Team Spotlight: Meet Your Graphic Design Team!

When putting together our spotlight this quarter, we had a suggestion to switch up the format and highlight a whole team — so, meet the Graphic Designers of Boston Retail Solutions!

This group of 14 talented designers work all types of magic daily to get our graphics from design → prepress → sent to print. Throughout our interview, they shed light on their daily duties, discussed their team structure, and showed off their amusing personalities!  

The biggest takeaway from my conversation with the designers : teamwork is most important. Tracey noted, “We collaborate so well and come together not only as coworkers but as friends.” Jaan agreed, saying, “...everything I’ve learned here has been taught by my co-workers. All pods jump in together when something needs done, even if it is not our usual responsibility. The phrase ‘it’s not my job’ doesn’t exist within this team.”

The group's time with BRS varies from the newest team members, Nylles and Vick, who started this past month, to Stephanie (sits in Vero Beach) who’s been here an impressive 9+ years! Everyone pitches in to train so new employees feel properly onboarded and welcomed. 

They are currently structured into what they call “pods” to help flow the workload. We have 4 different pods that make up our design team – all that contribute very important work to BRS. Here’s the breakdown:  

Design: The “Design” pod, which includes Mark, Stephanie, Julie, Odin, and Victor, refer to themselves as “the first line of defense.” They handle design for all our barricade work making sure color and details of the graphics appear on the barricade correctly. If the barricade has a graphic, it was touched by this team!

Prepress: After a graphic gets done with Design it goes to Prepress, our second line of defense. Similar to quality control, they double-check the details, send out the proof, make sure all boxes are checked – then send to print! Our Prepress pod is made up of Tony, Tracey, and David. Just like the Design pod, they touch all barricade graphics as well. 

FedEx: Our FedEx pod is made up of Romesh, Alexa, Jaan, Nylles and Anna. This group, as you can probably guess, works through all our FedEx graphics. From design → prepress, the projects get started and sent to print by this group for everything FedEx Commercial and HCO. FedEx usually calls for specialized graphics, so these can be time-consuming as there is, at times, intricate CADD work that goes into the creation 

Vehicle Wrap: We have a small but mighty group of Sandra and Andres (Dre) that are dedicated to our vehicle wraps. These graphics require different design work than our Barricade Design & FedEx team, so they are a pod on their own. Similar to FedEx, they take care of design → prepress and handle all vehicle wrap projects that come through the Big Wraps division. 

All to say, this team might have their pods for workflow, but realistically, they all dive into what’s needed! Romesh shared, "I mostly work on FedEx stuff, but you can bet when Barricades are busy and FedEx is slower, my whole team jumps in and asks what we can do to help, and vice versa. Sometimes it’s all hands on deck to make sure we exceed customer expectations.” 

Next, we jumped out of work for a minute, and talked about some hobbies outside of the office. Alexa was quick to share, “All the designers enjoy spending time together outside of work – many of us get together and play music” — and, wow, do we have some musicians! 

Alexa and Oden play guitar, Mark plays the ukulele and sings, Tracey on the violin and Nylles is a music producer (I might have even missed some). Many on the team also love to draw (and are very good at it!)— in which they teach and challenge each other to grow. Sandra explained, “The team does a monthly drawing contest, and whoever won last month gets to pick the next category. To pick our monthly winner, we have the print team in the back for judges. It’s so fun and helps us improve our skills with some healthy competition”. Additional activities they do together include playing billiards afterwork some days, hanging on the weekends, and even went to an escape room together a few weeks ago!

I wrapped up our interview by asking the team :" What's the most rewarding part of working for Boston Retail Solutions?"

• Tracy shared, “It’s rewarding to see a project from start to finish. I love learning and growing with this team. We have comradery — I have never worked with a group like this before.”
• Julie said, “We all motivate each other in our work-work, but also in our other forms of art — we push each other to be better.”
  
• Mark continued, "I love coming to work because of the group I work with. With this team, we’re all so different and FUN... plus we’re hard workers. We know how to enjoy ourselves and still do what's needed, it’s a great environment to be a part of.”
  
• Jaan sharing, “This is the best type of work environment — we all want to make each other better, find another workplace like that!"
  
•  Vick, our newest designer chimed in, “Everyone wants to teach me things, I’ve been shocked to learn everything I have in the past couple of months. I really like working with this group. We can talk about work, but I can also open up about my art."
• Nylles, also a newer team member, added “I have never been a part of a team that works together like this. Never been in a spot where we’re having so much fun, but also getting our work done.”

I could go on much longer from my conversation with this group about how much they enjoy working for BRS and with each other. Thank you Graphic Designers for sharing a little about your team with us. The culture you've created around relationship, hard work, and FUN is contagious! Keep up the great work! 

.....and happy waddle-D-Thursday, IYKYK...if you don't, ask one of them!