Do you remember that moment when you talk about a project with some of your best friends for the thousandth time and finally saying, ‘Lets go and do it now’? Well, we did and what comes to our mind is that first sunny day in spring 2012 in a park with a big smile on our faces whenever somebody asks us what we do and how this all started!
Back then Tom came up with an idea…
written by Tom & Luke @ Take a Smile
Tom’s dream was to organize an event with some of the Reggae artists he had worked with as a graphics and web designer in Vienna. He always insisted, that he wanted to give the event’s profit to charity. Josip, now our creative director, completed this approach by saying: “I got a friend whose NGO is called Make Me Smile Kenya. They do awesome, sustainable projects in the western part of Kenya.“
Luke, back then an Event Management student and SAE Alumnus, offered his collaboration under one condition: “We do it as great as possible or we don’t do it at all.“
First of all we had to present our idea and concept to the founder of the NGO, Maximilian Ullrich, who happened to be traveling India at that time. So the only way to get in touch with him was to send him an email explaining our idea. Waiting for his reply, we already continued working on the website, the CI (Corporate Identity) and the whole concept. In the meantime we also got the chance to present our ongoing efforts to Maximilian’s mother, who is the co-founder of Make Me Smile Kenya. She was into the idea right away and very pleased about our enthusiasm. As soon as Maximilian came back from India, we met up for the first time and gave him a closer insight into what we wanted to achieve with the project and the whole concept around it. Not only was this the beginning of an inspiring and productive work partnership, but also lead to a personal friendship.
Soon after that the Make me Smile Festival was born.
Make me Smile VolontärInnen mit unseren Schützlingen aus Miwani vor dem Kinderhaus © josipjukic-sunaric WEB
The team then was enlarged by Roger, a business economics student from Luxembourg, who joined the team further into the project.
After receiving wonderful feedback for our event and the accompanying media productions we wanted to combine forces and use our network of creative professionals to extend our passion for perfection to customer projects. This led us to the idea to launch the Take a Smile Media House, which is meant to be a media productions company.
By that time we were still working from our “home offices”. The only problem was, that the given circumstances just didn’t feel right. We all were dreaming of an office, we could share with creative people of similar interests. In addition it became increasingly obvious, that we needed a more powerful workplace for our media projects.
In the first process of research, it stood out that we weren’t the first ones with this quite new idea of a shared office space in combination with a networking community and that these facilities are known as CoWorking Spaces. However back then there was no such space in Vienna that offered exactly what we needed. So we continued to work on our idea until it became more and more specific. A business plan was set up and we were facing completely new challenges. The two most challenging obstacles were to find an investor and the perfect location for our start-up project.
Currently we are getting closer and closer to reach our goal. We are continuously adapting our business model and starting to look for the perfect location. In addition we are soon to enter the final negotiations with our prospective investor – cross your fingers!
We believe that together we can change the way people work in creative environments as much as in providing our customers with carefully designed products and services.
We are a family of creative people with different backgrounds and proud to combine graphics, photo, video, audio, organization, management and financial skills. The glue holding everything together and letting us work even better is our friendship.
We dream about being able to expand our work and spread the word even on the outside of Vienna to other big cities in Austria or one day even go international.
DREAM BIG – people say. So we do. This is what lights the fire in our bellies.
This is why we hop out of bed bright and early every morning, highly motivated – knowing we can do the work we love.
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Tom Haider
Lukas Ritter
Tom Haider: Founder, Graphics and Web Design, Video Postproduction – Self-Employed Graphics Designer since 2008, Web and Printdesign
Lukas Ritter: Founder, Audio Engineer, Event Management, Marketing – Studied Audio Engineering, Event Management and International Marketing
