We recently connected with Ana Gonzalez & Kevin Bendtsen and have shared our conversation below.
Ana & Kevin, thank you so much for taking the time to share your lessons learned with us and we’re sure your wisdom will help many. So, one question that comes up often and that we’re hoping you can shed some light on is keeping creativity alive over long stretches – how do you keep your creativity alive?
It has been quite challenging keeping creativity alive with a full time job and life happening all at the same time. I think what has really helped is creating habits that force us to be creative. For example we have made it a point to sketch something new once a day. Whether it be a new product or refining an existing idea, it has become a sort of habit to get it on paper at least once a day. This strategy really gets our ideas flowing and gets us excited to actually accomplish them later on in the day. In a way it becomes a big motivator for us to really decide on what priorities and tasks need to get done for our ideas to become a reality. Another thing we do is try and surround ourselves by creatives. Whether it is an artist we follow on Instagram, a post we saved on Pinterest, or friends we surround ourselves with, we really try and dive into those creative aspects of our lives.
Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
Ana and I are actually architectural designers. We met in grad school our first year and quickly realized we share many of the same views and opinions about design and architecture. I think most importantly we both wanted to start something that could be ours.
We started DANICO in 2018 and the name originally derived from our Danish and Mexican roots, hence the name DANICO. We originally began designing and building commercial furniture for businesses using heavy steel and wood. Over time we slowly came to realize and understand what type of identity we wanted DANICO to become. We love the idea and process of making unique pieces by blurring boundaries between design professions so we slowly backed out of the realm of contractor/carpentry shop and started pushing and pursuing our own designs. Now we are more of a design studio that exercises furniture design, product design, graphic design, art, architecture, branding, and we are beginning to explore fashion design.
We have still managed to keep everything in house from design sketches, building our prototypes, building our end product, along with all the photography, graphics, marketing, and packaging of our products. Something that is extremally important to us is making sure that our product tell a complete story or narrative and everything is cohesive. It is almost as if we are trying to give our creations life!
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
We think there are many things that we have learned since venturing on our own, but one of the most important things to keep in mind is that it is completely fine to fail. We have failed time and time again, but I think those moments are more valuable because something is learned, and we remind ourselves of those moments how not to do something and that really guides us into choosing the better option or path for us and DANICO.
This also opens the opportunity to start over, so don’t be afraid to start over. For example I can not tell you how many times we have re-branded DANICO, but the decisions that lead to this helped us refine what we wanted to do and how we wanted to position our brand and what type of brand identity we wanted DANICO to have. Starting over is not the end of the world.
Lastly is to just get started. So many people get so into their heads and instead of just doing, they get caught up in hypothetical situations and get discouraged and never begin. With this its important to remember that nothing is built in a day but taking small steps every day well get you a lot further then never starting at all.
If you knew you only had a decade of life left, how would you spend that decade?
The largest challenge we face at the moment is time. We both have full time jobs that take up most of our week, so whenever we work on projects it is usually comes down to late nights weekends. We try and make a list of priorities we want to get done each day. This way we are kept usually a little more organized and committed to repetition to help us grow our brand so it can become our full time focus.
Contact Info:
- Website:www.studiodanico.com
- Instagram: @studio_danico
- Other: https://www.pinterest.com/StudioDanico18/
Image Credits
Studio Danico
