It’s a wrap! February 2018
February started with the launch of the Veganz Online Shop in Austria. We’ve gathered a fine group of bloggers and Instagramers and invited them to shop in the store. For me personally, it was quite fun to watch what different people bought for the budget we gave them. Given Veganz is currently working on making it as easy as possible to shop vegan food in all sorts of convenience stores all across Europe, it was also super lovely to be a part of the contract signing with Carrefour, the largest food retailer in France.
Having been working freelance and mostly by myself for the past four years, my collaboration with Veganz challenges me in a whole lot of different ways. I’ve been setting up internal comms and briefing processes. One of the solutions I’ve found valuable to communicate with distributed teams in the past years has always been Trello. I organize my own workload using the app and I’ve always really liked using it when working with others. I believe Trello brings more transparency and structure, so I introduced it to the marketing team at Veganz.
Seeing how much more transparency Trello has brought to the marketing team at Veganz has really helped kill some of the time consuming projects the team had to deal with. We’ve been using the software for a little over five weeks, and while there is still a long way to go for the system to really bring all the benefits, it’s been an improvement that’s helped organize and communicate projects without having them disappear from people’s sights and minds.
This past month I’ve also started teaching. I’m giving a course on social media for designers. The first lesson must have been quite shocking for the students. I care very little about follower counts and engagement rates. To me, what matters most when it comes to social are the human connections and opportunities one can unlock using the available tools. I’m not planning on teaching how to make a living being a social media celebrity. I don’t know if one can study how to have genuine relationships, but I do know I’m not very interested in teaching people how to trick different platforms' algorithms. I really believe that people follow others online who they find inspirational. They follow people they think do cool stuff, so it’s more about doing cool stuff and less about following/unfollowing to get people’s attention in a rather unethical way. We’ve, for example, watched Mr. Bingo’s Kickstarter video, talked about Lauren Hom’s idea to letter blackboards in restaurants around NYC in return for a free lunch, and we’ve also discussed LadyVenom’s article on how she got to 270K followers.
I also had the chance to participate in a workshop organized by the incredible agency (and one of my incredible clients) Hanzo. I also spoke at the LifeStartFest at the London College of Fashion amongst some other incredible people, such as Victoria Stoyanova, Erik Rodin, Kristi Kuiken, Gemma Milne, Luke Whitehead, and other wonderful minds who joined the crowd as mentors. I really hope I get to work with LifeStart even more in the future.
As a fun fact, I was one of the sources for the New York Times article about the Viennese ball season. Anyway, I’m still really busy working on way too many projects, but will be launching another Kickstarter project in March to fund a guide of the Berlin café scene. If you’d like to have a coffee, please check where I am these days! I’ll try to make it happen.
Okay, bring it on, crazy busy March!
