Nicolas Roope

In business, no individuals work in a vacuum. Interview with Nicolas Roope, founder of Poke

Words: 1.444 | Time: 6 minutes

What is Poke?

It’s a creative agency. We do a lot of communication, design, web design and architecture. We reconstitute the digital presence of companies and figure out how to structure it from a logical standpoint, as well as a grand perspective. Nowdays, digital presence is a much layered enterprise. It’s not doing one thing, but you have to deal with: brand expression, behaviour, graphical identity, visual identity, functionality, applications, integrations and services.

If I’m not wrong, your education is in sculpture.

Yeah! Lucky break, really. The road in this was just a good timing thing. The book “The Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell questions our obsession with genius, brings down people like Bill Gate’s fortune and shows how timing is such an important aspect. I came out of Art School just when multimedia was in a mini bubble and joined a digital art group. It was a totally brand new media and it needed to be explored. It needed much more artistic inspiration before. I decided what the thing was there for and how it should work, I played with it and I was successful. There was no training in what I did. Even now, the training is not really suitable to educate people for my job. A fine arts degree is pretty good preparation. I use artistic thinking every single day. The most elegant solutions are not logical outputs. It’s not like a computer that you stick a bunch of problems in and it churns out the right answer.

Without a vision, you cannot go anywhere, isn’t it?

It sounds obvious, but if you accept that, then you also accept that creativity has to be complicit to the process, you have to embrace creativity and its problematic aspects. In business, it’s a work called ‘risk’ which people don’t like.

When did you start Poke?

In 2001. On one level, it’s a very commercially driven business, on another level we wanted to transform business, but we knew that it requires wild and creative thinking. It’s not just trying to sell people stuff using whatever the current trends are, which make it easier to sell, but rather going for what the real issues are as we see them and pick things out of the air, create right results for them, which is artistic and creative. And again it draws on that training. On my terms my liberal art education was walking into a white studio in the morning and trying to figure out what the hell was worth making sense of. It ended up being what in business people are struggling to figure out at the moment. It’s a difficult question and the most meaningful one. Once you can answer that question, you’ve taken on a course. If it’s the wrong course, you waste every penny. There lies the challenge on how to find the right direction and trajectory and start to move it forward bringing in all the skills and the know-hows to make that happens.

What is innovative in your approach?

Digital’s greatest strength is to connect things together. I know it sounds obvious, but most things are not well integrated, it’s very schizoid sometimes, very strong in some areas and very weak in others. The strongest holistic simple purposeful things come from start-up community; everything else is corrupt in its own ways. We really need to approach any aspects of business across the border, but with more layers in skills and sensibilities that run across those divisions. We have recently acquired a new client, Mulberry. One reason we won that contract is because we helped them understand that in luxury within ecommerce, you can’t separate the brand experience and the service experience. These things need to be tackled as a whole.

So, how do you combine creativity and technology?

Often digital projects are very technically heavy, defined by the culture of technology, becoming robotic, clunky and mechanical, and because of this they lose that feeling of luxury. But, of course, you can do both and we were successful.

Because code defines service and experience, you can define that experience how you want, yet when you are dealing with transactions at checkouts there are certain steps you need to take, you can take those steps in any order and as long as you orientate people and take care of the procedural steps you can still be very open to define those steps exactly how you want.

In the world of ecommerce, it is often not just a design problem, more an organisational perception problem that prevents organisation from dealing with the digital things in an integrated way.

With the light bulb project (Plumen), we look at projects in certain categories that are, in the case of lighting, defined by low cost economics, but from a cultural design perspective as well, because at the moment the major players in light bulbs are interested in high volumes. They go for generic products and neither of those allow for a different category of lighting, so this is the opportunity we saw. We thought: why can’t light bulbs be nice?

What do you think about Maker Culture and its appeal in Europe?

I think Makers are not slavishly following the old formats, there are not clenched stories, but reinventing that qualities in terms of our times and now, techniques, qualities and communication offered. So you end up in a similar place where the product has much richer story prominence, texture, meaning and currency.

The layered approach I mentioned before is a metaphor for European strengths, where you have a strong artistic culturally led sort of sensibility that allows you to do certain things, and then the craft sensibility. In the States, there is less respect for this artistic culture and in Italy, much more than in UK, there is an embedded respect for craft and quality.

And beauty...

Yes and this is an incredible strength and the reason why it is important is because in business, no individuals work in a vacuum: Italians go out, eat and drink with their families and friends and culture is projected through their conversations.

We talked about old formats and new culture. What is the business model you propose then?

Well, we started our business with no funding, just small business bank loans and have managed to reach global markets with next to no costs. It has been a frictionless growth of a small business into a global market, with no key markets we do not have a presence in.

Before light bulbs, we made retro phones between 2005 and 2009. When our product reached the New York Times, it attracted international attention and we made 10,000 units. We are marketing it primarily on its artistic merits, its quality, and this came at a price to the consumer. While initially very successful, the business soon declined when cheaper rivals copied the idea and flooded the market. The consumer was more interested in it as a novelty rather than a premium created product. At this point the light bulb idea developed and the business changed direction.

The changes that need to be done in the world could not come from the big businesses. Small businesses do it through genuine desire, rather than through obligation and that is the way things have to go.

Take the case of car industry. While automotive industry knows that the future is moving into new technologies, there is strong tension that doesn’t want that to happen. I think this is projected through the design of those alternative environmentally friendly cars which are a little bit boring, anodyne, not exciting. They do not appeal to the masculine ego which is a massive problem when you are talking about the automotive because so much is driven by that. It is also connected to what is happening in the economy which is the problem the established order is producing. What we have proved with the light bulb is that almost without resources, you can reach a global market place and build a brand, and that can potentially be a really big business. We can do this because we see things in a different way, in a layered way. We look at every single layer of opportunity in everything we do. For example what can we do on a product level that tells a storey, and in the way we release it, how can that be a storey. Large organisations generally don’t think like that, are not able to think like that because they think of things much more procedurally.