
Behind the brand with Root web design studio
Hear how Paul re-branded his business to match his ethics and goals to grow from a one-person freelancer to a fully immersive, low carbon web design studio.Welcome to the Brand Stories series! Brand Stories go behind the brand where I chat to some of the inspiring business owners and brands on the story behind their brand. I hope you too can be inspired to hear how they built their own authentic brands, the blockages and hurdles they have overcome and how the creation of a brand worked!
Hear the brand story and behind the brand with Creative Wilderness and Paul the founder of Root Web Design Studio.
A few of the topics we discuss…
• What is sustainable and low carbon web design?
• How going through the branding process out in nature helped Paul get clear on his mission and come up with original ideas
• How re-branding helped him feel more confident in attracting bigger businesses
• How a great branding experience and website design work together
• How to make your website more sustainable
• How it feels making a bigger investment in your business
• Quitting social media and how he find clients
• Digital minimalism and his essentialist approach to business
Watch Paul’s inspiring brand story below (audio version too if you’d prefer to listen!)
Brand story 03: WITH ROOT WEB DESIGN STUDIO
brand story transcript
Welcome to another one of my brand stories, and I’m so excited to have the wonderful Paul from Root Web Studio, joining us. Do you want to introduce yourself and tell people what you do?
Thanks for having me today, Charlotte. It’s very kind to you. So as I just say I’m Paul Jardin. I’m the founder of Root Web Design and we’re a low carbon web design studio building, and building and designing website is, are very efficient and the idea is to minimise the carbon output of them as much as possible.
Yeah, something interesting I’ve done this week. We just had a little girl very recently. So yeah, she’s taken up a lot of of my lifetime at the moment, which is very exciting. And yeah I’m hoping this business will, we’re aiming to make a bit of a more positive future, which really hit home since since our daughter arrived. Sometimes it’s like your life changes, doesn’t it? You’ve been in business 10 years before that and operating more under your name, weren’t you?
So like a solo web designer and then you’ve taken the brave step to rebrand it and be a studio. We’re going to talk a bit more about why Paul’s doing this? Learn a bit more about low carbon web design because it’s something that’s quite new and it is very exciting.
It’s all about being a bit more sustainable in your web design. We did an amazing brand exploration in nature, which tied in nature which tied into Paul’s name about roots. So we’re going to talk about how that all came about. And yeah, just the kind of journey and some web design stuff and how the project was.
If you are thinking of rebranding, it’ll be probably a really useful conversation to listen into because Paul’s business was doing really good things before that. It was almost like, what’s next? So maybe, yeah, we could ask a little bit more about what sustainable web design means to you, because that’s the thing that you prompted you to start looking into that a bit more.
Yeah. I suppose the last couple of years really been thinking about how I can do what I do better. Like I think the web design, digital marketing industry as a whole is not in the best place really. I think it’s an attitude of just because we can do something we should, so that means making very inefficient websites.
I’m very much a digital privacy advocate and it tends to be a attitude, which kind of the industry standard is to track everything just because we can. And also all these tracking scripts you add, slow the page down a lot, and that really bulks up the carbon footprint as well. So that’s the main driver really. And yeah I think so really the aim of Root is to go against these kind of industry standard practices and suggest is there a better way of doing things.
And that kind of pulls in everything really from the development to the design and the copywriting and even of the marketing of your website. I love how it goes really deep and I think that’s one of your inspirations behind the name of Root. We’ll be talking a little bit more about what that, what, how that came about.
I think people who are maybe thinking about making their business more sustainable. Do you think they think about their website? Have you noticed people thinking about it a little bit more or has it been something, the focusing more on like products and the energy supplier they use and deliveries.
I think I don’t think many people are aware of it cause it is a very difficult thing to visualize, I always say it is not like your phone gives out exhaust pollution every time you load a website out, it’s a hidden thing really. So I don’t think a lot of people are aware of it.
Something I really want to spread the word about and educate people on ways to minimise your output. Whether you are developing a whole new site or you want to optimise your existing site. I think if I can educate people to just make that little bit of progress as you go, then it does add up to quite big wins over the long term.
It’s not just about these kind of practical things making images smaller and that, but you spoke a bit about, the humans that are going to be visiting the website and how how you’re treating them. So you you take that sustainability, but you’re going into the ethics as well.
Have you got any some of those bad practices that people might be doing that aren’t great in the sense of like your ethical web experience and what you do in Root to overcome those things?
Yeah, I think the three things first of all is I suppose from like a tracking perspective, that’s quite an ethical dilemma a lot of people have. Especially for small businesses like you you’re encouraged to measure all these things, so like you’re, like page views are useful, but a lot of the time if you are using software, say like Google Analytics, that will track a lot more personal things that as a business you don’t necessarily need, and especially if you’re a small business, realistically, you’re not gonna have the time or resources to study it anyway.
So the benefit for you as someone putting these scripts on your website, it’s real beneficiary is these massive companies like Google who are getting everyone’s personal data, but the person who’s using these scripts isn’t really gonna have the time or expertise to really make the use of it.
I always think you have to decide, this goes into designing the site as well. What do you actually need?
It’s taking a more minimal approach. Do I need to track these things? Do I need to include a massive image gallery on the homepage of the website, which is going to slow it down and give more carbon emissions.
Or can I capture the same kind of feeling? Can I accomplish the same thing by doing it in a more minimalist way? And the other thing I tend to look at from an ethics perspective is it is kind the kind of phrase that gets banded around is devious design where you’re trying to trick people into doing things.
I think you tend to find this a lot on a the example that used to be would be on like airline websites where they’d put on all the hidden fees and you could only turn them off through the button would be hidden somewhere at the back. And something like making a thing that the company wants you to do would be a big button, whereas the decline would be a little text link which would be hidden somewhere in the corner.
So that’s something I’m very much against. I believe that people should do something because they want to. Because you can supply that need rather than you having to push them in that direction.
This is something that’s come from the social media side of things where it’s designed to be addictive and, you pushing someone to keep reloading something.
Whereas really from a minimalist perspective, I just want someone to do something once. And then if that journey is designed well enough, someone can do that and then get on with their day. The site doesn’t have to reload again. So that minimizes the carbon out output.
It’s like a space that someone’s coming on and you want them to enjoy it. You want them to feel good. You don’t want them to get to the end point and feel not a horrible feeling. And do you think that stuff helps brands create their loyalty a bit more and a better relationship with their customers?
I think so. Yeah. It’s it’s a funny thing, but when you’re doing this kind of minimalist approach, when you do it right, people won’t be aware you’re doing it at all. I think a lot of the things I try to push is you’re avoiding something negative. So for example, if you have a very well optimised website as well as it having a low carbon footprint, if it loads fast, you’re going to avoid frustrating your customers.
You know how annoying it is when you go on a website, it takes ages to load or you go to click something and an image you’ll load in and you’ll click something else instead. That is annoying and that gives you a very negative relationship with that brand. If you’re like shopping for something you’re not going to stick around and buy something here, I’m just gonna click elsewhere.
Yeah, and it’s interesting as I feel here a lot of small business owners are worrying about doing loads of Instagram posts and they actually forget about their website.
I want to chat to you more a bit about your kind of digital minimalism later, and we’ll chat more about that, your rebranding process. But yeah do you feel that, people think that website, they just forget about it, and is there a reason why?
Yeah I think so. I think I just feel your website should be the center of your target. If you’re promoting your business, everything you do should go on your website first. For example, if you are doing a social media post, do it as a blog on your website first, and then you can take parts of content and repurpose it for different social networks for your newsletter and so on.
I think because it’s just a slightly slower process. If you put a blog up, that will eventually get picked up by search engines. But that takes a bit of time. Whereas I think social media is more of an instant gratification thing. It’s that I could spend a couple of hours writing a social post, which might get to people within seconds essentially, but then it’ll be gone again in a few hours and then it is done. All that time you spent writing that post, it’s gone. Whereas if it’s on your website, it’s always there and you can always refer back to it in the future. And that is growing your online presence as opposed to it being a fleeting.
A fleeting thing that’s gone again very soon. And that ties more in with your ethics, doesn’t it? About it being a sustainable business as well, so you’re not relying on quick fix social media posts and you’ve got something that will be putting down strong roots.
Journey of rebranding.
Was there a point when you went ‘I really need to rebrand’? Can you take us on your journey of how you got to the point of deciding you wanted to form Root?
Yeah I think as you said earlier yeah I’ve been for, nine years, operating as a sole trader freelance.
My business was my name. So essentially I was the business. And I think there’s a mental blockage is presented in yourself as a trades person versus a business. I think there’s a limit to the size of projects people believe you can take on as a single person, even though for the most part I would be working with other creatives as well and getting a team together for a job.
There’s that sort of mental blockage. I think from this, the capacity you have as a person as opposed to say a studio, even if you are all practical terms operated in the same way. So the other side of the rebrand was I really wanted to reflect better the kind of business I was doing.
Representing the ethical side and the en environmental side, which didn’t come across at all, even though that was the roots of what how I’ve been operating for quite some time. I am the person. we are the business that can help you if you’re wanting to reduce your digital carbon footprint.
Sustainable Website and Branding
And this is why I’m really excited about this chat! The thing about branding is what you are doing isn’t changing. You’re more focused on the kind of ethics and the sustainability behind the websites you build. But your brand is a different experience and as you say, trying to attract different people and you’re hoping it’s going to put you out there as a place where people would make that bigger investment.
We went into nature for our very first initial workshop around exploring the roots of Root. And it was the first time you’ve done this. Would you say that you, had you done anything like that, getting out into nature and thinking about some of those bigger brand vision questions?
Yeah it was a new experience.and I absolutely loved it, to be honest!
I think, yeah, it was really good. Like the exercises we did, I was able to clear my head really well, and I think a big part of your process is following your intuition, isn’t it? So I think you were able to sraw some really good answers out of me when you were asking questions.
I think had we just been sat in a room doing that, I don’t think we would’ve got the same experience. And I was really blown away about how well you actually listened to me and really got what I was saying. When I was, yeah when I thinking about this stuff I don’t know, I’m don’t think I’m particularly good at expressing myself a lot of the time, but you know what I was saying did get through.
I think that’s a testament to you rather rather than the what I was saying, I thought you were fantastic and the end result of what we had you really speak for themselves!
It’s like you extracted that directly from my brain. I thought that was wonderful.
And how did being in nature compare? Did did you notice you were thinking differently or I know you said you came up with things that you wouldn’t have come up with when you were sat around a desk.
Yeah. just being able to breathe and relax helped a lot. And you really slowed me down and, we did the guided meditation and that was fabulous.
It helps to just slow your brain down. I always think a lot of the ideas I have are bouncing around in the back of my brain. And this has just been able to slow everything down enough to extract them, When we were doing the choosing the different items to represent different parts of the business., I thought it was a a really enjoyable, and it was so useful.
It really helped me to settle myself and get out the ideas that I kind wanted you to.
I think that’s why I love taking people out into nature as you’re away from the external noise and we can be quite easily influenced with what’s going on or what we see around us and forget, And then if you don’t tune into that at the start of building your brand, that can lead to something that doesn’t feel truly like you or. You Ooh, it’s not quite. Got it. But I was super clear on everything when you did it. And I hear a lot of people saying oh, I’ve got all this stuff in my head, but it doesn’t make sense.
It’s just having a few of those little exercises about it that helped you do it. Was there anything during it at the end?
I was just really so blown away by how well you interpreted everything. I think it was just a testament to how good a listener you are and how well you could interpret everything. I thought you were great, Charlotte.
So you’ve rebranded now you’re tentatively putting the website together for Root. How does it feel now You’ve got this brand ready to go?
I feel a lot more confident. Absolutely. It just feel like a new chapter, in a way it feels like a completely new business.
Even though it’s a transition to what I was doing to this new step. But in a way it does feel like we’re starting again, which is fantastic. And I feel a lot stronger in being able to approach larger style projects. And yeah, even feeling like more of a business, it’s a strange I suppose a lot of small business owners might relate to this where thinking, oh, I’m just a person. Even if you are, you are technically business now. Now I feel like Root web design studio is a legit business. Which is great.
It’s so true as I think when we’re just up our, we are our brands in a way.
But also I feel like when you’ve got that support of a bigger brand, that’s everything about what you do. I find you just feel more confident and even though you are still the personal side behind it and you are bringing a lot of stuff into it like you say, it just gives you a bit more power.
We are both really passionate about helping independent businesses to thrive, aren’t we? And sometimes that can stop them in a way because they’re, not seeing their service or their product is as gonna be as good as one of the more, yeah, bigger, even though it will be. But something like their website and their branding will maybe let them down and maybe their confidence in pricing as well.
Do you think that’s something that having a better website experience and a better brand experience gives them more confidence around that? Have you experienced anything like that with people you’ve worked with or your own experience?
Yeah, absolutely. One of the reasons I wanted to invest in my own branding was if I want people to invest in hiring my services and the services of Root, how can I expect people to do that if I’ve not been able to invest myself?
If I’m feeling unconfident about pricing a job in a certain way, I can say I myself was able to do this. Other people can as well. I think that’s quite an important standpoint. And as well as a web designer, I have to lead by example and have as great a website as possible and really have as lower carbon a website as possible, which is why the entire brand was designed around being able to produce such a sustainable website, which has as low carbon output as possible.
We’re very fickle online, aren’t we? We’ve got lots of choices and I think we can find stuff now that really fits with our ethos a little bit more. If someone’s going on a product-based website and another one, and this one’s made sure it’s all intentionally designed, it’s got a low carbon Footprint, is that the right word for the website?
You’ll choose that one even if maybe they’re selling pretty similar products. So it is like a deeper experience and more intentional. I think a people think, especially with web design and branding, they are bigger investment services, aren’t they, than say you were getting a photo shoot.
It is an investment, but it’s not quite as big an investment.
I suppose as timeline investment, as well as website branding. Anything you can share about that and how you talk to people who may need to invest in their website, but the big chunk of money that they’re gonna have to invest at the start that you might have fear around it or whoa, that type of thing.
Yeah. No, no question. When you’re invested in a big piece of work, like a new website, there is that initial fear. So I think I always think from a business perspective you have to consider whether doing so is going to from a financial perspective if I spend this much money. can I confidently pay for it afterwards? Is creating this new, greater brand, better experience, better website, is that gonna bring me, say more business or save me more time than if I stayed with my existing self?
Really, I think that’s the important thing. In terms of, from my experience from investing in getting this greater brand in I’m tightly confident that, I’ll be attracting new audience of clients and we’ll be doing work in no time really.
So that’s why I was confident in making the investment. There are a few different angles you can take is whether I put in the initial investment upfront or whether you you do it in steps where you might do smaller improvements to your existing site and kind of nudge yourself along to being able to make a bit more money through your business from small improvements and then taking that larger leap later down the line when you think you’ve grown in.
Just for making small adjustments, which is how I work with a few people. And I think you’ll let people know if at that point it’s better to do this and then wait a year and test it out.
It might be better for them to wait a year, get their business going, making sure it’s working well, and they know who their customers are and that type of thing. And then go, yeah once that’s all sorted, I’m going to invest in my branding, I’m going invest in my website at that point.
I think in terms of the journey of growing your business, having a solid brand is your first point.
So if someone’s got a limited budget, I’ll usually say focus on getting your brand together first, and then you can come back to me later on down the line when you you’ve got that kind of base in place really.
And then we can take things from there.
How can a great brand and website experience, like how do they work together or partners in positive, Have you experienced them working together with any projects that you’ve worked on?
With the Root site, the brand was designed with the end game that it could be adapted into a low-carbon website. One of the main factors is to limit the amount of images that are on the page and any sort of large graphics.
With our logo and all the different illustrations you designed Charlotte those were all things that could be adapted into it’s what’s known as a vector graphic. Effectively, I guess a code image. And they’re really efficient.
So when I was building it, that could be turned into a very efficient graphic, which just goes into the website’s code. So in, in all whilst the low carbon side has, you have to be good at the development. You need to have a design and a brand at the start, which allows you to do that.
Designing your brand and your logo, whether this will work go going forward when you actually get to building it is very important I think, and when you’re trying to minimise the amount of stuff and the amount of images, creating that amazing brand that’s gonna connect with people simply. I think that’s another thing that’s really important, isn’t it? It’s like you’ve invested in making sure your copy’s really good and straight to the point and very quickly people can get a sense of what you all are all about. So you’ve really gone very minimal but very powerful on it.
I will share a link to talking through all the clever things that we did. Paul had some amazing ideas of how we can make it even more low carbon and efficient when we, when he went around and built the website. So I’ll link to the Root website as well and you can have a little look over it and and see what he’s done.
And, yeah. Marvelled at the low carbon web design that he’s created. Having this sounds like not point, not five grams of carbon when it loads, which that’s pretty low. That’s way below the average.
But from what we did, we managed to do, it was like 10% of that, so it was not point, not five, which is like nothing basically, which I was really proud of and we couldn’t have done that had it not been designed that way by you in the first. Yeah, I think more people are going to start looking into it.
I’ve noticed, I can’t remember which site it was on but it was a clothing site and instead of having the images, they just had a drawing of a vector of a t-shirt and then if you actually wanted to click on it, then it loaded the image. So yeah. That’s brilliant. That’s really good. We’ll probably see lots more of that in the.
So a couple more questions.
I know you are really passionate about digital minimalism, and you’ve been on an amazing journey around that. How has that inspired your kind of approach to business now?
Yeah. I suppose the idea of digital minimalism is to reduce the amount of, say, digital tools you use to, to use them more effectively, really in a way that suits you.
As a typical example, it’s like from a social media side of things, it’s not going on and scrolling for half an hour and accomplishing nothing. It’s about thinking, right? I wanna post something on this day, that day. So I’m gonna schedule a bit of time to write all three posts and then I can get that done in 20 minutes as opposed to having all these kind of interruptions as I go.
I’m trying to structure things where I send emails and blocks during the day rather than being distracted by it all the time. And limited how much time we do that. And it, it does, it, it all adds up. It gives you much more time in the day to focus on the important things.
I’ve been doing this nearly sort of two years now and it has helped a lot. So in the end I I really stripped back social media use because I didn’t find it that valuable to my particular business. So I think now I’m only really have a presence on LinkedIn now.
Because using the other stuff – I didn’t think it was that worthwhile for the amount of time I was having to put into it myself. So it’s just about limiting anything negative. When you went off that Instagram and Twitter, did you, was there anything? No, because I found I was spending the time elsewhere. In more effective ways. And I know it was quite a big leap, but as well, I suppose I approached this in quite the privileged position that I’m, at the time I’m, I’m a fairly well established business of, say, eight, nine years now.
I thought it’d be better for me to focus on providing a better experience for my existing clients and trying to constantly trying to hook new people or new inquiries, if I can just focus on doing less stuff, but better that would work well. And it, it has been so far, which is really great..It’s really taken that traditional idea of growth and going, actually growth can be what you just making, what you provide better.
Not getting loads more customers in, but how can you serve those customers better and make your service better? It’s like an anti antithesis of the traditional way of growing your business. Yeah, absolutely. think that’s something I really want to promote with Root as well. As, as well, the sustainable side of, from the environment, it’s actually sustainably growing your business in a slow way, which, you’re not going in the growth at all costs by doing all these kind of unethical practices and stuff that isn’t gonna last in the long term.
It’s taking slow steps, but stuff that will work well.
And anything exciting on the horizon for roots that you can share? Yeah. So I started taking the initial bookings for projects next year, which is really exciting. And it’s been really fun. Because it’s starting from scratch, growing this all the way I wanna work with new clients.
It’s focusing on a good search engine optimisation strategy. And getting at a moment I’m working on getting blocks together, which will actually serve a purpose for people. Hopefully these will also be articles which people who might wanna work with Root will find as well.
It is, and it is been quite interesting as I’m only really. really trying hard just to have a few core articles as opposed to doing lots and lots just to get clicks on. I wanna have fewer clicks, but. The right audience.
I always say you want to find the right audience, not a bigger audience.
I love that. That’s such a good piece of advice. Yeah. Which I think is quite a good. Quite a good mantra to look towards. You could have thousands of people on your website and none of them are interested and then 10 and all 10 of them are interested. It’s way more powerful.
The most efficient website is one that doesn’t load at all, which is completely counterintuitive!
I would rather have, say a hundred people visit a website who want to work with me than 10,000 who don’t. It’s that less is more approach really in quality of quantity.
I think that’s the best way for society and the planet I think is something we only need to do to think more about really. Yeah, definitely not that kind of throwaway experience. It’s been super inspiring hearing you’re still doing similar stuff, but you’ve tweak your brand and your business. I think some people get to a point, maybe they’re frustrated with their business or they’re not working with the people they want to and they might just quit. But I think what is shown you is you’ve gone, I like this, but actually I I want to do this and I wanna grow and I wanna bring my ethics and you.
it’d be great to hear how it’s gone, The best piece of feedback I’ve had, Charlotte, is that people have been saying the new brand is very much more me, which I think is is a real testament to your work.
That’s amazing. Amazing to hear.!And finally, can you share maybe one top tip of how people could quickly improve their website experience? In terms to optimising a site, you want to reduce a number of things on the site. So a lot of the time that might be, say images, if you’ve got a lot of images on a page, thinking about whether to cut them down.
Do you need 10 images or can you achieve the same thing through five or three? And that will add up, even though it doesn’t feel like a big thing you’ll cut down the amount of carbon you produce over a year quite well. And the other thing you do is shrink in the number of images, shrinking a number of files you have.
Even making small little tweaks like that will add up over the space of a year. Oh, amazing.
So would you like to share where people can go and find you if they want a little bit more information and connect with you?
Yeah, so the website is rootwebdesign.studio. And yeah, you can also find me on LinkedIn, and that’s really the only place you’re gonna find me, . Are you doing a newsletter with Root or is it, are you keeping it minimal and just keeping it to blogs? At a moment it’s just gonna be blogs.
I’ll see how things progress, but at the moment I’m just trying to keep things pretty minimal.
Thank you so much for joining us. Paul and I will share Paul’s amazing website here so you can take a look at the project and the low carbon design and web build that we’ve done.
Do reach out to Paul if you’re looking for a sustainable and ethical website for your business too. Thank you very much, Charlotte. Bye-bye!

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