Dogs just wanna have friends
Or why and how we decided to join a bunch of talented friends to be future-proof while remaining true to ourselves. Hoo-ah!
Rollercoaster love
Running an agency is mainly a really large collection of up and down moments, and oh boy, what a ride it has been so far for us.
The nostalgic me still remembers the day we landed in Chicago with my business partner Nico (you can call us Nico & Rico, your improbable duo) now more than five years ago, dropped by at the closest IKEA *unpaid sponsorship* not-so-fresh-out-of-the-plane, bought a couple of mattresses, the necessities to cook some pasta and whatnot, and head to a temporary apartment where Nico would stay for the foreseeable future before his family could join. Good times!
The following years were a nice blend of surreal meetings, imposter syndrome, countless introductions, regular jokes, twin bed hotel rooms in NYC hotels to save money, cheap flights, projects we lost or won for both good and bad reasons, and more than anything countless times when we didn’t consider “no” a satisfying answer.
Running an agency is all about growth and getting back up again and again…and again. We ran Dogstudio as if there was no tomorrow.
Born in a small town in one of the back-then least tech-savvy part of Belgium, with no major brands around, no major agency background for any of us, no ivy-league school education, we collectively built the company we thought to be right. The great part about starting with absolutely nothing is this chance to do it your own way.
In the end, it took years of very hard work, random and fated ( Nah, I actually don’t really believe in fate ) encounters, award-winning work, people trust ( both our team and our clients ), and buckets of luck for us to collaborate with some of the largest forward-thinking, culture-changing, and innovative brands *slash* organizations out there: Microsoft, Google, Supercell, Star Atlas, The New York Times, World Expo 2020, Adobe, Tomorrowland, Jaeger-Lecoultre, or Time Magazine, to name but a few.
Our team won Webby’s, multiple sites of the year, dozens and dozens of awards, gave design and tech talks all over the world, but more importantly provided what we hoped to be delightful experiences to millions and millions of users across the world.
We’re obviously proud of what we have accomplished so far and we definitely push ourselves trying to deliver experiences people will love or hate, but will definitely talk about.
People are people
We love meeting people and building relationships. Fortune cookies would say “happiness is only real when shared” and just looking at Dogstudio, we’re speaking about dozens and dozens of individuals we were lucky enough to meet and grow with. Choosing this particular line of work wouldn’t make any sense if not for the people we might and will encounter during our journey. The ones who will believe in you, your team, and because of what you’re collectively trying to achieve, will decide to stick around for a little while.
It has been shown multiple times that during our life, we were most likely going to spend more time interacting with our colleagues than with our own family ( think about it!), and that’s the reason why we always had this absolute focus on “Leaving a Mark”, paired with a strong belief we had a responsibility to make it count by surrounding ourselves with people we believed to be amazing individuals.
Is it because of their skills? Yes, definitely, but mainly and more importantly because of the right value alignment, and well, all in all, getting along for a ride which often proves to be as rewarding as it’s challenging.
Growing pains
Everything’s perfect, right? So why poop the party? Well, after all those years, including a mobile revolution, and a godawful 2-year pandemic, we also know and understand for a fact, that nothing is ever permanent. After all these years of building our very own legacy, we really started to really feel how volatile agency life was.
Sure, projects got bigger, more interesting, more visible, and all in all more rewarding, but we still felt this pressure of a ticking clock on our shoulders: when would we get tired of steering this ship alone? How much information are we missing? How many more times would we need to bang our heads on walls to learn new tricks? Was there a magic recipe for longevity? And more important: is being independent a necessity or just a pointless badge of honor we wear to maintain a sense of control? Doom and gloom right?
Do you remember 2Advanced, Cuban Council, Legwork Studios, Soleil Noir, Anonymous Paris to name but a few?
Amazing, then you’re old enough in the game to understand and remember these used to be some of the very best studios out there, and yet they just disappeared at some point thanks to tiredness, market cycles, changing founders, life…
What we know for sure, is that we don’t want to end up in oblivion because we were trying to “Leave our Mark” by ourselves. Isn’t it about time to properly team-up and build up a proper legacy?
What’s next?
We’re not going to lie, it has been a challenge to identify the perfect match, people with the exact same approach, people who could handle Nico’s funny but lousy jokes, people who would understand our obsession for craft, details, and stories, but above all, people with a maturity we had yet to reach.
Technically you might argue many companies could have fit the bill, but over the years as we received numerous marks of interest from various companies, we did seem to constantly hit the same roadblock: values.
Culture-fit. Culture-fit. Culture-fit. Repeat it three times and when you’re done, repeat it again. There are a lot of players out there, and we were adamant about one thing: we’d prefer to just disappear than to join one of the big consultancies, or turn into one of those mindless digital factories.
We know for a fact Dogstudio has a human, strong, talented, committed, and *insert superlatives* team, and we pride ourselves on the quality of the interactions we managed to keep over the years. Especially, how tight-knit everyone is, despite the distance between some of them, language, or culture. That’s by far our biggest collective achievement.
Joining something bigger than us, needs to make sense from both a human and professional point of view, because yes, we’re still out there to make an impact, create memories, meet people, and maybe collect some more awards along the way.
Bromances naturally happen in the most unexpected places, and this one happened to begin 263km from where it all started for us. As of today, Dogstudio decided to join the impressive roster of DEPT®, and their lovely “big enough to cope, small enough to care” mantra. We’ll be offering our savoir-faire ( It’s “know-how” for fancy people), in creative and immersive experiences to their extraordinary network of talents.
It fits like a glove
Yes, and a velvet one we might add: across our numerous interactions, we noticed a perfect culture alignment, but more specifically this very same ambition and hunger we also have when it comes to making an impact as a digital company. Dogstudio has been considered an underdog (no pun intended) for so long, and those open-hearted exchanges resonated with us as they transitioned from being that very same challenger to now one of the fastest-growing and relevant players out there.
We strongly believe this move will allow us to best position ourselves for the future: with our history building award-winning immersive real-time experiences, cutting-edge 3D virtual events ( see Tomorrowland and the Virtual Dubaï World Expo to name but a few ), or our growing list of world-class Web3 / Metaverse-related projects, we will now be able to rely on DEPT® to accelerate our growth and supercharge our skills in what we believe to be some of the most exciting challenges for our society.
Cherry on the cake: it came as no surprise that their unique approach already seduced some of the most respected and awarded firms out there, with some of them we’re already proud to call friends such as Hello Monday and Basic Agency, two world-class design firms which have been obviously known for their work, but also for their world-class company cultures.
As an eminent doctor of my childhood once said: “The way I see it, if you’re gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?”.
Well, in that kind of company, we certainly don’t lack style.
More than ever, we’re looking forward to keeping on making great work with great people, and the honesty, trust, and transparency we constantly felt in our exchanges were second to none. We believe this relationship to be the best way for us to truly extend our reach, get a chance to leave the biggest mark in and for the world, and still remain true to what we have been until now: a jolly band of ambitious dreamers misfits.
Today is the first day of the rest of our journey, and we’re just getting started.
Watch us.
