About
We tear down what isn't working, and build something that can hold weight.
That's not just the metaphor this site is built on. It's the actual rule we work by. Polish for its own sake doesn't interest us. If something's broken, load times, structure, the whole idea, we'd rather say so and rebuild it properly than decorate around the problem.
How we got here
We used to take on hospitality clients almost exclusively. It didn't work the way we hoped.
One of the clearest examples: we offered a full site rebuild to a restaurant we knew personally, at a steep discount, because we believed it would be mutually beneficial and we were on good terms. Over six months we had four meetings. They were late to most of them, or didn't show up at all. When we finally walked them through everything wrong with their existing site, point by point, they said nothing. We found out weeks later, by checking the site ourselves, that they'd quietly hired someone else to fix it and never told us. We'd just been blue-ticked.
That's the moment the shift actually started. Not every hospitality client is like that, but it was enough of a pattern that we stopped chasing that kind of work and started building for clients who show up, decide, and move.
Two people, one process
Paolo and Julieta work the same way on every project: design it, then build it, rather than handing work off between roles. We're creative partners and life partners both, and the same instinct for filling in each other's gaps shows up whether we're shipping a platform or just cooking dinner. It's not a formal division of labor so much as a genuine complement: one of us practical and build-oriented, one of us design-first, both of us opinionated about the same outcome.
One quick, honest aside: clients occasionally get exactly as invested in small decisions as we do. Rising Collectively went three rounds a sprint on individual color choices alone. We respect the care. We also remember it.
Proof beyond our own word for it
Flushiest, our own product, got picked up by:
- Het Parool
- I Am Expat
- Times Radio Instagram
- Bram radio soundbite
On a marketing budget that was, honestly, close to nothing.
The honest version of “we've been doing this a while”
The first design for Flushiest was, by any fair measure, bad. It was built around an androgynous figure sitting on a toilet, and it's very likely the specific reason we lost the hackathon we entered it in. We don't say that to be self-deprecating for its own sake. We say it because it's true, and because the gap between that first version and what Flushiest is now is a better argument for what we do than any before/after we could stage.
And while we're being honest: distributing Flushiest ourselves came with its own hazards, not just the legal kind. Mid-campaign, wearing a t-shirt with a large golden toilet printed on the back, a seagull hit me square on the head with enough force that it genuinely felt like being struck by an egg. I walked home for half an hour, in winter, covered in it, still wearing the merch. Amsterdam has opinions about guerrilla marketing, and apparently so do the seagulls.
The ground is ready. Break it.
Tell us what you want to build on it. We reply within two working days — with a plan, not a pitch.