Happy 10th Birthday To Redbox Studio!

This post is written by Nic.

We’re 10 today. I started the company on 10 October 10 years ago. I thought it be nice to tell you a little story of the little red robot that could.

I started this web design business with one Dell computer (which cost me a staggering RM7,000) in a corner of my rented room in 1998.

I’d graduated the year before with a degree in Fine Art from USM. I didn’t want to be an Art teacher so I got a job as an art director in a local advertising agency (that agency is now long gone!).

I spent a year working in the advertising industry, where stress and late nights became best friends. After a year, I decided that this was not the life I wanted and I quit, knowing I had a business idea but no skills at all.

Not one to give up easily as I am what others would call a headstrong Aries, I promised myself I would learn how to build websites from scratch. Which was quite daring in an odd way because when I graduated in 1997, I had no programming skills or computer skills.

But there’s 2 ways to go about this – I either gave up or I learnt.

I learnt. I learnt everything, read everything, put everything I read to practice. So if someone now comes and whines to me that he can’t get a business started on his own, I would say you haven’t tried hard enough. You have to want success bad enough to do what it takes.

Redbox Studio was a work-from-home business for many years. That’s why I get it if you tell me you’re a work-at-home entrepreneur. I understand your challenges and perils.

Was it tough to get clients in the early days? Of course.

But I am thankful for those early clients who gave me a chance to design their websites. They’re still with me after 10 years!

But even work-at-home businesses need to grow. In 2005, we got an opportunity to work with the USM School of Arts (I’ve come full circle – I was a student in this faculty and now I’m back again to help!). A year before (2004), my wife quit her corporate communications job and joined Redbox Studio.

In those early years, we were working from home. Work and personal lives blurred. We were truly a start-up. As we were living in a rented double-storey house, we converted a room on the ground floor into our ‘office space’. Friends often came over to marvel at our little office.

Two years later, we moved into an apartment and soon, our apartment doubled up as the official Redbox Studio office and living quarters.

And in 2005, we officially moved from a home office to a real office within the USM campus. In 2006, we hired our first full-time team member and we’re grateful with the way we’re growing as a small company. Beginning this year, we started accepting interns for our internship programme.

How We Decided What We Wanted Redbox Studio To Be

Before Redbox Studio was born, we were both working for other companies. And yet, we disliked much of what we saw out there – fun and work never got along together.

If you had fun, you probably weren’t working. The work environment was stiff and formal. The kind of corporate environment we didn’t fancy at all.

When I started Redbox Studio in 1998, we knew we wanted it to be really different. We want it to reflect the values we believed in – what’s wrong with having fun at work?

Shouldn’t work be fun?
Shouldn’t work be deeply satisfying?
Why would anyone spend a third of their lives working in sheer grumpiness?

Most people say, it cannot be done. How does one have fun and work? It’s anarchy.

You see, I don’t take no. I like to try and see what happens.

So from the beginning, I decided that we were going to have fun and work at the same time.

What We’ve Learnt in 10 Years

This year is our 10th year in business. Yet nothing has changed much over the past decade.

We’ve always held firm to the idea that work should be pleasurable and satisfying and we should be honest and sincere in our relationships with our team members and clients. We want to help clients who are keen on helping themselves, clients who understand why they need our services and clients who value the advice and consultation we offer.

It’s not just clients either.

We offer our team members, the people who work with us, a good place to work. Our small, cosy office on the green campus of Universiti Sains Malaysia gives them a place where they can do their best work.

Although we’re fun and casual, everyone in Redbox Studio knows it’s about performance and results.

We encourage time out to play during office hours (we even have yoyos, games and playing cards in the office), we encourage team members to explore and we encourage team members to chill at our warm, inviting coffee corner. It’s about freedom, flexibility and forward-thinking. It’s about having fun as a team and creating results as a team so that you, as our client, benefit.

From the start we believed in running a business with heart. It means having confidence in knowing that we live each day with integrity and knowing we are helping clients grow their businesses globally.

Through it all, our work has never changed; we’re still here to help you create a better website to tell your fabulous story to the world.