Wove delivered me such a good client experience that I joined their team

Wove is an innovation, strategy and design agency based in Dublin, Ireland. If you enjoy reading this piece, I have a few small favours to ask at the bottom of the article.

A few summers ago, a business contact came to me with an idea for a project. He pitched it over coffee and I instantly loved it. I’m limited in what I can reveal - as I am still under NDA and the project is yet to launch… Suffice to say it’s a venture which would be brilliant for Dublin and dramatically different to what’s already on offer in the city. It also features a thoroughly impressive civic mission - the likes of which we haven’t really seen since the Guinness family were building redbrick houses for their workers in the late 1800s.

My contact had the bones of a marketing strategy but the venture was already outgrowing it. He wanted to create a brand and some creative assets to start pitching the idea to stakeholders: a promo video, mockup website, that kind of thing. He asked if I would manage these.

I did that classic marketer thing of interpreting this as: ‘We need a logo!’ So I shopped around a few creative agencies, wondering who would deliver the prettiest branding.

I was told by a prominent Dublin graphic designer, too busy himself to accept my project, that aad (the brand, digital and communication design wing of wove) was one of a very small number of agencies in Dublin who could produce work to the required standard. So I called them up, had a meeting the next day and was impressed by their grasp of the brief and the quality and depth of their suggestions. And even more impressed when they followed up the day after that with a winning proposal.

In it, I found the seed of what made wove great to work with over the next year. That boils down to three things.

People: Johnny, Scott and the entire wove team are friendly but deadly serious about their work. They have a kind but firm attitude and way of working that I’ve nicknamed ‘wove Gentleness’. They have deep expertise and a really agile approach. They are totally focussed on helping clients meet big challenges.

Ethos: Wove is fundamentally about helping organisations thrive in a complex, digital world. We help these organisations design strategies, tools, products and services to drive them forward. We understand that, in business, there is ever increasing complexity and choice. And we believe that, if we put the work in for our clients, we can solve this complexity with a certain elegant simplicity. Our default isn’t to pitch the ‘shiny new thing’ - but rather to enable the human beings that make up an organisation do better work.

Results: I know they’re good because they did great work for me in the past. On my project, for which the sponsor had very high expectations, they held my hand, convinced me I needed more than a logo and then walked me calmly and competently through our year-long collaboration. We went from defining the problem to devising a strategy to delivering a detailed plan, strategic pillars and outputs. The work wove did for me was constantly referenced by everyone on the project team. It gave us a direction and purpose which massively improved the quality and potential of the entire venture. As I already mentioned, wove also encompasses aad (a brand, digital and communication design agency) which does brilliant creative work, and span up at just the right intensity to produce beautiful visual assets for my project.?

Fast forward to summer 2021. Scott and I weren’t directly collaborating as agency and client any more - but we still caught up regularly for coffee. He dropped a few hints: they wanted to bring wove properly to market, knew I had worked in sales and marketing and liked how I collaborated and problem-solved.?

Over the next few months, I facilitated a some strategy workshops to pick out opportunities in wove’s target sectors. We then moved pretty organically towards a deeper collaboration. This is typical of the lightweight but useful way wove works: meet up in person or online, discuss problems and opportunities and then produce new ideas away from the pressure of the day job. Then apply just enough process and expertise to unlock opportunities for our clients.

To finish, I have three small favours to ask: Wove has big ideas but not (yet) a big marketing budget. So…

1. If you enjoyed this piece, please share it on LinkedIn - and follow wove there too.

2. Consider subscribing to wove mind: a weekly dose of ideas to change the world.

3. If you’ve got an opportunity or problem you think we could help with, please get in touch.

Thanks so much for reading!