I started hiring again, and that gives me the opportunity to tell me the company story of Obra Studio. We’ve been growing a lot since our inception in the beginning of 2025.
A few things keep coming back in calls so I thought I’d write about them to avoid giving the same explanation to everyone.
Language requirements
Requiring Dutch as a language has given me a lot of pause over the years. Why is Dutch a hard language requirement when more than 80% of our internal communication is in English, and clients in general don’t mind working in English…?
This requirement is about the Belgian market. Currently we have 6 Belgian clients and 2 clients in the US.
Team members are encouraged to use public channels on Slack, avoid too many DMs (especially when they contain project info or discussions) and speak English in general.
So why still this language requirement for Dutch? The reality of the Belgian IT market is that a significant part the taxes we tend to pay flow into government and government-subsidized projects (18.15 billion EUR in 2024).
The environments you end up working in for some projects (universities, government departments, subsidized orgs like VDAB, VRT etc.) are typically 100% Dutch and projects require you to speak Dutch. As such to essentially be “hirable” for these types of contracts, you need to speak Dutch as well. We haven’t had this type of project yet, but with Mono in the last two years, a rather significant part of our income came via these types of projects.
These projects are a reality to keep an interface design agency afloat in Belgium. For all
A secondary reason is that some of our work is in an industry context where the users of our work (e.g. factory workers) do not speak English. The usability test has to be conducted in Dutch.
Company hubs
It is our intention to create two company hubs: one in Belgium and in Mexico City.
Belgium is pretty small and we focus on the triangle Antwerp – Brussels – Ghent. Currently most of the team is based around Ghent, but we have people from Brussels and Limburg as well.
Mexico City is a huge city and travelling within the city can take as much time as switching cities in Belgium by train. We are generally centered around the neigborhood of Condesa.
Generally work is 100% remote with exceptions for meeting the other team members for design workshops or limited social activities. Independence to go towards our clients and conduct workshops with the client, do usability tests and field research on location (in hospitals, factories, schools…) is a requirement for designers.
I don’t want to be the company that sends their employees on an Ardennes weekend twice a year, taking away their free time. However, I am planning to do a Christmas dinner in Belgium, and eventually want to make enough money to have the team gather in a place with a latin vibe, realistically a good place in Spain would be the stand-in for the ultimate dream, sending Belgian to visit Mexico or the other way around; sending the Mexican team to visit Europe.
For Mexico City, the idea is to get an office in a co-working space and work together 1-2 days a week. Ideally the person we find is a real chilango, and communication is in both English and Spanish. We have been doing designer, developer & PM meetup events in the city to grow our network.
Some freelancers have already decided to travel on their own to Mexico and say hi. I myself travel 2-3 times per year to Belgium and then spend time with the team and clients.
Freelance vs payroll
We are not ready to hire payroll. I wrote on this blog earlier that I made the decision to go for freelancers only. We split our job in 2 roles: hiring in Belgium for a freelancer that works part-time and hiring in Mexico for either part-time or full-time.
I feel like eventually we will want to work with mostly payroll people when we reach a stable point. But right now, the talent we need is usually with freelancers; and I believe a payroll job is a long-term promise for stability.
The risk I can realistically assume is to give a freelancer a 3/5 contract for 1 year (132 days); this ties the freelancer to the company but also allows them do other projects. When incoming work happens to be strong, we can give more work to the freelancer; but they have some certainty having an agency contract than being a “sole” freelancer.
When a freelancer joins with a year contract, they don’t have to worries about sales or marketing themselves. Projects get sold for them. You have stability for 1 year and possibly much more if the agency grows.
This stability comes at a certain price where the agency obviously takes a margin on the work to grow itself and to pay the roles not directly generating revenue (business development, sales, marketing)
Design level expectation & Obra Education
In many applications, designers mention that they are not learning; either they are in an environment where they are the only designer, or the environment they are working in does not value design.
Obra is 100% the polar opposite of that, where if you’re looking to expand your skills and to grow as a designer, you are in the right place.
That doesn’t mean we don’t have a baseline expectation in place for the level of design you already have. We want you to grow from a good designer to an excellent designer.
At Obra, we have an education pillar where we focus on Figma workshops, we’ve been actively exploring how to design with AI (in a good way) for almost a year now; and in general, we are focussed on reaching a very high level of design.
If a high enough level cannot be attained, the designer is mentored to get there (and the more senior designers compensate to deliver a great project). There’s my profile as an agency owner, but next to this we currently have 2 senior design mentors to help grow medior designers to a senior level.
Interested? Know someone?
Are you interested? Know someone that is perfect to join for an important role to grow a new boutique design studio, that helps software companies to the next level? Find our jobs at our website: