The Story Behind Konichiwa’s New Makeover

Konichiwa (pronounced: “kon-nee-chee-wah”) is the basic way to say hello or good afternoon in Japanese. The Konichiwa story began when we opened our doors to free-thinking entrepreneurs and independent businesses in 2015. We’re a friendly and motivated family of freelancers that live to help startups, social enterprises and brands with purpose thrive. As long as you’re open to creative and strategic help that’ll help your brand flourish, we can’t wait to say “hello!”

What’s The Inspiration Behind Konichiwa?

Our founder Ursula was inspired to launch Konichiwa after witnessing the explosion of young, vibrant and exciting startups that sprang up in the UK following the financial crisis. Ursula had graduated with a degree in Creative Advertising Strategy from London College of Communication at the height of the recession and noticed that a lot of talented freelancers wanted to support those kinds of businesses, but didn’t have the opportunity through conventional agencies. This sparked the idea of creating a family of freelancers who could come together to support new independent-minded startups, and Konichiwa was born.

People faced hardship during the recession and a lot of businesses closed, but that didn’t stop opportunities from opening up. Retail outlets were shutting up shop, but that gave birth to a new wave of entrepreneurs setting up their own businesses and testing out new business ideas. It was an exciting time. We hopped on the bandwagon and started a PR agency that provided services which solely catered to this refreshing and innovative bunch.

Our aim at Konichiwa is to help companies who are just starting out or in their early years to kickstart their brand journey. We offer affordable pricing which works for startups but also small to medium enterprise clients who want to build long-term service partnerships. The potential of freelancers to nurture small businesses is changing the landscape. We at Konichiwa believe that our model is highly beneficial to both businesses and freelancers in terms of cost, the regularity of work, widening portfolios and constantly working with new, exciting and innovative people. In addition, it’s really beneficial to us as a business, as our model allows us to be agile and adaptive.

The Website Has Just Undergone A Major Makeover, Why The Change?

After four years of this incredible journey, we decided to upgrade our website alongside the services we provide. Our baby is now grown up and we wanted to present Konichiwa the way we are today. So much has changed as an agency in that time, we wanted to bring everything up to date!

As a creative and communications agency, we look to provide services for each stage of an entrepreneur’s journey. From launching your business to building your brand presence, to keeping your message fresh through PR and marketing campaigns, we want to cover the three stages that are most important to establishing your brand in the market.

We spent some time last year to redefine who we were and how we can improve our offering as an agency that specialises working not only with independents but also startups and purpose-driven businesses.

This meant evaluating our process. We started with how we deliver our services. First, we focused on how important it is for businesses who are starting out to have a really strong foundation. In light of this, we introduced a PLAN phase and worked out all the services we currently had or needed to facilitate that. We understand that only a perfect first impression will do justice to the blood, sweat and tears you’ve put into your business. Once we feel really clear on your business’s brand messages, we kick off the CREATE phase. This is where we unleash our family of freelancers and their creative skills, from logos to content, to copywriting. Of course, producing brilliant creative content is useless if it doesn’t reach your audiences. That’s why we put the ACTIVATE phase in place so that we can work with you to find the right way to implement the services and see the project through from start to finish. This is a really important part of the mix. We understand how important it is to help implement the creative toolkits we give our clients, whilst maintaining a flexible approach. We do this by offering either a full-service approach, where we deliver the strategy and toolkits for you or a personalised workshop approach which helps our clients gain the tools and confidence to implement it themselves. 

How Did You Apply Your Approach To The New Website?

It all starts with the three core phases – plan, create & activate. This is what we apply to our clients and ourselves as a company as well.

PLAN –

When it comes to planning, we’re talking business development and strategic thinking. Danielle, Oliver and Ursula spent 2017-2018 looking at Konichiwa’s services and thinking about how, as a team, we could reshape them to reflect what we find our clients were needing the most. We ran a series of development sessions as a team, where we packaged up our services up into four key areas (eg. Launch Your Brand, Build Your Brand, PR & Marketing Campaign & Content)

This led initially to a refresh of our visual identity, and the decision to drop ‘PR’ from our name, to reflect the wider creative and strategic services we provide. To chart a course forward, our communications strategist Oliver worked with founder and creative director Ursula to develop our own Brand Blueprint. Ursula then gathered the core team (Oliver, Danielle, Sophie) for an ideation session about how we can present our new services in a fun and engaging way. This is where the concept for the Bento Box came about. Our creative director had the initial idea and we used this session to develop how we would structure everything on the new website as you see today. We wanted to get across the fun nature of working with our team on projects as well as the pick and mix nature of our services.

CREATE –

Once we had fleshed out our PLAN, Ursula (Creative Director) and Sophie (in-house designer) put their heads together to translate the strategy and approach from the ideation session for the Bento into a set of Creative Assets, comprising of illustrated icons. We also created some animations to help reflect Konichiwa’s 3 core value propositions, which came from our Brand Blueprint; creative + strategic, perfectly crafted stories and handpicked motivated team.

Whilst we started putting together the Creative Assets for the website, our brand strategist Danielle began writing copy in line with our new messaging from the Brand Blueprint.

The whole website started to take on its own personality and shape as the creative assets developed by our in-house designer Sophie, and key elements created by our WordPress designer Chris were implemented. With a basic structure now in place, we worked with AD, a web design and developer who specialises in interactive websites and animation.

Finally, we turned to the rest of the creative team to get their input on how we should shape the final elements of the site, including a team interview and tips for businesses starting out. 

 

ACTIVATE –

Our Campaign Launch Strategy was created by Clare, our Social Media Specialist. Based on her advice, we invested in a mix of organic and paid advertising for the website launch. The creative content used for marketing the campaign was handled by Sophie and was implemented across all social media channels including Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn by Zoey, Ursula and Clare.

What’s The Next Step For Konichiwa With The Relaunch Of The Website?

2019 is an exciting year for Konichiwa. Our new website is more than just a relaunch: it’s a chance for us to say, this is who we are now, and this is where we’re heading.

Since launching, so much has changed for us, including our team, our approach and the kind of clients we work with. We are clearer about our vision and principles, and naturally, we are a bit more grown up – more ambitious!

The past four years have taken us on an incredible journey. During this time, we’ve listened to our clients and ourselves and realised that we are essentially on a mission to support startups at every stage of their journey. Instead of providing businesses with just creative assets and promotional material, we assist in building a sustainable model with an attention-grabbing campaign, whilst aiding growth in the longer term.

After our first three years of helping clients launch their businesses, we took a step back. We made the decision to develop our own services in order to meet the needs of free-thinking entrepreneurs who have the independent spirit we share. We wanted to utilise our knowledge of working with these kinds of businesses and offer our clients unique services that respond to not just our expertise in the field (marketing, comms creative) but an understanding of how these businesses function over a cycle of, say, year 1- 5, and also how to work across different industries, with different size client teams, and with different timelines, budgets and resources.

For example, an entrepreneur might come to us with a brilliant idea they want to launch, as well as seek investment. As supporters of brilliant ideas, we put together a pricing structure which allows for each iteration of this development. We understand that a startup is dependent on a head-turning campaign to create revenue streams, so we help them plan for this with a budget over a year-long plan.

This is only part of the reason we have revamped our brand and upgraded our website, however. One thing we wanted to focus on more this year was the amazing collaborative nature of our team, and we felt this website we reflected that really nicely. It’s not just the outcome which is important, but the process.

Our family of freelancers at Konichiwa make up a huge part of who we are. They not only come to us because of our exciting clients and projects but also because they all have their own specialisms and business experience. This makes picking the right team members for a project really simple, as they have the right expertise to bring to the table. For instance, if we’re working with a restaurant on their marketing, we’d allocate our social media specialist Clare, who has a fair few years under her belt working with marketing hospitality brands. Our photographer Kym can also be brought in to the project, as she specialises in food and lifestyle photography. Therefore, with Kym’s keen interest in the local and national food scene, and Clare’s strategic know – how, this is the perfect match for this particular marketing project.

What we always work hard to achieve, and what we believe really differentiates us, is the value we bring to our clients through this flexible model. By choosing Konichiwa, you not only get access to a core team who understands the startup journey inside out and will see you through the process, but also a bespoke, hand-picked creative team that is highly motivated and all working efficiently from a single brief overseen by the creative director and project manager. Our freelancers love collaborating and bouncing ideas off each other – let’s face it, it’s way better than working solo!

Collaboration is key at Konichiwa, not just with the team, but with our clients. We have devised several workshops that reflect this, from co-creation workshops to help entrepreneurs refine their ideas and align core aspects of their brand, bridging business strategy with brand strategy, to discovery sessions where we explore fresh ideas to tell a brand’s story, drafting a handpicked team of different skills and talents to get a 3D perspective.

Our flexible model has another really important benefit for our clients: cost. There’s no escaping it – with the economy in the state it’s in, we know that businesses need their marketing budgets to stretch further and further. With margins under pressure, our clients need truly flexible solutions. Our agile approach allows us to adapt to this. In fact, in the future, we see more of a shift towards creative services being delivered through these kinds of collaborative models, rather than traditional bricks and mortar agencies. We welcome the change: it’s not just beneficial for our business model, but also great for keeping us agile, open to new ideas and at our most creative.

So what’s the future for Konichiwa? At the moment, it’s mostly rolling out our new website! As we feel so much has happened since we launched, our focus is to get that message out to the world. But that’s just the start.

We have plans to expand the team in areas, with some freelance positions and a community manager to come on board to help get our message out there but also with managing the team. As for our Indies in Bristol campaign which focuses on local events like Startup Stories, we expect to see these sorts of things starting up again in Summer 2019 with some exciting collaborations, on a larger scale! In the future, we also hope to roll out our new services through group workshops and programmes, as well as one-on-one, to aid businesses with launchpad success, and taking them through the whole startup lifecycle, in a more supportive and collaborative process.

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Written by Zoey, Ursula & Oliver.