In an exclusive interview with
Website Planet, Vovi Studio shares insights into their journey of becoming a trusted name in award-winning branding and website solutions.
Over the past six years, Vovi has built a reputation for crafting memorable brands that leave lasting impressions on audiences. Led by a team of creative experts, they aim to surpass even renowned agencies like Pentagram, consistently delivering exceptional, unforgettable work.
From small e-commerce projects to high-profile partnerships with billion-dollar tech companies, Vovi’s dedication to excellence continues to set them apart in the industry.
Introduce Vovi to our audience, please.
Vovi Studio is a branding and website company. We’ve been in business for six years, and we’re known for delivering award-winning branding and website solutions to our clients. We have a team of incredibly skilled professionals, and we’ve carefully assembled the exact skills and processes required to deliver award-winning brands or websites.
We emphasize “award-winning” because, statistically, creative and award-winning branding or website work is about 11 times more effective at driving market growth for businesses. Our philosophy, however, goes beyond just that statistic. When creating a brand or product, the most important factor is that it leaves a lasting impression on the person who interacts with it—whether they use it, look at it, or consider purchasing it.
Memorable brands are incredibly valuable, and creating a brand or experience that people remember and talk about is key. Having award-winning branding can significantly contribute to that memorability. Of course, having an excellent product helps, and if it’s a digital experience, we can assist in that area as well. But ultimately, our role is to take your great product and create a brand that people will remember, easing the marketing burden on your team.
Share the narrative of your company: What inspired the concept, and how has it progressed to date?
The company was born out of my frustration with working in a marketing agency. Fundamentally, the marketing agency model is broken, as are many service companies. Their goal is to have the smallest number of employees and the largest number of clients, and the gap between those two creates profit. What happens is that many talented people either go in-house with their clients or leave due to high turnover. In a business where the product is determined by the quality of the people, having a high turnover is a bad idea.
With that insight, Vovi was built to focus on retaining talented people. To keep the best talent, you have to provide them with interesting work. In most marketing agencies, people specialize in specific industries, like construction or gravel companies, which isn’t always exciting for creative professionals. At Vovi, we focus on creating memorable brands for various types of businesses. We aim to become experts at crafting experiences that people will remember, whether through branding or websites, and we validate that through creative awards.
Beyond just interesting work, we strive to make Vovi a fun and inspiring place to work, so people want to stay. Traditional agencies overwork their staff and fail to provide a compelling vision. At Vovi, we do things differently. We encourage our team to do the most excellent work, giving them as much time as they need to make it happen. We won’t release any work unless it’s memorably good and will resonate with people. Our goal is for our work to be so impactful that industry professionals will reach out and say, “Are you the ones who did that brand for my competitor? I’d like to speak to you.”
I tell the team that great brands are a 9 or 10 out of 10, and we need to give an extra 10% in everything we do. That extra 10% often lies in the core idea—something that may be harder to achieve, riskier, or that breaks some conventional rule of design or marketing. But without pushing those boundaries, the result wouldn’t be as memorable.
Over the last six years, we’ve grown from working with small e-commerce businesses—where we over-delivered to earn recommendations—to now partnering with billion-dollar tech companies for product launches and branding projects. We’ve won 17 awards in the last two years with a team of just 15 people, which I think is pretty good progress. Our commitment to going the extra mile, often in ways that may not be immediately obvious, ensures that the brands we create are memorable, helping our clients stand out in their industries.
Could you outline the services you provide?
Sure! We offer a wide range of services, starting with branding in all its forms—whether that’s developing a tone of voice, designing a logo, or creating a comprehensive brand guidelines document. We’re also very skilled in creating websites, UX guidelines, and app guidelines. Beyond that, we help keep the brand alive and healthy over time. For instance, after completing a branding project, we can create your ads, social media templates, and other marketing materials.
On the digital side, we deliver websites and other digital products. We primarily build in Webflow, but we also work with Shopify and can design websites to be handed off to other developers if you’d like to build in a different language. We manage that process as well. Additionally, we have technical teams in place to handle more complex development needs.
Finally, we also provide 3D motion design, photography, and video services. So, in essence, we cover all the owned assets a brand might need—videos, advertising, motion graphics—anything to help explain or advertise your product. We also create websites that convert and deliver results. What we don’t handle is PR or paid marketing; we don’t manage paid campaigns, but we cover everything else from a creative and design standpoint.
What is Vovi’s overarching mission?
Our mission is to be better than Pentagram. I know that’s an ambitious statement, but we truly admire Pentagram—they’re an exciting branding agency with a stellar reputation. I want Vovi to have a reputation for consistently and sustainably delivering brands that surpass theirs.
I genuinely believe the quality of our work is on par with Pentagram and other large agencies—if there’s any difference, it’s minimal. My goal is to build a strong reputation, be trusted by larger companies, and take on even more exciting and large-scale projects. In short, we want to grow and push the boundaries of what we can achieve.
What distinguishes you from other companies in the same domain?
There are certainly many companies in the same space, but what sets us apart is our unique approach to branding, which focuses heavily on being memorable. Additionally, we have an incredibly talented team. Our creative director, for instance, has worked with major names like Google, Apple, Netflix, and the NFL, bringing a wealth of experience. Complementing him are others with equally impressive backgrounds, and together, we focus on delivering a memorable experience for our clients’ consumers.
Our goal is to imprint our clients’ brands in consumers’ minds for the right reasons, ensuring they remember them positively. In today’s competitive landscape, it’s hard enough for a brand to gain a share of voice, let alone a share of the market. That’s where we come in—our agency is focused on giving brands a fundamental edge in how they present themselves to the world.
It’s like when Russell Brand, despite being controversial, stands out because he has a distinctive, charismatic personality. Brands need that same charisma to be remembered, and that’s what we aim to deliver. Ambitious companies, bold companies, and those looking to win in their markets by doing things differently would naturally see us as the right choice.
What is your vision for the future of your industry?
It’s unclear exactly how AI will affect all industries, but it’s certain that our industry will be impacted. Over time, I believe AI will completely transform the global economy to the point where it might become unrecognizable. It has the potential to be a history-changing event, where traditional economic cycles are disrupted due to this entirely new variable.
In the next 5 to 10 years, I don’t think AI will evolve fast enough to completely revolutionize industries, but we’ll likely see a gradual proliferation of useful AI technologies. We’re already witnessing some great software tools using AI to improve their capabilities. Over the next couple of years, we’ll likely see software become significantly better due to AI, leading to disruptions in various industries, including ours. For example, we may see AI tools that can turn Figma designs into fully coded websites, which would be a major shift, though not too far-fetched.
That said, I don’t foresee the fundamentals of how the world works changing drastically in the next decade. Businesses will still need to stand out, be memorable, have charisma, and use clever strategies to market themselves. AI tools might help streamline these processes, but the need for creative, strategic thinking will remain. While some people may lose their jobs to AI, especially those who are just starting their journey or in more junior roles, I believe those who excel and have a strong reputation will continue to thrive.
In short, the future is uncertain, much like Brexit was. No one can truly predict what’s going to happen, except perhaps a few experts at places like OpenAI. Some believe there’s a moment when AI will suddenly become super-intelligent and change everything, but I think we’re already seeing that shift. Technologies like ChatGPT are already incredibly advanced, and the changes are happening now, just not overnight. The innovation is here, and it’s growing rapidly, but we’re still in the process of adapting to it.
Find out more at:
www.vovi.studio
