How did Industrial Design help me start two design startups?

I always knew I was into creating things, and this started with sketching imaginary worlds into sketchbooks and building stuff out of #lego .

As long as I remember, I have always been sensitive to how things felt around me, How materials felt in my hands, to how the #ergonomics of daily objects felt.

I started complaining about things that functioned around me, and I realized I wanted to fix these human errors and problems that people often neglected.?

Over the years, I have had very focused and niche hobbies, such as building things out of Lego that had multiple functions, Sketching highly detailed oriented pieces that would take hours and hours to complete, and macro street #photography .?

As I grew older, I started to notice a pattern in everything I did and began to narrow down my interests. I realized that I found peace when creating things, and I enjoyed finding problems in the things around me and finding solutions to make them more adaptable.?

When I was 22, I came across #industrialdesign as a course. Industrial Designing taught me to focus on the problem and structure it into a process. It is a beautiful combination of #design and #engineering .?

Industrial Design taught me how to be more sensitive to my environment and more #observant of how people react to experiences in their physical and digital environments. It gave me the confidence to see problems as an opportunity of creating new solutions rather than a hurdle.?

I found one such problem in the branding industry. Everywhere we see, we find graphic designers creating brand languages at all various price points and over multiple mediums. As we progressed into the digital space, we connected less, and the timelines were reduced to a couple of minutes to create logos and brand languages. Websites that sell generic logos and #ai -generated brands have transformed people's thinking.?

This triggered my curiosity, and I deep-dived into this industry to study the process of building a company, the #psychology and how brands #marketed themselves with that human touch.

All brands have incredible origin #stories . They market their products and services through great storytelling and spend millions of dollars creating #impactful ads to create new #audiences and open new #markets .?

#Storytelling is the way to bring that connection between the business and your audience. New startups invest very little in their branding and focus on sales and marketing the most. They never #invest in what makes them sell their products or services, what identifies them in the market - their brand. Companies spend very little time and money on building a logo or working on a brand that's meaningful to their story of the company.

They never question if the designer can reflect their story into their brand. Is the amount paid to build a brand an expense or an investment??

Brands should invest in finding a creative who understands your business's industry and how brands are built using #consumer psychology and #aestheticsurgery to make you stand out from the competition.?

Brand building is a complex area of specialization as it takes knowledge not only in Design but also design theory, consumer psychology, storytelling, strong #visualization, and customer experience.

Seeing this industry move fully digital and not involve human interaction gave me the idea to step back and sell the old-school approach. Because finding someone who prompts you to talk about your story, understand your company and build something unique is rare these days. So I started Design Makers, a branding studio that took branding through the human approach and handled brands as products rather than just a project. We built a company that was designed for humans, by humans. @wearethedesignmakers

We created processes that would reduce #communication friction and help us understand how and why the founders think a certain way and build new ways of presenting information to tap into their subconscious mind to understand their liking towards specific designs and #business styles.??

This approach changed the way people perceived their investment in their brands. They liked talking about their stories and seeing their words being transformed into a visual language.?

They felt more connected to their brands than ever before, and they felt the human connection when they spoke to their audience. We treated our clients as people and not as projects, which changed how we spoke to them, handled meetings, and worked on transforming their brands.?

This took a boom in the industry, and we worked with nearly 150 brands in the span of 4 years with projects in 13 countries with clients who love what we do and continue to work with us and cannot imagine working with anyone else.?

This gave me the confidence to work on building a space for creatives to understand and learn the secrets of the trade in the design business world. The problem was that designers specialize only in the field and continue to work tirelessly. As a creative, I believe you should be aware of all design fields and other industries. Being aware of other design industries helps us draw inspiration in the most unexpected ways. For example, I solved a #manufacturing problem by remembering a technique from woodwork and CNC laser. We solved the issue by drawing #inspiration from other industries' works and functions.?

So I built a platform for creatives to support #crossindustry #collaboration through #networking and #competitions that will encourage them to work and understand how other creatives work and draw inspiration into their own works. That was the origin story of my second company- Kreatr. The Kreatr

Industrial Design is a process of Design that is applied to physical products that are to be manufactured by mass #production. True, but it helped me use the design #methodology to build brands on my own today. It taught me how to find the problem and focus on building a solution that efficiently solves the problem with maximum efficiency.?

If you need to break a rule, you must understand it deeply. Then restructure to build something the world has never seen.