Each year, D&AD, the global association of creative advertising and design communities, publishes its official table of the most successful design agencies. These rankings are based on the results of the D&AD Awards, with companies allocated points for each win.
This year, the overall winner is Raw Materials, which is unusual for two reasons. Firstly, because the American agency – a team of digital product designers, brand designers, strategists and technologists – was only founded in 2023. And secondly, because, well, that’s what they call themselves. The tagline on their homepage is literally: “An unusual design company”.
Working with early start-ups and established brands such as Meta, Peacock, JP Morgan Chase, and 7-Eleven, Raw Materials aims to break the mould of repetitive, cookie-cutter digital products, instead opting for work that embraces difference as a competitive advantage.
As their mission statement says, “We believe that when everything is the same, different is the greatest of opportunities. Unusual wins. We bring together bold and ambitious company leaders and the best creative talent in the world to design and build products founded on the power of difference.”
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So, what does that philosophy look like in practice? And how did this approach catapult Raw Materials to become the D&AD Design Studio of the Year within just a year of operation? We caught up with CEO John Roescher, CCO Pablo Marques and COO Jennifer Allen to delve deeper into what makes Raw Materials so… well, unusual.
Origin story
We start with the agency’s origin story. As John puts it, the core idea behind its launch was simple but compelling: “When everything is the same, different is the greatest opportunity.”
Where was the most “sameness” and, as a consequence, the most opportunity? This question led them to the digital space, which they believed had become an environment of monotony, particularly in the area of product design.
In other words, digital experiences – the touchpoints between businesses and consumers – were becoming too similar across industries. “We found a lot of reasons for that,” John says. “And those reasons led to how we decided to build an agency, build a team, build a practice that would solve that problem.”
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Addressing sameness
From day one, then, the philosophy that drives Raw Materials has been a desire to break from convention and find new solutions. “It’s finding the thing that’s better than what exists already, or that’s better than any obvious idea, the easiest path or the most optimised path,” explains John.
“If you can find that and you can pull that off, it’s always going to be more successful just by definition. It’s that it is hard work to get there. It’s hard work to figure that thing out. But if we can find that thing and pull it off, everyone’s going to see results that are much better than what they’ve experienced before.”
This might all sound like common sense,