Member Spotlight

Currently, you are running two businesses. How did that happen?

Susanna: It was an organic thing. We did not set out with the idea of having two businesses, because that’s insane.

Simon: First, we decided to pack up our lives in London and go traveling. The original idea was 12 cities in 12 months with the intention of experiencing cities as the locals do. We are not pausing our lives, we are just continuing in a different way. At that time, Susanna already had experience working freelance, and when I quit my job I just thought that I will somehow make it work. The plan was never to work together. 
We just got a few clients from an online platform and we ended up collaborating, and that turned into our first business endeavor, ALAK Design, which is a design and branding agency. It just kind of happened. 
The other thing, the Climate Crisis Creative Hub, started at the same time as we were leaving London. There we were volunteering and putting on films. And as our parting, we thought of doing a little film festival on the climate crisis. It was meant to be quite casual but, it ended up being quite intense and also a massive success.

Susanna: This was a year ago. For the first two weeks, we went on holiday to Croatia. That was when we started ALAK and also when we started the Climate Crisis Flim Festival. So, if I think about it in a strategic way it was a bit suicidal, I don’t know what we were thinking. But it worked. It worked really well actually. 

Simon: We were able to reach thousands of people who planned to come to our film festival although we had just 45 seats available. That’s when we realized that we had something that we could build on. We rested over Christmas break and soon after started planning the next edition. 

That’s when we started thinking that the film festival could become something more. That led us to think about bringing the film festival to a larger online platform. Lock-down was the perfect time to build out that idea.

Susanna: I had a concern about the year-round engagement of our community. The problem with film festivals is that they are events that happen once a year, and there is this massive gap that needs to be filled with marketing. The point in traditional festivals is to funnel people back into your event next year. But there isn’t much of a concern about how these people are interacting with the content. Ours is a mission-driven festival focused on a topic that urgently needs massive engagement. We felt that it wasn’t enough for us to just do a festival. We had to do something all-encompassing, offer a platform for the community to expand and engage.  That’s were the creative hub came from, the desire to create something that was actually impactful. That’s our ambitious plan and now we are working on delivering it. 

We wanted to bring to life a next-generation platform where people our age and younger can connect. In a way that suits our digital minded perspective on things. One of the things that people in our age cohort are most worried about is climate change but there isn’t any digital infrastructure for that. It exists to book accommodations or to order food, but not for this thing that people are seriously interested in. So, we realized that there is this gap. The branding is what we really wanted to focus on in order to create a good user experience that is on par with other apps and digital products. 

Simon: In London, in 2019 we had Extinction Rebellion pop up with a very distinct brand. Their work opened our eyes to the need and potential that exists in this space. They unshackled traditional environmentalism.