Foreign.
You're listening to Eureka on Monocle Radio.
Brought to you by the team behind the entrepreneurs.
The show all about inspiring people, innovative companies and fresh ideas in global business.
I'm Tom Edwards.
John Rocher is the CEO of Raw Materials, a digital design agency that delivers innovative solutions by taking unconventional approaches.
Prior to founding the company, John ran another successful agency, but grew somewhat disillusioned with the industry's focus on scaling and optimizing pre existing ideas instead of nurturing originality.
This frustration led him to create Raw Materials with the goal of challenging conformity and prioritizing creativity, not just for clients, but for society as a whole.
But how do you implement such an unconventional business model in an industry that's often rather reluctant to think outside the box?
I caught up with John to hear more about the start of the journey.
He began by telling me about his unusual approach to design.
So the word unusual is a special word for us, means a lot of things, but I mean, so we're a design company and so our job in our capacity as an agency to clients, as a service provider to clients, our job at the end of the day is effectiveness.
And that's our goal.
We just believe that the thing that is the best is better than everything that exists, exists, already exists before, and what everyone else is thinking to do.
And so therefore it is unusual because usual is what everyone else is doing, especially more and more these days.
And so looking for the unusual thing is just our strategy in finding the thing that's most effective.
And then in order to do that, you have to open yourself up to taking unusual approaches to doing things that might include some of the practices that everyone else does, but certainly look outside of that and go and find things and ways of working that are different in order to create the thing that is so much more successful at whatever it is you're competing at or trying to do.
That it is unusual, in fact.
Yeah.
And I know that you're passionate about this idea that through constantly striving, sort of optimized processes and constant iterative development of things, that we're actually doing maybe the opposite of what the intention was, and that we're stifling originality, we're killing innovation, not to sort of fill in gaps that aren't there.