In case you haven’t been following the news during the last year (spring 2012) we can inform you that the world is at a shift. A chaos-point where small changes and initiatives can make the future take a new direction.
So accordingly we are rearranging ourselves into new units and restructure the brands of old ones.
Stay put there will be news.
The first unit created was also perhaps the most extraordinary. When this company was founded, the intention was to create a company truly for the post dotcom and post nine-eleven era. To do this it very soon became clear that it had to have a level of integration between strategy, organisation, identity, products and marketing totally unheard of before. The only tool available, that could achieve this level of integration, was the methods and language of art. Therefore the first unit was created to explore business as an expression of art:
rasmus unit 108 – BUSINESS-AS-ART STUDIO
The unit was later numbered one-hundred and eight because it was such a nice number. And so far it has only created one piece of art, and that is the company rasmus. The creation was made by writing a manifesto expressing the higher meaning of the company existence, and stating that the company itself was a synthetic piece of art. The creation is then fulfilled by a constant stream of related acts of business. rasmus is indeed a very living piece of art.
In retrospect, stating that the company was a piece of art and then treating it as such, has made much more business sense than we had expected. For instance, since the company actually achieves a high level of innovation and unique artistic expression in areas like organisational structure, marketing and business models, all these are protected rights belonging to the original creator. And these rights are likely to be protected, in some countries, up to seventy years after the original creators death. That is a very long time of protection and we will most certainly be prepared to protect these rights in court.
Also, we would never have dared to try the concept of fluid business units, unless the company was a work of art. To have far more business units than people employed does feel insane. In the beginning, this was just a thing we did for fun. Because it made sense if the company was a piece of art. But after a while we realised that these business units made it much easier to use the expertise and knowledge available, in the team and from partners. The concept of fluid business units are probably the most efficient way to organise a knowledge based company ever devised. When we better understand why this is more efficient, we intend to create a method license, so others can also implement the concept.
To think of a corporate identity or a brand strategy without logos is almost impossible. We have a unit of expert logo designers, specialists on graphic identity and design of most print products:
rasmus unit 64 – GRAPHIC ART STUDIO
The task for unit 64 when designing the logo for SLAAK, was:“The logo should be an onomato-graffito equivalent of slapping your hands together, in front of your eyes, hard. Instant satori, just by looking at it. Very Zen.”
Check out SLAAK to see if they made it.
Several more logos created by this unit can be seen at www.aktafejk.se.
While it’s been almost sleeping for a couple of years, web-development is becoming really hot again. This time it’s driven by the concept of the semantic web. This is a huge paradigm shift in both content and in technology. The all encompassing social web is also very hot. Right in the middle of this shift lives our web unit:
rasmus unit 57 – WEB STUDIO
This unit doesn’t have a public front and works as a subcontractor to our other units.
Strategic design isn’t possible without understanding the essentials of brand identity development. So of course we have a unit specialising in this area:
rasmus unit 48 – BRAND IDENTITY DEVELOPMENT
This unit works under the name Äktafejk (which is swedish and means “authentic fake”).
Toy Characters, as brands, for selling almost anything, is very big in East Asian countries. Like in Japan and Korea. Very few of these characters are European or American brands. Most efforts to build such brands in Europe and America are failures. Our study of this phenomenon showed that the Japanese method for creating and building such brands was quite different from the one used in western countries. To change this we created a unit specialising in creating and building brand-characters the East Asian way:
rasmus unit 22 – BRAND-CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT
Unit 22 is currently preparing to release its first brand-character, created by Erika Lockne. it will soon be available for licensing as merchandise.
Among our currently most fluid units are:
rasmus unit 17 – INTELLIGENCE PRODUCTS DIVISION
This unit recently released SLAAK. SLAAK is a Chaos Intelligence Product containing briefing material. Target audience is experienced creative people working in the cross section between design, information technology, business development, innovation research, marketing and art.
Our ability to rearrange ourselves, to provide for your needs, are based on a concept of liquid business units. This concept allows a very small number of specialists to manage a very large corporate structure. Enabling the organisation to rapidly shift focus without disrupting workflow.
The first and most important liquid business unit:
rasmus unit one - STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIPS
This is the unit you as a customer will meet first. We regard all our customers as partners. And partners should be chosen with care, we believe. This is exactly what this unit does. Unit One enters a dialogue with you, to find out if we are suitable to be partners. Everyone at rasmus belong to this unit. Most often the unit is headed by Rasmus Larsson, founder of rasmus
If you are in a hurry, just contact this unit at info@rasmus.se and we will get back to you as soon as possible.
CUSTOMER CENTRIC · Our organisation is a fluid of people, all unique specialists. We rearrange ourselves to provide exactly what you need and nothing else. This creates the highest quality, the most cost effective results and the best possible customer satisfaction. This is our first core competence.
STRATEGIC DESIGN · Everything is design. We think strategically and apply a design process to everything we do. By doing this, we achieve beauty, completeness and fulfilment of goals. This is our second core competence.
CHAOS INTELLIGENCE · The world today is ruled by chaos-mathematics and singular events. Managing it means finding obscure pieces of patterns, understanding how they will influence the world and then creating and inserting new pieces of patterns at obscure places. This is our third core competence.
A KNOWLEDGE COMPANY FOR THE POST DOTCOM AND POST NINE-ELEVEN WORLD
