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What is going on DTC pod today we're joined by Isabel Mendez, who is the founder and design director at Antara Studio. This podcast is going to be a lot of fun because we're going to be talking about everything design and I've had the pleasure of knowing Issa for a while now and we've recently reconnected chatting through. I've seen some of the projects that she's worked on in the space and I thought it only made sense to bring her on the episode for a pod. So Issa, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your background in design, how you started on Tara, what you guys focus on and then we can go from there.

Amazing Lane, thanks for having me here. Well, Antara Studio is a full service design partner for Purpose Driven Brands. We help build brands from start to finish and also rebrands. We help you discover your brand story, bring your brand to life and support you throughout all your growth, effectively becoming your in house design team. So I guess I started Antara. I always wanted to be a design agency owner. That was like My end goal. But I did go through the natural path of designers of going through a couple of design agencies.

First. I did my undergrad in graphic design as well. And in 2020 in the pandemic, I think we were all thinking about our life future and I had time to just like think of what I wanted, where I wanted my professional life to go. And in 2021 I decided to just start entire studio started with the process. And yeah, here we are a couple of years later with the team, global clients and growing.

Yeah. And you guys have won a bunch of design awards. You guys have worked on several brands. So why don't you take us to maybe the beginning, the first couple projects, you know, just, just so we have like context of how you got even started working with brands. Like what was, what were some of the first brands that you worked on? What did it look like getting set up? And then we'll, we'll jump into more specifics about design in more broad terms.

Yeah, for sure. So I started basically as a freelancer and that is the most common way to start a design agency. You start as a freelancer and have like a proof concept, you know, like you see that your work is actually generating profit, that you can handle it. And once you have a lot of projects coming in, you just expand with a team. Right. And it's been a very organic growth. It's been like that we. It started me freelancing then.