Always Design to Grow the Business, Not Just to Be Fashionable

“We don’t want to be a company that only does fashionable designs. We design to help our clients’ businesses grow.” The reason I have come to believe this is because of my own painful experiences in the past.

I started ALIVE in 2001 at the age of 21 as a design company. At the time, I thought that a designer’s job was just to design beautifully, without putting much emphasis on marketing or understanding the customer’s business. Thinking about slogans and text were also a pain, and I thought writing itself was not a designer’s job.

Then, in 2002, when I was 22 years old, I was introduced by an acquaintance to design a flyer for a grocery store.

The person quit his job at a large company and opened a British goods store that he loved with his own funds.

I thought at the time that I had designed beautifully as a designer and created a good design while receiving text and photo materials from the client. Then I printed and delivered tens of thousands of copies of it and that job was done.

A little time passed, and I wondered how that client was doing now, so I checked with an acquaintance to see what the client was up to, and he said, “Well… you didn’t know. Apparently the general store didn’t work out for him, and he took his own life.”

I was greatly shocked to hear that.

“Was my flyer bad? No, I just designed it as my job and I am not responsible, but maybe he asked to make the flyer as a last ditch effort. Couldn’t I as a designer have done something more useful…

My younger self blamed myself, asking myself the same question many times.

Perhaps the flyer was not the only reason, and I think it was the client’s own root cause, such as just opening a store as a hobby, lack of business model and marketing research, and lack of cash flow and tenacity. But as for me at the time, I wondered what I could have done to make the store better.

“Paying a lot of money for a design and now the client’s company is going out of business. Does this mean we are doing something meaningful with our work? Aren’t we just doing an extension of our hobby?” I asked myself many times.

And the solution I came up with was “Design must grow the client’s business“.

There is no value in designing something just to dress it up;
it is only valuable when it grows the clients’ business

With this thought in mind, I continued to study marketing, writing, and management theory, and to add these to my designs.

Twenty years have passed since then, and although we are still not perfect, I believe that as an Alive company, our foundation has been to “grow our clients’ businesses” rather than to “just design” them, and I believe that we have been able to grow many clients’ businesses to date.

We still have a ways to go, but we will always remember this original intention and implement “designs that help clients’ businesses grow“.

About ALIVE Vietnam

ALIVE is a digital creative company based in Vietnam and Japan that uses the power of design and technology to solve business problems.

Branding & Marketing
We will accompany and support you to grow your products and services in the Vietnamese market.

UI/UX Design
Our designs will help your business grow further by improving the UI/UX of your app or web design.

Please feel free to Contact us for more information.