Dare to be different

How did the company come about?
The company was set up in 2011. We mainly focus on two areas: one is image or videos such as animations and video production, and the second is web design. I myself concentrate mainly on the design of web page. Our main customers are clients in Macau from different social sectors, there are clients from the government, hotels, and SMEs [small and medium sized enterprises], and the ratios of them are equally shared. Currently we are starting to expand our business to theMainland and places outside of Macau.
There are four of us mainly and now we have hired some people so there are six people working now. My major in university is design and I graduated from Macao Polytechnic Institute. After I graduated, my classmates and I had worked for other companies quite some time and we decided to open our own company after that. We simply think that it was enough for us to work at others’ companies and we would really like to do stuff ourselves, plus there wasn’t that many companies doing the things that we thought of, so we set up our company.

Any difficulties that you and your partners encountered when working for your own business?
We did encounter difficulties when we were setting up the company, but those problems were not too difficult to overcome.
For example, the renting part, we had moved several times, the price has been increasing in the past years and we had been forced to move out. A few years ago we discovered here [Macau Design Center] and we stayed. Now it is our third year here.
For me, it [rental] wasn’t something that cannot be solved, given that we have reached our sixth year.
Probably, the one problem is that we still haven’t had a place that belongs to us and I wish that we could overcome this in the future.
Another thing is, many would experience difficulty when they just started their business, because you still hadn’t got enough work to do, but gradually you will get jobs.
Also, there is this problem, but this depends on your own perspective. Like in the old days we spent so many more hours to work, although now there are times once in awhile that we need to work overtime. Since we are working for our own business we don’t have choices. We needed to work more or receive less than expected, but once we build up our reputation, we receive better jobs. Like in the early days we didn’t choose jobs because we hadn’t had much and I think everyone is like that.
We didn’t need a lot of capital to set up our business, it is very easy for us to set up a company in this field but it is definitely difficult to manage the business because it is really exhausting. The problem of the business environment in general is the inflation, everything is more expensive like the renting and labour, and this is because of the improvement of the city’s economy.
When the gaming revenue dropped in the past years, jobs from hotels and casinos also dropped, but this wasn’t a huge impact when it is shared by jobs from other sectors.

What are the difference(s) that your company had gone through after six years of operation?
The main difference, I would say, is the new staff we hired. For my own experience, this is a very meaningful difference. In terms of what we do, we haven’t changed much, we have been sticking to our guns, like we continue to do digital and multimedia without changing much. The difference would be the jobs that we take now tend to be in larger scale, but I would say that there are more jobs related to filmmaking, as you know there wasn’t much about this area before. By that, we mostly do post production and special effects and we also make films ourselves. Usually we made animation video therefore we don’t often film a video, but there are also times when other filmmaking companies ask us for help and we will participate in part of the making.

What was your largest scale job to note?
Some examples of large scale jobs include Hisence, a brand from Mainland specialises in electronic appliances, and we made promotional and introductory videos for the brand.

What is the difference in terms of the market in Macau and in mainland China?
The biggest difference between Macau and the Mainland is that Macau doesn’t have any big brands, aside from the gaming operators. So the biggest clients would usually be government and gaming operators, and what they need are more or less the same and the things that we can explore are very limited. Unlike the neighbouring city Hong Kong, they have a lot of international brands. The good thing is, since we established in 2011, we have accumulated certain amount of experience and customers and so we know what we want to develop and explore, but there are times when we want to try something new and be a bit more creative; clients at this point might not accept it. However, since there are more young people setting up their own businesses, I can see that many of them now would start applying designs in their businesses.

Are there a lot of competitions in the design field?
Yes, I would say more companies are providing design services nowadays, but in terms of competitors, as far as I’m concerned, I don’t know any companies for the time being that are doing the same as we do. For us, we focus in two areas, and companies now tend to focus on only one or they might work on some filmmaking. For us, we wish to combine the two areas that we are working in better ways. Web making is a prevailing market internationally but I think in terms of web page design there isn’t much out there, there are more people working on technical parts instead. I refer to ourselves as web page designers but obviously we also need to work on the technical parts, but we put the focus on the design part and so we refer to ourselves as designers.
And so we hope that we could see some good achievements in the coming ten years,
I wish that we could combine the two and make something new and that new creation would also be accepted by the majority, because many of the projects separate the two areas.
Initially, I was hoping that the [aforementioned] combinations would happen but the limited market in the city does not make this available.
I think it is a good thing that more companies appeared in the market and together we do our best to make the market improve.
For our strengths, aside from the number of clients that we accumulated, our quality of works also attracted first time clients to enquire. We do not particularly sell our services, we simply upload our works on our website. We use our works to do the talks.

What else can be improved in the market and what can you do as part of the industry?
I think maybe the city’s atmosphere and cultural cultivation. In my opinion, the funding provided by the government or other institutions is not important.
It is about both parties, the designer and the client, and I think both parties can have their realm constantly upgraded.
But now, I feel like the level of acceptance for both parties is quite confined, because the works are mostly the same, like we care too much on following standards and rules. And of course, since we focus on commercial designing, we have to be down to earth because we need to communicate with our clients, but I feel like we should seek out or be more flexible on other ways that could also be workable.
For us, I would say it has to be doing our best. There is one thing that we could do and it is to share out information. I would say it is not quite appropriate to consider it as education, but more like to expose this information to others, and this could indirectly help us.
It is kind of also sharing my own experiences to clients and maybe clients would learn something from things that they never encountered before.

Any difficulties encountered when hiring staff?
Since we don’t need to hire a lot of people, it won’t be a big problem to us.
Generally speaking, I think it wasn’t that bad in hiring people. In my field, there are many people who have a degree in design but most of them have zero experience. And it is best for us not to hire someone who is completely fresh to the business, it is fine if we hire these people as interns or part-timers but definitely not full time.

Does the Macau Design Centre help your business?
I wouldn’t say they would directly help us, but definitely we were benefitted indirectly, like they would ask us if we are interested in certain project once in awhile. Also, all related people working in the same design centre and I think the image is good and we also know other designers and we could cooperate together.
In fact, in direct terms, they provide a place for us to operate which requires a cheaper rental as well as other hardware support.
We knew about this place from our designer word of month and during that time we were also finding a place to move.

How is your plan to expand your business, such as in the Mainland?
It is not necessary for us to expand only in the Mainland as long as we can expand our business outside of Macau.
There are definitely more opportunities outside of Macau but it is a matter of how to grab those opportunities effectively. Definitely there is more competition out there but we still need to go out and compete with others, if we don’t compete with them we don’t know whether we are capable or not.
It is definitely difficult to find new opportunities out there all of sudden, and strategies are needed for that, unless you know some people, I mean usually there won’t be people approaching you suddenly. I would say it is more reasonable to know people outside when expanding businesses.
In Hong Kong, we have jobs only once in awhile, we had discussed with clients there before, and the competition is huge in Hong Kong but we do have intention to take part in the market there.

What is your plan in the coming year?
Well, we don’t really have a solid plan because we are too busy, we would be more likely to see how the situation is and then plan our next action. But expanding our business would be things that we need to work on. In terms of my area in web page making, we might explore something that I want to do rather than doing for clients, like inventing things that could help people but at the same time make profits, such as Uber.

How do you see the market in the future?
I think it will be good, but honestly this field is something that is not a commodity for people, and the industry would be highly affected by the condition of the city’s economy.

How could the government help in cultural creative industry?
I personally don’t really agree on the concept of cultural creative industry because it is too vague. I don’t think the government needs to do anything on the matter, but funding for particular areas could be workable like subsidising people to make long films, but most importantly they have to find the most suitable judges or evaluators or to ensure the mechanism of this funding is suitable for the city. Nevertheless, I’m not quite sure on the government supporting companies’ business.
There is one thing that, the government a lot of the times needs the help from designers, and I wouldn’t particularly favour taking government’s jobs. For instance, they would ask us to make free pitching for partaking public tender, but it is always a waste of time and effort for companies to make a proposal which at the end of the day got rejected by them.
I think it is more fair and reasonable to pay for the pitching, like a deposit, and this has been widely discussed among the design industry.
Also, many also think that the government puts more attention on the price. Sometimes it is not only the price but it is worth considering whether the price is worth the service.
For the government, I feel like they need to know in details about the projects so they invite a bunch of designers to take part in the public tender, but obviously this depends on different government departments.
I know it is rather sensitive and controversial if the government is to choose a particular company to do the job [rather through a public tender], but I feel like, since Macau is a small place, people would think that finding some particular person or company to do a job is only because they know each other, and this norm also applies to works from public institutions and big companies, but of course they need to tell the public why they choose a particular company, it could be probably this particular company is capable of doing something that is not common. However, the fact is that the government sometimes is using the norm by granting projects to someone they are familiar with, and I think this shouldn’t be this way.