Creativity may be very personal, but creation—the actual releasing of a product out into the world—has most often always been something of a team effort. Then came Covid-19. Collaborative work for most professionals took a hit, and many creatives found themselves searching for tools to help sustain their inspiration while working remotely, and ways to build the support they could no longer get from in-person interactions.
In Season 2 of “The Drop In with Dropbox,” an ongoing series looking at the future of work produced by Dropbox and WIRED Brand Lab, three creators take us inside their work spaces to offer a look into their working worlds, and get candid about the challenges they’ve faced. The three-part documentary series showcases how they’ve come to depend on digital tools, like Dropbox, to push their projects across the finish line and guarantee happy clients, and how those tools will continue to serve them in the post-pandemic future.
For furniture designer and upholsterer Nicole Crowder, running her business—while fostering her creativity—has meant having digital tools that can make her client interactions feel almost as if they were in person. Crowder creates commissioned, one-of-a-kind pieces of furniture and accessories in her Minneapolis design studio, Nicole Crowder Upholstery, and also produces how-to videos shot on her iPhone. For a recent project upholstering dining room chairs for a client, she used Dropbox to share swatch choices with her client and to solicit feedback, counting on Dropbox notifications to help her keep the process moving smoothly and to make sure everyone stayed on the same page. “As a creative working in something that’s very tactile, very physical, very laborious, it’s been wonderful having a digital tool like Dropbox, where I can compartmentalize and streamline my workflow process,” says Crowder. “It just frees me up to focus more on my work at hand.”
Even before the pandemic, Dropbox aimed to design a different way of working—one where creatives and other business owners could sustain, and even improve, their creative process, offering built-in support by integrating with the tools and apps creative professionals already use. Staying organized and aligned is easy when everything—projects and photos to share, designs to review, documents to organize and save— goes in one place. The back-and-forth process of creative work gets out of the way, so business owners can present their ideas with the polish and professionalism they deserve and their clients value. Creative work is easier—and clients are happier.
Illustrator and designer Sophia Chang had a vision to make shopping for sneakers more equitable. She cofounded online marketplace Common Ace with a focus on women and streetwear as a way to provide the accessibility and variety for women that she saw the market lacking. She and her partner put out a survey to collect data on women’s sneaker shopping habits and used Dropbox to work remotely with their team—distributed between New York and L.A.— to craft the survey, put it out, and analyze and share the results. She also used Dropbox as she worked to turn the survey results into sharable social assets. “I’ve been using Dropbox the majority of my career,” says Chang. “Dropbox just has a very simple easy to use interface that allows us to share files seamlessly.” Even better, the brand shares Common Ace’s own business M.O.: As Chang puts it, “We want access to be widespread.”
King Children is an eyewear brand, but it’s also a tech platform. In the final episode of the three-part series, cofounder and CEO Sahir Zaveri talks about how he created the company in response to the vast waste and inefficiencies he and his partner saw within the industry. King Children calls on 3D-printing to craft zero-waste, made-to-order sunglasses with blazing efficiency—a lead time of weeks instead of years. For a recent project designing eyewear for gamers, Zaveri and his team were in the final stages of design when they decided they needed to start over from scratch. Luckily, all of their earlier versions were saved and organized within Dropbox, and available to all team members around the world. “When we’re working with CAD files, and especially when we’re transferring them, having a system like Dropbox that allows you to transfer a large file easily is really helpful,” says Zaveri. Also essential, as he discovered: Being able to track different versions of a document or design and lock files to prevent unwanted edits, getting notified when new changes are made, and seeing all feedback at once.
That sort of efficiency and ease matters to King Children’s bottom line—but also to the heart of its mission. “King Children stands for a new way of doing business, without squandering resources and still satisfying customers,” says Zaveri. “We hope this business model is something that can inspire people in other aspects of the industry as well.” As artists of all kinds move forward in the new world of work, it’s heartening to see that, with a little help from Dropbox, creativity and collaborative work can find a place to not just coexist, but thrive.
Discover more from Dropbox here.
This story was produced by WIRED Brand Lab for Dropbox.
