DTC POD #349 - Between Trends and Timelessness: The Antara Approach to Building Strong Brands from the Outside In
Blaine Bolus 00:00:05 - 00:00:43
Hey everyone. We're super excited to announce the launch of our slack community for D2C pod. This is a space exclusively for D2C founders and operators to connect, share ideas, ask questions and support each other. You'll be able to engage with the best minds and operators and consumer and currently we're on a waitlist and it will open up the community Once we reach 150 members. So apply using the link in the description and we hope to see you on Slack. So before we kick off today's recording, I've got one more for you. Keeping up your momentum this year starts with the right selling tools. And if you're looking to increase revenue, grow faster, build more pipeline and close more deals, check out the all new sales hub from HubSpot.
Blaine Bolus 00:00:43 - 00:01:15
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Blaine Bolus 00:01:20 - 00:01:54
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.
Isabel Mendez 00:01:54 - 00:02:46
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.
Isabel Mendez 00:02:46 - 00:03:29
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.
Blaine Bolus 00:03:29 - 00:03:54
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.
Isabel Mendez 00:03:54 - 00:04:34
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.