Why We Love to Work with Small Businesses
Studio DNVR loves to work with small businesses for numerous reasons, including the fact that we are ourselves a small business.
We love designing brand identities for owners who take pride in their work, because and that’s how we operate.
Humans can tell when a product has been made by human hands, which allows us to connect to one another a bit more when we begin to look more closely at the products we consume, and what it costs to make them. In today's age of machine-made everything, human connection goes a long way to reach human customers.
For practical reasons leadership in small businesses is closer to the action and connected with the workers. They own their mistakes because they are closer to the action, learn quickly, and are more nimble. Small business owners aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty.
Those in leadership positions in small or employee-owned businesses more often live in the communities in which they operate. This encourages them to invest directly in those communities because they are directly affected by the money available to them for vital and necessary spending like infrastructure, affordable housing, air quality, access to healthy food and water, and protection from extreme weather events.
For decades in this country, investment has shifted away from our local-level communities. This has allowed the literal and figurative crumbling of our infrastructure and systems. Ownership and capital is focused at the hierarchical top pieces of the economy, and the local suffers and becomes less resilient.
We work with small businesses because they help strengthen our communities. Too much power and investment is consolidated away from them, and we are grateful to work with people who have the chance to shift that imbalance.
“800-pound gorilla” is an American English expression for an organization so powerful that it can act without regard to the rights of others or the law. The phrase is rooted in a riddle joke: "Where does an 800-pound gorilla sit?" [The answer: "Anywhere it wants to."] This highlights the disparity of power between the 800-pound gorilla and everything else.
Investment is less wasteful and resources are put to better use when operation becomes focused on quality and craftsmanship over efficiency, mass-production, and infinite growth.
