We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Austin Dunbar. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Austin below.
Austin, appreciate you joining us today. What do you think matters most in terms of achieving success?
Defining success is a moving metric. I think once you set a goal or some chapter changer than you’re wanting to achieve, whether that’s “I’ll be successful when I get this X client,” “I’ll be successful if I make $X amount this year,” “I’ll be successful if I have X employees,” every instance is a chance to challenge your perception of what success is, and realize none of those goals truly define success, their just steps building up a wild staircase to another level, another challenge. What I love most about success is it such a weightless possession. Success is a mindset, not materialistic. Success is earned, not given. Success is growth and maturation, not stagnant or misused.
For me personally, what my kids say when asked who their Dad is, measures whether I’m a success or not – nothing else holds more than that. Durham and Wenzel are my work-life, my wife, my kids, and my family are my life’s work, and the seesaw is weighted down on the latter for me in terms of importance. But work takes up the majority of my time (in space and thought), and work always had a personal place in my heart of wanting to be successful and have it bare meaning. I knew early on that I didn’t want to build a business that was self-serving, but wanted to brand a service-based design studio that operated more like a hotel or restaurant, than a traditional client-to-contractor work transaction. I wanted to make sure that when clients “checked-out” or “paid-up”, they always felt welcomed and wanted to come back and stay and dine with this place called Durham. And knew early on that if I wanted to build it beyond a solopreneur situation, knowing damn well I couldn’t wear every hat forever, I had to level up on the steps and build a successful future for others to flourish.
Success shouldn’t be selfish, it should be celebrated with others. That saying, “if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together,” and I’m thankful for an incredible team on all sides of my professional life that have ran alongside this marathon of a career and helped carried the torch with me to get us where we are today. Without them, I would of burned up and out on the side of the road years ago. Entrepreneur isn’t my favorite job title for myself, but that road is definitely paved with a windy width for only one on the path sometimes, and it can be a real lonely and heady space of second and third-guessing, and you need people on all sides of you to help navigate the forest through the trees. And in most cases, success is on the other side of the bend that others may see down-the-line but you may not because you’re so focused looking down, moving the next foot in front of you.
What it takes to be successful changes with the challenges that present itself day-by-day, but there’s a few tried-and-true themes that ring true through the course of any career and just life in general. Being empathetic, being a giver, not a taker, being people focused over a profit fiend, balancing friendship with leadership, and most importantly, finding and defining your why on what makes you you and why that matters – self truth is the foundation of any success. Also, being human and realizing that 1 failure will teach you more about success than any stack of successes could ever teach is an inevitable and invaluable truth to everyone who’s perceived as “successful.” Their path towards that perception is riddled with potholes and danger signs on their path towards success.
And I guess I’d do my work-life a disservice by saying the studio turned 10 years old and Wenzel Whiskey is winning globally recognized awards. In a career of winging it, the businesses are receiving some milestones and external praise definitely checks some successful boxes for me.
Austin, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
My name is Austin Dunbar, I’m a husband, father, designer, business owner, and bud to a handful of people I love. I’m the founder and principal of Durham Brand & Co., an independent design studio developing strategy and design programs for some of the world’s best-loved brands, and a co-founder and partner in Wenzel Whiskey – a bourbon blending experience in downtown Covington, KY, rectifying its own history in the city I love and call home since prohibition. Both the personal and professional jobs wear multiple hats and there’s not a lot of free time between them all, but I wouldn’t want it any other way.
I knew growing up that I had artistic interests, but never really investigated much more than required art classes in elementary school. My father was a Lt. Colonel in the Air Force, and my mother was a Gallery Director for a handful of contemporary woodblock art galleries throughout Japan, and we would spend time there as kids post school or on the weekends running around the galleries and meeting famous artists at events, or dinners. That kind of exposure at a young age does something to you and I believe my time spent there is where the realization of what’s possible in terms of a career that’s art focused started to dial in. As I got older, exposure to other interests gravitated me towards a more design-led world than fine art. My early teens of flipping through skateboarding and music magazines and playing in bands put design on my radar, and that’s when I started dabbling around pirated PC Photoshop designs for shows, merch, web, and all the DIY self promo you have to do to get noticed. To this day, that DIY mentality is still a true testament to how I operate the studio and approach creative.
Durham has been fortunate to build strategy and design programs for a handful of global companies to local champions including Bud Light, Cincinnati Reds, CVG Airport, DoorDash, Jack Daniel’s, Old Spice, and TaylorMade to name a few. Regardless of the brand names we’ve had a blast being able to build, I think the most fortunate aspect of running a creative studio is the relationships that have formed along the way. 1000% of the studio’s work is word-of-mouth and merit, and we have a saying internally that isn’t a poetic play on words, it’s just the truth. “We’re proud to partner with some of our favorite people, and thankful to call them clients.” Being in a service-based industry, our friends come first, and we’ve had the honor of working alongside our buds project after project, and year after year – some of which are going on 8+ years together. The studio has never been fired from a client during or post a project is completed, and most have gone on to share what we do best with others and they’ve reached out to say “ABC spoke to me about Durham, and we’d love to talk to you about XYZ.” To me, that’s probably my most proud memory of the studio is what people say about working with us and our work. That’s earned, not given. And when there’s a designer or design shop or some digital design depot pumping out AI work everywhere you look, portfolio’s become less prevalent to make money and your relationships are the real currency in this business. Human Capital over quick cash will keep you in business a lot longer.
What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?
The story of starting Durham was born from a supply and demand issue, as well as having too much time by myself to think. I was lucky to work at some great studios in Northern Kentucky, Cincinnati, and Chicago starting out in my career. In 2012, my wife and I were living in Chicago at the time and were expecting our 2nd daughter, and there’s this wild rule in Chicago that you can’t have more than 2 kids or you gotta get out of there (I kid!). My wife is from Northern Kentucky and moved back here. The problem was, I loved where I was working and what I was working on in Chicago and I knew I wanted to continue doing that. To save a long story and before remote work was even a thing, I ended up “perma-lancing” / full-time freelancing for this agency in Chicago, but I had to be in the office to get the work done. So every Monday morning at 1:30am I hopped on a Megabus and rode it to Chicago. I’d get dropped off downtown at 6:30a, walk to Union Station, wait there for an hour to then take a train ride an hour north to be in the office by 9am. I’d sleep on friends floors or couches Monday-Friday and would leave the city at 10:30p Friday night, pulling into my house around 6:30a Saturday morning. I’d play dad and husband for a couple of days and then back on the bus early Monday morning. I did this for over a year. There was a lot of window time by yourself sitting next to storied strangers that got me thinking, “how long can I keep this up, and if I leave, then what?”
After a while of living in limbo of Cincinnati and Chicago, I decided I needed to find a permanent job that would keep me in Cincy and around family. I ended up taking a job at a global agency for 7 months, and during that time, people reached out from other places in the US wanting me to freelance on their projects, for their studios, etc… My day consisted of working 9a-5p for the big design co, come home play dad and husband, and then work in my home office from 9p-3a Monday through Friday. After a while, my night job became more profitable than my day job, and I started having that “how long can I keep this up, and if I leave, then what?” conversation pop-up again. This time, I knew if I was being called again to change, I was going to do it on my own. I had the right balance of my wife being 100% supportive (she was also pregnant with our 3rd daughter at the time), enough confidence in myself creatively mixed with not knowing a damn thing about business to be blindly bold and just step out with one foot and see where the next one would takes me. This was October 2013.
Fast forward 6 months, I continued freelancing for agencies all over the US but felt like it wasn’t going to be permanent. I knew freelancing full-time wasn’t for me. I didn’t like feeling like I didn’t own anything – the client, the conversation, the cost, the creative, etc… The idea of being a hired gun whose work was being selected and winning awards for other studio’s ran a short course. I knew I wanted permanence and ownership after floating around for a couple of years. I knew I wanted my own studio, I always had that dream but it seemed so out of reach. Being a freelancer is one thing and you just go by your name, being a business and looked at as one is completely different, and the brand needed to stand for something not only to me, but others willing to work with me. I knew I wasn’t going to go by my birth name cause that would keep me in the freelance conversation and it wouldn’t give me a moniker to hide behind, and I also knew I wasn’t going to name the company something trendy or fictitious. I looked over some notebooks I had kept while bussing back and forth to Chicago, and Durham (my middle name) Brand & Co. was written down. It gave me a name-based name that sounded like a company, and something I could hide behind. I didn’t want people early on to know who Oz was behind the curtain, and I’ve definitely fallen guilty in the early days of saying, “Thanks so much, I’ll let the team know we’re aligned on Concept 2.” I was the Team and the person who designed Concept 2.
What started out as a selfish something built from confidence and ignorance mixed with attitude and an appetite for the unknown, has turned 10 years old recently and I’m thankful to say Durham’s gone from a one-man-band to a full on concert hall of employees and clients that also call this place theirs.
Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?
Durham’s reputation in the market is 100% predicated on being people focused first and foremost. That’s the why. The what and how is design and strategy, but the why is what matters. I think of Durham as a restaurant or a hotel, and I want any client that’s dining or staying with us feel like they are the most important guest while we’re spending time together. It’s really that simple. I personally love hospitality and making people feel good, and I feel that our creative is designed with that same sentiment in mind.
And with Durham being my company, there’s a lot of personality that I get to work with every day here that clients interact and engage with as well. For me, personality is so much more important than a portfolio – especially when it comes to building a great team whose work and reputation is predicated on being good designers designing great work for the best people. You can teach someone how to be a better designer, more efficient with time, etc…, but you can’t teach personality. It takes good people to make a great place and I think both of those things apply to the why when clients choose to work with Durham.
Also, we’ve never dropped the ball, missed a deadline, fired the client or any other agency fumbling that so commonly happens. What people say about Durham matters, and our reputation is all we have. Without it, Durham wouldn’t be here.
Contact Info:
- Website: durhamstudio.com / wenzelwhiskey.com
- Instagram: @durhamstudio / @wenzelwhiskey
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/durhamstudio
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/austin-dunbar/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@durhamtv3850
