Well Made

57 Bringing the Chocolate with Haraldur Thorleifsson, founder of Ueno

Episode Summary

A conversation with Haraldur Thorleifsson, founder Ueno — a creative agency designing digital experiences for Silicon Valley's biggest tech companies.

Episode Notes

From Airbnb to Uber, creative agency Ueno is designing digital experiences for Silicon Valley's biggest tech companies. Founder Haraldur Thorleifsson is on Well Made sharing how the most important part of their process has nothing to do with design.

On this episode, Halli talks about building trust with first-time clients (14:25) and teaching brands the role of agencies (17:39). He shares how collaboration and fostering personal relationships are important to their process (21:23). He talks about not wanting to be boxed into the same design style (25:59). As Ueno continues to boom, Halli talks about restructuring their company to be autonomous without his direct oversight (27:36). At the same time, he’s learning how to encourage creativity and bring geographically spread out teams together (30:01). Finally, Halli talks about overcoming alcoholism (38:30), taking things to their extremes (39:42), and bringing his big visions for Ueno to life (40:50).

Links and images from this post are on the Lumi Blog.