Showcased recently at the Milan Furniture Fair, VELA is an exercise bike that breaks from the established aesthetics of gym equipment. Vela uses projectors built into the frame to simulate a digital racing grid around the bike for an immersive training experience. Its sleek appearance has more in common with modern art than modern gym equipment and doubles as a sculpture whenever it is not in use.
It’s been twenty-five years and Wert&Co. has held true to our original mission (and our early ads in the beloved, now folded, ID magazine), working “where converging disciplines find their place“ and “where design is integral to business success.”
In 1995, Google was still three years away from being founded, social media meant classmates.com (although the term had not been coined), and design as a discipline was fairly rooted in its’ classical forms. Wert&Co.’s office had a room for portfolios, a hallway’s worth of paper resumes and interview notes on 4×6 notecards held together by rubber bands and paper clips.
Design’s journey to the C-suite had begun and, although we didn’t know it at the time, the pivotal moments and boom and bust cycles of that era, led to the wider understanding that design leadership should play a central role in business strategy — not just providing useful products and services, but creating experiences that people love.
Today, the story of the true value and impact of Design and Innovation in business is still being written.
Our clients and candidates are thinking about the ways people address smart roads and smart cars, the future of consumer experiences within hospitality and travel, the changing landscape of luxury and retail in a new consumer era, governments and elections, modernizing education, the future of media, structural equality in society, privacy and security, and transforming health care for the aged. They are doing this while experimenting with distributed global workforces, automation, and new communication systems at scale.
All in all, it has been quite a journey, and we’re looking forward to the future as Design continues to play an essential role with tangible impact on people’s lives, shaping countries and cultures, with a common purpose to deliver a better world, not only for today but for future generations.
Judy was delighted to be featured on the High Resolution video podcast series. Focused on Design Leadership, High Resolution is the passionate endeavor of Bobby Ghoshal and Jared Erondu, showcasing some highly inspired dialogues.
Our conversation ranged from Wert&Co.’s history recruiting creative leadership over the last two decades to some of our behind the scenes insights and tools, and even our favorite children’s book Harold and the Purple Crayon and how it can serve as a metaphor for mapping one’s own professional (and personal) journey.
On our recent business trip to the left coast (after a pit stop for the fascinating Renaissance Weekend in Utah), we were finally able to visit the renovated SF MOMA. And while we don’t exit thru the gift shop, well, actually we did. And the bookstore left us with plenty of summer reading inspiration — from A Smile in the Mind: Witty Thinking in Graphic Design (the classic had a new edition out last year — over 1,000 visual examples of humour, irony and playfulness in graphic design and branding over the last few decades) to the Little Book of Hygge (which just might make us look forward to the winter or at least a visit to Copenhagen!).