You’ll be forgiven for wondering why things look a little different around here. If you hadn’t already guessed, we’re no longer BrightByte Studio.
But don’t worry, it’s still us, we’ve just got a new look, new values and a bigger team.
Whilst this may come as a bit of a surprise to you, it has been about 12 months in the making for us, so it’s rather refreshing to finally announce it!
Truth be told, it felt like a very natural decision to make and we’re not feeling even slightly sentimental about it.
Let me tell you why.
Why change from BrightByte Studio?
To be honest, BrightByte Studio wasn’t a name we would have chosen. BrightByte Limited was setup by a former director Pete who, an early entrepreneur at just 16, would rebuild and sell computers online. Fit for purpose, the name was perfect.
In 2012 Matt and I joined BrightByte and we started building websites in our spare time to raise money for our iPhone app, and rather than endure the tedious pain of incorporating a company, we decide to use a trading name and thus became known as BrightByte Studio. The ‘Studio’ part was fashionable at the time, and we reasoned that ‘BrightByte’ had a nice ring to it – despite the technical connotations of the word ‘Byte’.
The name was okay and we never really intended for the agency to take-off as quickly as it did because we were focused on making money. Changing the name was low on our priority list.
12 months later we were working full time at BrightByte Studio and had acquired a decent list clients who allowed us to pay ourselves a basic wage. We were building beautiful websites at an affordable price for local businesses. Nothing more, nothing less, and it worked.
But following Pete’s resignation as a director in 2014, Matt and I started thinking about a name which would reflect our values and aspirations for the agency (and more importantly one we could all spell!).
We wanted to start a new ‘chapter’ (yep, I did just say that).
Much More Than Web Design
By mid 2014 we were pitching for work with bigger clients, with bigger budgets, and winning the deals. Through this we discovered that many of our clients were using competitor agencies to produce their visual content and creative artwork as part of the web project, because they thought we were just web designers. We saw this as an obvious opportunity to expand our offering and, excited by this, Matt and I set about creating a fully-serviced creative agency.
So we made a lot of internal improvements to ensure we had the tools meet all of our clients needs; this meant investing in new equipment, recruiting more talented team members, working to tighter deadlines and pushing our process driven business model to its limit to improve efficiency and quality of output.
It’s safe to say we’ve been on quite a journey, with recent projects which have taken us from working with small Southampton businesses to big brands in the US and across Europe – we’re really proud of what we’ve achieved…
We’ve sent our production team to Serbia to produce a series of documentary style short films for a global non-profit, we’ve produced artwork for Universal Music and worked with several fashion houses (established brands and exciting start-ups) on multiple ecommerce projects.
Chaptr represents a shift from working with local businesses to global brands. It’s the best version of us and a natural step in evolution of our agency.
So don’t think of us as just web designers, think of us as your creative partners.