exolab are a team of senior digital professionals with broad skills, each having some overlapping experience in UX, design, web development and digital marketing. Founded by Scott and Steven in 2016, the plan was to build the digital equivalent of a boutique graphic design studios that offer a more direct and higher quality service, cutting out the middlemen and salespeople that are often a staple of working with agencies. With a combined 10+ years working in digital design and marketing companies of all sizes, operating in the UK and internationally, our team have managed marketing campaigns and designed and maintained products for cinema, finance, renewables, food, digital marketing, public wellbeing, consumer brands and employee training.
exolab has two founding principles that influence how we hire and how we operate:
Clients always in direct contact
Working with us means you’ll be in direct contact with those who work on your website, marketing campaign or product. This benefits everybody – it ensures we won’t overpromise and underdeliver and it means your requests won’t be bouncing around the studio for days before we get back to you. We don’t hire go-betweens and we don’t charge you to maintain a working relationship with us (unless we agree on a support or marketing retainer, obviously).
Hire and work with multi-skilled people
Having previously worked in organisations that place a lot of emphasis on departmentalising individual employees, we decided to take a broader skills approach to team building. We hire and work with staff and local talent that have overlapping skills; UX researchers with strong interface design skills, designers and marketers that can build websites and developers with front end skills. This mix allows small groups of individuals to be responsible for entire projects and means less conflict and confusion as work moves through the studio.
Affordability
More recently, our approach with many projects has been to create sustainable and adaptable streamlined websites that aren’t a large investment risk. Our careers began with responsive design making a huge impact on web requirements for small and medium-sized businesses. Now with the recent GDPR legislation, we’ve occasionally decided that the best approach with some clients is to build websites robust enough that they’re capable of lasting up to 5 years but not such a huge impact on your bottom line. Many businesses rely on a number of third-party services to promote or manage their websites that are often liable to overnight change and employing this methodology means we can build a solid but disposable foundation on which to maintain your online presence in the long term.
