@bonolomathabela
Bonolo Mathabela
Founder and Managing Director
Bonolo works out what a brand is supposed to do before anyone draws it, and then makes sure the thing that gets built actually does it. He also runs the studio, which means the quote you receive is the invoice you get.
01Background
- 2021
- Founded BOAN with Angel Maile.
- 2020
- Product lead at a Johannesburg software company.
- 2018
- Strategy at a full service agency, Sandton.
- 2015
- BCom Marketing Management, University of Pretoria.
Works on
- Brand strategy and positioning
- Naming and verbal identity
- Website and store builds
- Analytics and conversion
- Studio operations and pricing
He spent four years in product before the studio, close enough to engineering to know what a design costs to build and far enough into the commercial side to know which features nobody ever used. Both are useful when a client asks for a fifteen page site to sell one thing.
Every project starts with him asking the questions nobody enjoys. Who is the buyer, what are they comparing you against, and what happens if you say nothing at all. The written position that comes out of that conversation is what the design gets measured against later.
He builds the sites the studio designs, which is the reason a BOAN presentation never contains a layout that cannot ship. It also means one person is accountable when a page is slow, and that person answers the phone.
02Three questions
- Why write a position down before designing?
- Because otherwise the review meeting becomes a matter of taste, and taste has no tiebreaker. A written page turns do you like it into does it do what we agreed.
- How do you price work?
- Fixed, off a published catalogue, quoted before we start. Hourly billing rewards a studio for being slow, and I would rather not be paid for my own inefficiency.
- When do you turn work down?
- When the deadline only works if nobody thinks. We would rather lose the project than deliver something we have to explain away later.
