Dogstudio, Hello Monday, and Set Snail create the “Motley Crowd” Collective to explore & build the future of immersive events

Motley — Definition 📙

You can describe a group of things as a motley collection if you think they are made up of many different people or things. adj n

Brought to you by the jolly pirates from Hello Monday, Dogstudio, and Set Snail, Motley Crowd is a collective (effort) aiming at challenging the current state of virtual events. That’s right.

Wait, but how did we get there?

Well, do you believe in synchronicity? You know, when things happen at the very same moment and for reasons you cannot really explain? This is exactly what this story is about.

Quickly rewinding to 2016 when I (Henry, Creative Director, and CEO at Dogstudio) finally met with Andreas, managing partner at Hello Monday as we were both speakers at the Digital Design Days of Milan.

A few conferences, two or three drinks, and one good restaurant later, we can really say we not only both met a new friend, but also discovered a lot of similarities in the approach, values, and expectations we both had as design agency (co-)owners. Quality of craft, transparency, purpose, and storytelling. We didn’t know back then, but this trip kinda laid the ground level for Motley Crowd to exist at some point.

Most topics during those days and consistently during the years that followed were around the lack of collaboration between similar agencies and most likely linked to the same factors: competition, ego, paranoïa, money, etc… to which Andreas consistently answered “it doesn’t make sense to see other agencies as competitors, there’s plenty of digital work for everyone”.

Spot on.

Make Love, Not War 💜

Now fast-forwarding to 2020 and the pandemic we all know. Suddenly companies from entertainment, culture, and tech to name a few are reaching out to Dog Studio, Hello Monday and Set Snail (an agency started by previous Mondayteers).

In a matter of months, we embark on the creation and delivery of Tomorrowland: Around The World, Hello Monday collaborates with SDU, Bartlett School of Architecture, Set Snail on The Chrome Summit, and later on the famous Google I/O, finally on our side we completed Naoz, and really recently the Palnorte Festival.

Different challenges, different angles, built with different solutions and approaches, but all towards a common goal: making virtual events a bit less of yet another Zoom meeting, and a bit more of a collective experience to remember.

As we released those projects, the willingness and desire to formally and informally collaborate together grew bigger and stronger than before, and at some point shit (excuse my french ) got real: some members of our team collaborated directly with the team of Hello Monday, some projects we couldn’t take were floated by them and the other way around, we discussed facing some challenges together, etc…

All in all, it was happening: we decided the relationship between our agencies was a thing and all it needed was a name and a website.

That’s it!

Motley C̶r̶u̶e Crowd was born. 🏴‍☠️

So, what’s Motley Crowd?

While we remain three separate companies, Motley Crowd is a way to explore and create inspiring things in an evolving space with skilled people we like.

Why you ask? Well, as much as this pandemic is hopefully slowly ending, we’re convinced that events in the future will have a virtual component thanks to the new possibilities they offer in terms of accessibility, customization, immersiveness, and creativity. People will still go to SXSW in Austin, but it’s great and democratic to enable people outside to participate and it reduces the carbon footprint as well. So we believe in a future with hybrid event experiences.

We are beyond excited about this fairly uncharted territory and we see a potential for more exceptional and extremely crafted events by brands/teams/artists/organizations that are looking to stand out and engage with visitors in new ways.

Zoom fatigue is a thing, and so is virtual event fatigue…now we’re out to shake things up, so why join the navy if you can be a pirate?

👉 motleycrowd.live

Dogstudio is a multidisciplinary Creative Studio with offices in Chicago, Mexico, Belgium, and Amsterdam, committed to crafting brandings, digital products & experiences that move people. Our clients include Microsoft, ZOOX ( Amazon ), Adobe, Hulu, Tomorrowland, Time Magazine, American Airlines, Rappi, The Museum Of Science and Industry of Chicago, The Navy Pier, Crypt TV, Quanta Magazine, bla bla bla, who’s still reading anyway?