hour PR machine.

39:19It's just working for you. Absolutely. When we're sleeping, when we're not doing anything, people can tune in and get to know us, you know, and see, you know, the things that we do and our opinions. So it's kind of, now it's really kind of starting to work for us and reaching the right people. The first time that we did a brand review, it's terrible. It's just, it's basically, it's just one long shot of you and me just having a chat and kind of some quite uncomfortable long pauses and not really knowing what we're doing but we had we had good fun with it you know i think there was some pretty cool content in there at some point if you were willing to to follow it all the way through yeah and we were like okay cool and people started to like it and stuff and then it turns out that we went to the paradance festival yeah and in marrakesh no that wasn't no this was in