Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
We are a creative agency based in Liège, active for 5 years. Our adventure began in 2001 when we went on Erasmus with my friend and partner Rodrigue Strouwen. We had the opportunity to work together on several projects and “the magic operated”. We started working together right after the end of our studies in 2004 under different names, and we finally found Twodesigners in 2011. For us there is more in two heads than in one. We work together to provide the best possible answer to the questions of the customers.
The question of the ego does not exist in our studio, because the projects do not belong to one person, but to the whole team .
We love above all to have fun at work, to share, to learn, to discover. These are the reasons why we get up every morning.
What would you consider your distinctive achievement?
One of the things we are the most proud of is simply the fact of arriving to live our passion, to have created our own jobs and begun to give a job to others.
As it is said, it is the simple things that give the most pleasure, right?
If we were to talk about a concrete project it would clearly be “Petiluxe”, a project that we have just started to develop in parallel with the studio after several meetings and trips. This project brings together all our values and skills. A human project done by men for men. The concept is simple “buy one give one” – when you buy one of our chairs we put a child in school. Production is carried out in Vietnam and we fully assign it. The project objective is to offer another way of furniture consumption based on transparency and sustainability.
What are you looking forward to?
We seek to work with people who have different ideas, who dare to take risks, who question things. We love challenges, experimentations and teamwork. We really strive to find more of this kind of customers with whom we can develop innovative and crazy projects.
Which advise will you give to other professionals?
Keep going, you are getting there!
It’s simple, we believe that if an entrepreneur invests enough in his business and objectives he will eventually get there. Always keep your goals in mind, it’s not always about how fast you will get there but more about how long you will stay. Don’t be discouraged when you face a failure; most important is to understand why it failed and to draw conclusions for future projects. This is our point of view but unfortunately we do not hold the truth. Just remember this “Never give up”.
What are the challenges that we need to overcome to make cultural entrepreneurship more accessible?
This is a difficult question, I do not even know if we should speak of cultural entrepreneurship or rather simply entrepreneurship. In general we think that more people would be more willing to start as entrepreneurs if they would have a better picture of entrepreneurship. For 3⁄4 people ‘undertake’ is dangerous, difficult, bad payed, and includes a lot of competition. To us, they give up to quickly in front of the difficulties and their responsibilities. In Wallonia, there is a structure that supports entrepreneurs, but at the same time, project leaders should be more proactive. We think too many of them are in a wait-and-see attitude. Change can only come from them. That said there are certainly political measures to take to make it all less scary and less expensive in terms of charges and so on, but it is a part of the subject that we can’t control.
In conclusion we would say let people dream and help them making their dreams come true. Too many of them think they are not able to achieve their goals but they are full of unsuspected resources.
