The Story Behind
Kreatyf Gen
After 2 failed attempts to establish a business, for reasons out of our control we gave it one last try. How we at Kreatyf Gen are Refining our way to Success. Implementing innovative ideas and setting up models to tap into new potential.
By Romario Schokman
After 2 failed attempts to establish a business, for reasons out of our control we gave it one last try. What started off as a brainstorming session of a couple of school friends who knew they wanted to do something in the area of innovation but didn’t know what it was, is what morphed into kreatyfgen. The name is a result of the unavailability of domains and two hours of google searching. “Kreatyf” which is basically the Northern Frisian Translation of ‘creative’ and “Gen” is the short form for ‘genesis’ referring to the beginning, and also referring to generations referring to the new generations we hoped to inspire.
Naive as we were, we went crazy with it. Unhindered, innocent ambition coupled with the dream of going big. We bought over 6 domains; Kreatyf was to be the parent company and under it, we had many others; Generations, Genesis, Gen and so on. Each of these were to be part of a huge conglomerate. For the first time I look back, we spent over LKR 250,000.00 over the course of 3 years on just hosting and domain renewals. We were all working and doing this as sought of a passion project aimlessly pumping cash in, to feed the beast. We kept track of neither expenditure or revenue, running the thing mostly at a loss. We had a few clients here and there, each of us acting as individual freelancers. Eventually, one of the three would drop out due to personal commitments and set himself up in the corporate sphere, but still continued to come on as a private consultant developer.
Eventually a few more classmates wanted to join us. So we said ok and things took off for about a week,
“As the good old team forming process goes, things progressed:
- Forming
- Storming
- Norming
- Performing”
Things took off , sadly things did not get passed the storming phase. Egos clashed and the team decided to part ways. Only the two initial founders remained and continued business as usual. Though I must say if that team did stay together, it would have been one hell of a force.
Things went on as usual and at the end of last year, I moved in full-time to work on Kreatyf Gen. though we had been loosely functioning we hadn’t really set up any infrastructure in terms of personal branding, process or operations. Jonathan the other co-founder and I quickly blocked some time and got everything together, creating a logo, setting up a website and setup [notion.so](http://notion.so) to coordinate operations. And then disaster hit. My laptop crashed and since I had just finalised the logo the previous night I had no backup (this logo was bae). It left me devastated, me being the detailed obsessive designer that I am it takes me a while to reach a state of things that I am happy with, and this was that logo. To my dismay, it was completely gone. I spent days trying to replicate it or even find the font that I had used but to no avail. It was gone and I had to come to terms with it. Finally, after about two days of trying to get a logo together and finally giving up and going to my bed, an image came to my head (this was 2 in the morning after I had shut down my laptop and switched off all the lights) fed up and too tired to go back down, I made a note on my phone describing it best I could.
Since I had meetings the next morning I couldn’t work on it, but soon as I got back home I was at it again to create the Logo for [kreatyfgen.com](http://kreatyfgen.com), so we could finalise the site and finally print the business cards. Since I had client work also pending it took two days to get it together and we finally can say it is done. Sometimes being a perfectionist can drive you to the brink. So getting passed all that and everything in order kreatyfgen.com is finally ready, officially live and we want to kick it off with this introductory blog post documenting our journey so far.
So to sum it all off and give you an idea of who we are and where we hope to be, this is as simple as we can explain it. Right now we are a Design and Strategy firm, what that means is we not only design and create but also formulate the why behind your implementations.
Whether it be logo design, web design, print communications, social media content we help you focus and realise what you are trying to achieve and measure the impact it has on your business.
This means we don’t put pretty colours just because they look nice, but rather figure out what they represent, the emotions they evoke and how it relates to achieving your goals (i.e. – the colours red and yellow are used with food & beverage brands since it induces thirst and/or hunger).
“we don’t put pretty colours just because they look nice, but rather figure out what they represent, the emotions they evoke and how it relates to achieving your goals”
In the future, we hope to develop into a Design & Innovation Consultancy Firm, which focusses on Global Problem Solving and measuring implementations’ sustainability and impact.