Hello and welcome to another episode of the AIGA Design
Podcast. My name is Lee Sean Huang, Co
Executive Director of Learning and Programs here at AIGA, the
professional association for design.
This season on the show we are exploring the theme of design
and performance and with me my Co host.
Hi everyone, I'm Julia Brontello, Design Competitions
and event Manager at AIGA. Our guest this episode is
Richard Moross. He is the founder and CEO of
MOO, which started as a business card printing company back in
2006. And now MOO designs and sells a
whole range of useful branded things from notebooks to water
bottles, and they sell to customers all around the world.
MOO is currently one of the fastest growing print companies
in the world. It's grown from 35 employees in
2008 to over 450 employees today.
In our conversation with Richard, we're going to learn
more about his entrepreneurial journey and get his reflections
on the theme of this season's show design and performance.
Welcome, Richard. Thank you.
Great to be here. Yeah.
Thanks for tuning in. We'd like to start our
conversation on the topic of entrepreneurship.
And from there, we'll get to know more about you and your
company, MU. But we did a little bit of
research. On your website.
You say that the very best part of being an entrepreneur is
working with your team of unconventional and brilliant
people who inspire you each and every day.
You also mentioned in a 2008 interview with The Economist
that before starting MU, you hadn't thought of yourself as an
entrepreneur. You told The Economist quote, I
was driven by the power of an idea.
As soon as I had fully thought through the idea, I was
compelled to set up the business.
I had no choice but to take my life in this direction.
It became an act of self fulfillment, UN quote.
So with that context, Zack, could you tell us a bit more
about the origin story of MU? How you came to identify as an
entrepreneur through that journey?
Sure. It's the first time anyone has
fed a quote back to me in that way, so I have to have to, you
know, kind of think back to what state of mind I was in at the
time. But no, the story is true and
the, the, the sentiment still rings true today.
And I, I think, you know, when I started the business in its
first iteration, I was 25, I'd been working in a design
company. I'd done a bit of work in a tech
start up and it was all about the idea.
I mean, the I, I, you know, becoming an entrepreneur was the
method by which I would make the idea real.
So I was about a passion for creating and the methodology was
starting a business. The original idea was was very
different to what we do today. I guess every journey starts
with a single step and that was the single step.
And it was basically about how to create a market for business
cards for your social life. You know, there's a, you know,
500 year old industry of, of printing, a sort of 300 year old
industry of printing business cards.
And, you know, for the history of time that had been for
professionals to give their information to other
professionals. But almost all technology at
some point, you know, finds its way into the hands of consumers
and consumers repurpose that for their for their benefit.
It just struck me as very strange that there was this tool
had been around for a long time, super functional, you know,
doesn't require Wi-Fi or batteries, doesn't universally
understood how it works. Why would consumers not using
them? So that was the original the
original idea. The original idea of the
business was called pleasure cards.
We can get into that. Obviously a very strange
branding decision, but what I did to stand out and yeah, I
became sort of obsessed. You know, it was a a moment of
of passion for trying to make something happen and and became
an entrepreneur sort of as a result of that.
That's great. Yeah.
What curious about this pleasure card name and how you got to
move. Maybe I can wrap it into the
next question, which is like this pivot.
So you started from business card printing and now you do a
diverse range of branded merchandise from notebooks,
water bottles, all sorts of things.
So can you talk about the pivot from pleasure cards to to move,
but also like expanding for your your product line?
The pivots were very different and driven by different,
different things. But yeah, we can tackle them one
or the other. So the pleasure cards didn't
work, right. There was no demand for this
product. People hated the name.
It was it was doomed to failure. And however, there were little
things about the product. It was a print product that it
had some technologies that that we had invented and they seem
kind of cool. And this is 2004, 2005.
And at the same time as me totally failing to launch
pleasure cards, social networks were exploding, blogs were
exploding, Skype was coming onto the market.
People were playing with technology in in new ways, in
social ways. So there was this, the pivot was
let's find a way to try and get this social, you know, hardware
product to work with some of these social software products.
So the first pivot was into like, how can we find social
networks? How can we latch onto high
growth opportunities and kill pleasure cards dead?
But but kind of. Take some of.
The things that were really cool about it and and work with some
of these social networks to bring it to life in a different
way. So that's how MU was was
initially born. I think once we'd proven that
out, we did, we did so we can talk about partnerships, we did
in the, the ways in which we grew the business.
But you know, ultimately we, you know, we talked about our our
kind of mission today. It's about helping bring brands
to life, right? So we did that in a 28 by 70mm,
you know, rectangle in these little cards that we launched
with. You know, we did that very
successfully with business cards and other things.
As we moved and expanded into paper, we were like, oh, there
are other challenges that we're quite interested in to you know,
there's big markets in, in things like branded merchandise.
How would we do that differently?
What would we do to to disrupt and innovate in those spaces?
So I guess it's a natural expansion and a natural
curiosity that we as entrepreneurs sort of have to
try and do that. And a great way to grow and
expand a business obviously is you seek other categories out.
But yeah, so two different pivots.
One was based on survival. Yeah.
This is dying. We have to change it.
The other based on on opportunity and actually kind of
an enthusiasm for building and expanding and growing.
Right. So it sounds like you've like,
you know, we're learning from your potential customers
pivoting along the way, like as follow up.
I actually wanted to like rewind a little bit more.
So folks have been talking about print being dead for decades
now. It's mostly about like print
journalism and that's a whole different discussion.
But obviously there's still plenty of surfaces that we print
on, whether for branded merchandise or packaging, all
sorts of stuff. So print is still big in that
sense, but it's perhaps considered a legacy industry,
although you have innovative and MU in terms of your model.
But when you were starting up, how did you convince investors
to take a chance on a printing business?
So again, I think this is probably two other pivots to
talk about which are very interesting.
I think initially, you know, print has, as I said, since
Gutenberg had a business model, right?
You raw materials, you have machines and you're able to to
turn that into something super functional, super useful.
So when social networks were looking for a way to monetize
their business before the advertising models came along
and you know they kind of grew and grew from there, we were
talking to social networks and blogs and kind of these startup
businesses said we can help you sell this to your customers.
So you know some of the early ones we did a deal with Flickr
was our first deal. So it was, you know,
photographers who were using Flickr to share their photos
online, a lot of professional photographers.
So this was a way for Flickr to generate direct revenue and for
us to generate direct revenue from customers by putting their
photos on our on our products. We shared revenue with with
Flickr, with Yahoo who owned them at the time.
And then we just rolled that out to blogging platforms.
And, you know, we did a deal with Bebo, if you remember that.
Yeah. Yeah.
So young kids social Nets, a young person social Nets, we did
it with with six apart and some of the kind of early blogging
software businesses. So you know, we tried in a lot
of different places. We did with Skype as well, you
know, kind of a way to share your Skype ID so that you could
easily communicate with people. So that that that was a very
easy sell to investors because we said we have a business model
and you have all these social networks over here.
If we can go and do deals with them, we can bring them money,
we can bring ourselves. We were part of an ecosystem of
growing and exciting businesses with all the potential.
So that was the kind of first, first compelling narrative that
became apparent. I think now it's almost the
opposite of that in a sort of interesting way.
The value paper and printed products, when done for the
lowest possible cost and expressed as an item of
practically 0 value, are obsolete.
When you can send an e-mail at a fraction of that cost and people
are going to ignore it anyway, why make something that's a
commodity that people aren't going to see?
It's like spam right? No one reads spam and I think
people don't read junk mail that gets put through your door at
the same time, because of all this spam, because of all this
digital, very low cost of digital communications, making
beautiful high quality physical things cuts through people
notice them. Oh, what's this nice card?
What's this nice gift that you bought me that you put kind of
the brand on? So I think in a world of a lot
of digital noise, analog is a is a really powerful signal that
people can latch onto and use. So we're lucky that we're in the
kind of high quality print, you know, the premium print end of
the spectrum. We care about those details and
we think we're quite good at, you know, discovering them and
innovating and making nice things.
That kind of stuff cuts through. So we think, we think it's a for
very different reasons. We're a highly sort of valuable
and investable Business Today because, you know, we make stuff
that you can't send in an e-mail, you can't send to 10,000
people with a touch of a button. It has to be special, it has to
be valuable, it has to cut through.
So yeah, a lot of difference between those two eras in 20
years of time. Right.
Yeah. Yeah, it's been an interesting
journey to to to get from there to here.
Yeah, I love it. I love to hear your journey and
also like how you started your concert and where you are now.
That's great. That's great.
So Richard, referring back to the code that Rishan mentioned
earlier about your team being unconventional and brilliant
people. I'm also interested to hear more
if you have any advice on how to build a team and how, how do
you, how are you able to see those brilliant and
unconventional people in the hiring process?
And also how are you able to maintain the the culture of the
company when you're scaling from 35 people to 450 plus, right?
So, yeah, I mean, a few questions in there and I, I, I
don't know whether I have the right answer to any of them, but
I can tell you my experience and what we did and what worked and
what didn't work. The culture is obviously
extremely important and values are extremely important and
they're going to drive, you know, performance ultimately.
So you have to care about those things.
You have to focus on them. There have to be consequences,
good and bad, for people living the culture or not living the
culture. And the more that those are
codified and part of daily life, you know, you'll see it
reflected in the performance of a business and in and you need
to see it in reflected in people who rise and fall within your
organization. I think that what that culture
is, what those values are and how that comes to life is very
different when you're a ten person company, then you're 100
person company or a 400 person company or 1000 or 10,000.
And I think that doing it for the first time, I was helped.
I mean, the, the honest answer to the question is I don't think
I'm greatly responsible for for the culture of the business Over
the years, I think I've been helped by having experienced in
senior people around me. I'm probably personally
responsible for the heart of the business, you know, like the
drum beat, but also like making sure we do things in the right
way, that things are aligned with my personal values.
You're as opposed to my professional values, you know,
like what I think things are, you know, morally, ethically
right to do or not. But I just had great people.
I was very we we had venture capital investors and still do.
They are extremely helpful at helping you attract talent,
helping you find them and convince them to come to the
business. Their endorsement helps you find
people that would otherwise never come to your tiny business
with no revenue. You know, I think it's a really
powerful and helpful things that was extremely helpful.
And then as we've grown, I think, you know, the, the, the
whatever the quote of brilliant weirdos or whatever it was that
I may have said before was actually something along the
lines of what I had heard when I worked for a design company
called Imagination here in London.
And I think in that they published a book many years ago
and I think that they had called it brilliant weirdos or, you
know, kind of nerdy, something like that.
There was this nice combination of obviously talent, but, you
know, didn't fit into another into the box.
You know, that they weren't necessarily, you know, at
Harvard NBA, you know, that they more of a Street Fighter type of
mentality than a, you know, than a super professional.
And and with that might come all sorts of quirks and things, but
I think that those are characterful, you know, people
with, you know, diverse backgrounds.
You want people who have different experiences that they
can one joins the business, adds to the flavour and the the kind
of diversity and the the quality of the work.
So yeah, for the most part, it's people have helped me along the
way and been very, very lucky to have a strong team, you know,
throughout different team and doing different things, but but
always strong. Awesome.
Very cool. And Speaking of culture of the
company and so on, I was thinking like more on a personal
note, I've been working remotely pretty much fully remote for the
past five years and before that was fully in person.
And now I've seen many companies either going fully back to the
office or some still keeping the hybrid model.
I know you have reached the moment where you're in the
hybrid work model. I wanted to hear more from you.
How do you keep this culture, the team spirit and create
making sure you create cohesion and that the communication is
smooth and still keeping and obtaining the the culture with
with such work model? It's very hard.
I think hybrid is the hardest. You know, you described it just
now. You know, it's very binary,
these worlds, either at home, you're at work.
To have a mix of those two things is hard because you need
to invest in both those things. You need to invest in the office
and you need to invest in the the remote tools and you need to
have some form of, you know, equitability across your teams
and your culture and your geographies and so on.
So I guess our final decision on hybrid stems from the fact that
we make products that are for people to hand out in person.
They're physical things, right? They exist in the physical
world. They're not a software only
business. We do software manufacturing,
design. We do all of these things in
house. So as we design things for
customers that are physical that are used to help customers to
network or to build their relationships in person.
I think it would be crazy for us to be a virtual business.
And if you add the fact that we have factories and we have, you
know, physical goods flying through our business, I think we
were always going to have an element of in person, what we
landed on was kind of 40% minimum.
So two days a week in the office and the rest people can work
from. That's dependent on the type of
role that people have, but that's I'd say the average
across people who are not doing a factory job.
So that stands for, you know, people who are working in the
service teams, people who are working in design, people
working in engineering. We have a, a pretty big remote
population as well. I think I'm going to guess about
80 or 100 people maybe are remote in the business.
So it's a, it's A and all of our manufacturing people are in five
days a week, you know, at least because they're, they have to
be. Can't run the machine from
remotely. So I think it's exactly, you
know, we'd have to buy everyone a new house to fill the machines
in them, which would be impractical.
So I think that like it's like I go to a gym sometimes I can work
out at home. It's helpful, I think to have a,
you know, if you use a trainer every once and often to help you
perfect your form, I think going to the office helps build that
in person. Mentoring and learning in person
I think can be much easier. So we've settled on our ratio
that works for us today. That may change in in the
future, but I think we're pretty happy with with where we are
with it. Great.
Yeah, that sounds great. Yeah, I wanted to take this
culture conversation in another direction as it relates back to
the brand at MOO. So I'm going to quote you again,
but in 2021, there's an interview with you on the MOO
website. You mentioned back then that you
didn't have a motto, but it seems that you've found one
since then. Maybe it's a motto, great design
for everyone, which is something you have on both the MOO website
and your personal website. So can you tell us more about
this vision of great design for everyone and what that means for
you? Sure.
So I would call it purpose, which is why if someone asked me
about a motto and I would, it's like we don't have like a one
for all and all for one kind of Musketeers type motto.
Great design for everyone is something that form of words
that we came across and committed to in the first few
years of the business and it was trying to express kind of the
DNA, the belief system of the business, like, you know,
believing in democracy or believing in whatever.
It's not a business strategy, it's not a it's not a mission
statement. It's much more, I suppose it's
well, I can, I can unpack it and explain what it means to me.
But but we think of it as a kind of a purpose and a belief
system. OK, so I can tell you where it
came from. So before I started the
business, I graduated from university in 2000.
I went to work for a design company 1st for a technology
company, the tech start up for a couple of years.
Then I went to work for a design company for a couple of years
and I founded new in 2004 after I've been worked for about four
years. And my sort of desire, what I
wanted to build and how I wanted to build it was born out of
frustrations from both of those two worlds.
Initially, you know, I had loved working in a tech business, but
it was all kind of everything was quite scruffy and, you know,
not very functional. You know, it was the world's our
oyster and technology's going to eat everything.
And but it was, it wasn't particularly aesthetically
interesting to me. And then spending time in the
design world, everything's beautifully, excessively
interesting, but it might be very expensive.
It might be hard to think about how anyone could afford this
stuff. It was for an elite audience.
So great Design for everyone means that we believe in trying
to break down the boundaries of design like design can.
Design is a process, it's a product, it's an outcome.
It's a way of thinking a lot of different things.
But fundamentally, we want to use technology.
We want to use our manufacturing innovation to make design more
accessible for people. That means maintaining standards
and quality. That means innovating, but it
also means trying to lower the price, trying to lower the
barriers for people to try and use these products.
So I could give you an example for another industry, This may
not be the best example, but something like Starbucks is an
attempt to make espresso based drinks something that everyone
drinks. And then Howard Schultz very,
very successfully executed this vision after having visited at
Coffee Fair in Milan when he was working in the business in the
very early days of that company. How do you create a scalable
high quality? You can argue whether Starbucks
is high quality versus other things, but it is a premium
product versus an instant coffee, for example.
So what great design for everyone means or what great
coffee for everyone means. And to, to make that up for
Starbucks, I know that's not their, their slogan is US just
breaking down the boundaries, helping more people get access
to the types of design that we we sell and trying to do that in
an affordable way, but having a premium product at the end.
Yeah, there's an interesting tension to that, right?
Because it's like the great design for everyone.
There's great design which is about quality.
Sometimes that's used as a proxy for just a higher price or even
like exclusivity, right? And, and that's one of the the
kind of sins in the design world.
There's often this kind of elite snootiness to things.
And then on the other hand, you have the for everyone, which is
about scale. And sometimes you do need to
make compromises to keep things, you know, below a certain price
point or what not. So yeah, like what are your
approaches at MU for maintaining this quality at scale since you
have grown to this global scale? So I think that it's a great
question. There is that tension, of
course, and I mean IKEA has this nice thing where the, you know,
the first thing on the page is the price it's going to sell
for. I mean, that is that really
focuses the mind when you have to design A sofa for 50 bucks or
something. For us, maybe it's similar like
hit a range of price points we can design for.
You know, they're going to start at super accessible.
What's the best thing we can do at that price point?
Not necessarily how we're going to make the most money, but what
can we make that we'll be proud of, that we can deliver at this
price point using the best materials, but also what can we
do at this higher price point? What can we deliver it, you
know, two or three times that price, But it's attention.
We attention we deal with, you know, all the time.
I think, I suppose I want to challenge some of the some of
what's behind your question and be make for an interesting
conversation. I think a lot of the design
should be popular, right? I think design should be
enjoyed. I think it should be something
that many, many people have access to, whether that's
renting, visiting, owning, you know, on all those different
levels. I think designing something that
is for a very few, for very few people, maybe it makes me feel a
bit sad that, you know, that it's so exclusive.
And I think there's a little bit of a chicken and egg thing
around, you know, is it starting with the price?
We're going to make this inaccessible and then we're
going to build something around that?
Or is it, you know, the kind of a Vapelin effect where it's like
pricing is the exclusivity, Like we're just going to price the
part of the market with this thing.
Or, you know, you see a lot of fashion brands are burning their
stock at the end of the year to to, you know, reduce the amount
of stock on the market there. There's no resale of these
things. We're going to burn them.
And, you know, and I just think that's terribly sad and
wasteful. So I think great design should
be for the mainstream. I think that to innovate in that
space, you have to be clever about what materials you're
using. You have to be clever about your
logistics. You have to be clever about
manufacturing and supply chain. Increasingly so in the world we
live in today. But I have a populist view on
this. And I, you know, believe that
design is a thing we should all be able to enjoy.
And, you know, the cheapest new products, 5-10 bucks, you know,
it's super accessible. So yeah.
But this tension is with us always, for sure.
Yeah. Getting back to the idea of the
of the tension and the choices behind when you design your your
products, I'm also curious to hear from you how you elaborate
your own personal relationship with design and how did you get
interested in design in the 1st place, So before you, before you
founded your own company? Sure.
Well, I probably didn't think about it as design much.
My my grandfather was an architect and we used to visit
him every year and he he had built his own kind of mid
century house filled with furniture from the era.
I remember sitting on his kind of Eames lounge chair and
Ottoman and just being like, I really like this thing.
I don't know why I like it, but I really like it as a, you know,
7 year old, 6 year old kid and being in this space that was
different to other houses because it was designed by him
and in a geography that he had tailored for a house itself.
So kind of my first experience even thinking about design was,
was of architecture and architectural spaces and and
furniture. Passion for design probably
manifested through film more so than through product design or
other things or graphic design or maybe graphic design in
films. I remember as a kid I was, I was
an obsessive collector of films and probably still I am, and
watching things like John Carpenter movies from the 70s
and seeing this very kind of utter mindset.
And I'm going to be called John Carpenter's The Thing, You know,
he's going to have his name above it, like Zuckerberg's
Facebook, you know, in the early days.
And he would design the music and he would design, he would
write the film and he would shoot the film and he would
produce it. And it was this amazing.
The film is a, is a sort of multidisciplinary design
exercise with ultimate control. I mean, just thought, you know,
I was fascinated by that. Now, I suppose that's somewhat
correlates to my, my interest in entrepreneurship because if you
are a bit of a control freak, it's the perfect, it's the
perfect career for you. Being able to influence all the
different things, you know, kind of around you.
Film was probably the first thing that I got into and maybe
think about design or designing things.
Right, yeah. Your answer kind of has me
thinking about like, yeah, this blurring of boundaries, right?
Because it's like creating a company as an entrepreneur,
growing that company is like the ultimate design projects, right?
Because it's not just about like the individual product or
service that you're crafting, but there's the whole business
model behind it and making sure that you can stay in business
and grow and all of that, as you were saying, like similar to
film, right? Because all of these great
auteurs, like are not just artists.
They have to get millions of dollars just to make the film
and have this huge team that they have to manage to make it.
Yep. So I wanted to turn to the theme
of the season of the podcast, which is design and performance.
And we've had guests look at this in different ways.
You know, I mean, this interview was a kind of performance, but
also we could talk about like business performance, a high
performing team in the context of MU or your own performance as
a leader. So just this is an open-ended
question for you to interpret design and performance in your
own way and refund it. And if you have anything to
share with our listeners or our viewers, if folks are watching
this on YouTube, Yeah. I was thinking about this and I
was thinking about film and running a business and I was
thinking about it this. When I was thinking about
performance in particular, there was a scene from a from a
documentary that I watched, which I think is my favorite
Collaborate. Like there aren't a lot of films
or documentaries that show you into the boardroom in a company,
You know, they fictionalize those things, right?
There aren't a lot of films that show you a creative team meeting
in a company or a decision meeting or what executive
meeting because they want to be secretive about that stuff and
it's very messy often. So I and I think about
performance particularly at no as being about being able to
bring, we're vertically integrated, right?
We manufacture our products, we decorate them.
We're the printer, right. But we also design our products.
We're the design company. It's all in house.
We do all the customer service in house.
We design all the technology in house, a full stack, you know,
business. And the secret to being
successful is being able to bring all of those disciplines
together and make it work. Not just make it work like we
can physically make the product, but make it work like the margin
is good. There's demand from the
customer. We know how to market it.
You know, it's good for the planet.
You know, there's 25 things that that need to come together.
There's no way you can do that without true collaboration.
So I was just thinking about this fantastic documentary
called Sound City, which is about recording studio in
California that Fleetwood Mac recorded.
Rumors in that Nirvana recorded Never Minded and Dave Grohl
produced this this documentary and there's a scene where Dave
Grohl, Josh Homme from Brain is gone, Queens and Steinage and
Trent Reznor write a song together.
You have three independent musicians, superstars, soloists,
leaders of their bands come together and write a song, one
on the piano, one on the bass, one on the guitar and singing.
Amazing. And the respect and the skills
and the collaboration, it's just incredible.
And I think, but when I think about how we think, when we
think about performance at the moment, we think about, you
know, what do we need to do successful?
It is about how you bring all those disciplines together so
that you can make this beautiful music or, you know, roll the
analogy out however you like. But there's no way that we can
be successful as a business without having our drummer and
our guitarist and our, you know, like, come together and do their
thing in time with everyone else, right, In a complementary
way to everyone else. So I love the musical analogy
and and you know, that's another kind of like high performing
weirdos. You know, that's that's music
all over, right? That is exactly what it's about.
You know, you've got really, really strong performers, but
they have to be able to play its band.
Yeah, yeah, that also reminds me of this is another
recommendation for our listeners, our viewers, The
Beatles documentary series get back the Peter Jackson one,
right? Where they're just like, jamming
in the studio for the Let It Be album.
And I think it's like Paul McCartney starts something and
they all like you. McCartney starts playing Get
Back. Yeah.
And you literally see. Yeah.
And you see music get written in front of your, you see, you
know, what would you perceive to be genius?
And it is genius. But it's so in a way, it's so
banal. It's just him playing on the
guitar, but you see the song pour out of him that you've
heard a million times. It's just amazing, incredible.
Yeah, very organic with designer.
Yeah, yeah. So Richard, still Speaking of
performance, can you share with us what has been the best, the
best failure or some type of unexpected outcome that taught
you about performance? Yeah.
I think that the best failure is probably launching business
cards. So I mean that sounds strange,
but I'll explain it to you. So when we started, we were the
anti business card, we were the personal card or the pleasure
card and we wanted nothing to do with business cards because they
were boring and they were traditional and why would we do
that? And that was in the early days
and when we started moving into working with social networks
and, and being AB to C brand, working with Skype, working with
Flickr, working with these guys, one of our investors quite
rightly said to us, you know, you're going to do business
cards at some point and we'd be taking all these weird products.
So we saw these little skinny mini cards.
We made these funny note cards and sticker books.
These were all products that were very cool and very, very
different. But no one was looking for them.
No one was going onto Google and saying what I really need is a
funny shaped card. You know, there's no like
keywords such As for these products and I was incredibly
resistant to to doing a business card because it was like selling
out to go back to the music. You know, it's like trying to
write your second album that sounded like the first album
wasn't different, wasn't you? And when I finally kind of
capitulated and said, OK, we'll do it, but we'll do it in our
way. And we'll make a beautiful
recycled paper and we'll put it in a, you know, we'll make a
beautiful box, the boxes with different, but, you know, same
kind of idea, beautiful packaging.
And we'll tell this story in our own way.
Basically the sales doubled overnight and just kept growing
because finally we had all of the DNA of a product business
that knew how to design remarkable different beautiful
things, finally selling products that people also wanted.
So it was a very important learning for me.
I think my values were very anti business cards and in the
basically deciding that we were going to try it after having
already put pressure put on me was the best decision we could
have made. It's business.
I guess it was a failure. It was a failure that we didn't
do it sooner, probably looking back, but yeah, it was that
transformed the business success.
Very cool. Another angle to explore this
performance theme is about your personal rituals or habits as a
leader. Do you have any of those that
are like maybe daily or weekly? And we could be any sort of time
scale? But yeah, what are they?
How did you develop them? Yeah, none.
I want to share. I think like we, we're a bunch
of weirdos, right? Yeah, it's a little bit weird.
And also I'm I'm often very wary of giving advice because I think
every journey is different and every person is different.
I think the biggest like hack at doing this is really, I know
it's super obvious, super obvious to say, but doing
something in a space you actually care about that you're
interested in. I think there are a lot of very
smart people who will be very successful who are going into
spaces that are exciting or have value to them where there's a
lot of hype. Let's say AI, you know, like
pick AI for no reason other than the fact that it is big at the
moment. And people opportunistically
going into that space and saying that they're going to build an
AI business, which is fine. But when it gets hard and when
it, you know, if that's not your passion or it's not your skill,
it's going to be so much harder. And it's always hard, right?
Like for 99.9% of people, it's very hard.
Most businesses fail, like 2/3 of businesses go out of business
in the first couple of years. So pick something you really
care about. You'll work so much harder on it
and care so much more about it. I suppose the thing you need to
avoid is the thing that I was doing, which is like getting my
being too belligerent about executing your vision in a
certain way and not being wise to commercial opportunities when
they're there. But you know, I really care
about what we do and what we make.
It's a passion of mine as a consumer and as a business
person. I think this journey, I would
have packed packed it in a long time ago.
I think of it was something I wasn't passionate about.
So very, very, very lucky to be doing something that I care
about. Yeah.
And as that sort of continuing that momentum, are there places
where you go for inspiration? Like how do you stay innovative
and up to date? Yeah, I go shopping.
I go shopping a lot. Not to buy, not to buy anything.
Like I'm a real window shopper. So I go to the stores when I
visit other countries, I love going to the shops to see what
supermarkets might be probably like.
What's the branding like in the store?
Like what food, you know, like I remember going to just a few
years back, just tiny little things.
I only going to tiny, tiny supermarket in Italy and they
had organized the food in the supermarket by the miles it
traveled to the supermarket. Those tiny little details just
so just so interesting. Like tomatoes were the front
because they'd come from down there.
It was like, I'm not saying this is like a big thing.
It was just the first time I'd ever seen it.
I was like, oh, that's really interesting.
Yeah. So I love going to the shops.
I love travel as well. So I love going and looking at
the windows of stores in other countries, particularly going to
Asia, where in my business, in the stationary business, there's
a lot going on and a lot to be inspired by.
So yeah, or, or, or shopping online.
I'm an incessant bookmarker and record keeper.
You know, I, yeah, I bookmark millions and millions of things
to go back into, to rediscover later.
Yeah, I'm with you on the supermarket thing.
I was in Portugal on vacation last month that we just went to
the supermarket, not because we needed anything, but it was just
to see like, OK, how do people here shop?
How do they live And then? Culture.
Culture is represented in what you eat, you know, is it is it a
bunch of stuff in the freezer or is it all Whole Foods that
people were chopping up and turning into dinner every like
You'll learn a lot about a country by what what the
supermarket looks like. For sure.
So to wrap up our conversation today, we wanted to hear your
recommendation for our listeners and that could be a book, a
show, a movie or some other type of media that you would like to
share that kind. Of given by.
Your. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
So given my my early passion for film, I think it'd have to be a
film. Can I cheat and give you a
double bill? Yeah, totally.
Yeah. Yeah.
All right. OK.
So we'll post links to all of these too, but it's helpful to
hear from you. Yeah.
I I think one of the most amazing films I've ever seen is
The Holy Mountain by Alejandro Jodorowski.
It is an insane massive budget, crazy designers fantasy.
It is beautiful and shocking and weird and insane.
And I would double bill it with Jodorovsky's June, which is the
story of how he nearly made the film June, which David Lynch
went on to make and subsequently has been remade again recently.
Watching the finished version of his masterpiece in the Holy
Mountain is an incredible thing. And then watching his process as
a film maker and watching him try to raise money and try to
get, you know, a Pink Floyd to soundtrack and trying to get all
these amazing people involved. It is like watching or hearing a
story about stuffed up the crazy founder.
So I think those two films, Holly Mountain is an amazing
film for designers to watch because it's just so rich and
filled with incredible visual imagery.
And then watching the documentary about about Dune and
how hard it is to actually do these things, I think it's an
inspirational double built watch late at night.
I think that they're they're a good pet to put together.
Wonderful. And to finally wrap us up,
Richard, we'd love to give you the opportunity to do a call to
action. Folks just share their links,
whatever they want to do. Of course, we'll post links to
the show notes as well, but it's helpful to hear from you or see
from you. So yeah, where can folks go to
learn more about you? At your work, at MU or other
things that you want to get people to go to?
I have so little social media presence.
I don't I don't think I have insight.
It's really worth worth following.
Well, we'll see. Maybe the Moo blog people can go
check out the Moo blog or just check out moo.com and have a
have a look at what we do. Awesome.
Richard Moross, thank you so much for spending some time with
us today on the AIGA Design Podcast.
And thank you all for listening or watching.
Please subscribe and review us or send us a voicemail as well.
We'd love to hear from you. I'm Li Shawn Huang.
Until next time.