Thankfully Simon has responded to my letter by email, which I am really grateful for.
'Hi Georgina,
Thanks for getting in touch and sorry for the delay in getting back to you. Your handwritten letter and doodle is good and here’s the answers to your questions:
1) When we started, we wanted a name that wasn’t our surnames and would stand out. Robot Food stuck.
2) Everything was a challenge setting up. Lack of funds, lack of experience and lack of clients all meant we needed to get noticed, but without any clients we had to design concepts and get them featured anywhere we could to build on our lack of portfolio.
3) I didn’t go to university. I studied art and design ant college and our co founder, Mike had a degree in design.
4) Vocation brewery was great to work on and it’s the project we’re most proud of. The client had confidence to leave the direction to us and we feel we created a pretty compelling brand. It was our first experience in beer and it it’s had huge success, being stocked in Tesco, ASDA and CoOp nationally, as well as all the coolest bars and beer shops. It’s also landed us work with Carlsberg and we took the project on with a limited budget for what it would bring to our portfolio.
5) I admire anyone who sticks to their guns and follows their own beliefs. All the greatest creatives have done so and it always pays off.
6) We decline a lot of projects, as we’re quite picky. We don’t want to take on everything and grow for the sake of it and we want to keep the focus on new creative projects only, as roll-out is dull. We’re only interested in working with good people on projects that will benefit our portfolio.
7) Inspiration can come from anywhere, but pressure is the best way to draw it out.
8) To avoid a creative block you just reset and think of the challenge from a whole new angle. It’s not so hard to steer ideas in a different direction.
9) My biggest achievement has been retaining every good creative we’ve taken on and creating an environment that they are proud to call home.
10) If you want to get hired stand out. We took on a couple of graduates who created bespoke books. When I asked them who they’ve sent it to they both said, ‘just Robot Food’. They didn’t just want a job. They wanted to work here. One came with us on a research trip to New York while on a placement and wen’t on to lead a presentation to a major retailer in his first month and the other went on to designing Cadbury Mini Rolls pack fronts in his first month. They’re both now key players in our team.
I hope this helps!
Thanks,
Simon'
Simons response's are really informative, concise and straight to the point, this is due to the nature of quick questions, which allow for a more direct response than in an interview. However, he also seems like quite a direct, straight to the point person which is probably how he managed to set up such a successful studio. Using this information I am going to put together my creative report, I want to try and create a more structural or packaging inspired format as this directly relates the studio.
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