Rush Hour Media was launched in 2012 to revolutionise Hong Kong’s online landscape. Those were big words coming from a team of two working out of a tiny room in Central, where my original co-founder, Jake, lived when he arrived HK. It resembled Harry Potter’s ‘room’ under the staircase. We found an opportunity to offer responsive websites to the market, which was an expensive endeavour when building a separate mobile version of a website was the norm. We offered a mix of branding, graphic design, hosting and web services to our clients. We were named one of the hottest startups by Hong Kong Business in 2012, but we made the mistake of many other services businesses: we were trying to be jack of all trades. We quickly learned we need to find a niche. So we directed all of our attention to our core business, which is digital. While we still offer branding services, we only work with digital-first brands on that.
Since then, we have grown into an 18-person company, with an office in Sydney. We have worked with some household names in Hong Kong, and across the globe, such as HSBC, New World Development, HK University of Science and Technology, The French Education Board and many others. We have worked with clients from Australia, UK, China, France, Taiwan and Singapore. We are laser focused on digital, with web and mobile based products being our core deliverables.
Of course, all these achievements are a collective effort from some great people we have met along the way and have contributed so much towards our success. That includes the talented individuals that are working with us today, along with a few that have moved on to achieve great things at other organisations. And of course some amazing clients that have placed their trust in us. And a couple of clients that turned into investors and provided us with the capital to scale up quicker than we would have done organically.
We have had the name Rush Hour Digital in our minds for a while, but like most SMEs, other priorities took precedence. The name Rush Hour Media no longer represents who we are and the products and results that we deliver.
The ethos and strategy for the new brand is simple, we have 3 key priorities. Number one is our people: we have a talented and growing team of UX and UI designers, Developers and Project Managers, and the leadership team is committed to encouraging them to grow. That means they are energised and well-equipped to look after our 2 other priorities, Our Clients and Our Products. We are here to build long-term relationships with our clients. We are in the hero-making business, and are here to help the teams and people we work with be the champions in their organisations. We do that by continuously driving results for them. Under promise and over deliver is our motto. For our products, we have already set a high bar for the UX & UI standard that we are known for but we are diving deeper with our clients in the research stages of a project, be it user interviews, user personas or stake holders workshops, the end goal is to provide a more research driven approach. We are also moving into a more technology agnostic era, still using open source technologies as a base but building up a range of integration capabilities on top.
I hope our new tagline ‘Where technology meets people’ drives home this idea. At the end of the day, we are a team of humans creating digital products for other humans to make their and their clients’ lives easier and hopefully better too, through the use of technology.
