“It’s hard to talk about innovation without talking about digital or any kind of technology”. “There is no option not to go through the digital transformation, the company that doesn’t want to talk will die”. “No wonder companies are investing heavily to improve their processes.” The statements are from Luis Felipe Fernandes, CEO and partner at HandMade, who is convinced that the way to innovate is what makes the difference. For him, innovation has to be collaborative.
“What we did was to find ways to involve customers in the process, and not just at the end, in the approval process. What we do, in a non-literal way, is take off the customer’s hat of approval and put on the employee’s hat, in the sense that they work with us. Of course, we have a way of doing this so that it is natural, smooth, but essentially our innovation as a company was to innovate in the way we do it”, says Fernandes, who is partners in the innovation and design consultancy created in 2015 the advertisers Fernando Rocha and Gustavo Burnier, all of whom worked for large agencies such as AlmapBBDO and Ogilvy.
According to Fernandes, part of HandMade’s product is called ways of working. “It’s actually how we build processes collaboratively so that innovation happens, because an idea is just an idea, true innovation is that implemented and generating results for all sides. This materializes in a series of things, such as always working with a multidisciplinary team for each challenge”, summarizes the advertiser.
For him, it is a pragmatic view of innovation, “which actually is what brings a different view to the table, which discovers something that no one has discovered yet, but which generates results regardless of whether it is glamorous or not”.
As well as several consultants and startups, HandMade surfed the wave of investment by brands in digital. According to Fernandes, the company should end the year, a period in which it conquered clients such as OLX and PetLove, with growth of 10% compared to 2020. “Last year had already been our biggest year of growth”, he declares.
At HandMade, the demand for innovation processes with embedded technology has been growing, but with a difference in 2021: there was a strong increase in brand briefings asking for the application of the O2O (online-to-offline) strategy, based on taking the experience of purchase from the digital world to the physical environment.
“Our feeling is that this type of briefing has emerged more now because during the pandemic everything online boomed, it grew a lot. And now that things are getting ‘back to normal’, the experience has become mismatched. There was a lot of investment in digital and, at the moment, there is no consistency of experience. Consumers are served digitally, but when they go live there is no connection whatsoever with what they are doing in a physical store. The strategy is to ensure consistency of experience across all brand channels”, says Fernandes.
For the professional, the investment in innovation returned, the investment in digital remained and the market’s confidence also returned. Vivara, Volkswagen, Porto Seguro and Wine are some of the brands already served by HandMade.
