Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Nils Davey. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Nils, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Let’s jump right into how you came up with the idea?
As with much in life it was a complete accident. I accidentally became an experiential creative director by taking on a freelance job through a contact who needed someone to design and implement an event. It just happened to be for Grammy’s week for a 7 day long Mastercard showcase at Tower Records. Pretty big first job. After that experience I ended up working with the same group of people and eventually starting an agency with them. During this time I really learned my chops in experiential dealing with a high volume of work across a lot of ongoing projects. After three or four years of this I was getting burned out on the work load and COVID hit. This was a welcome break as event design closed down. During this time I had started toying with the idea of combining my creative direction and experiential design skills with some friends of mine capable of building and fabrication. From there we managed to pick up some projects for Airbnb during COVID creating iconic experiences during lock-down. Once things got back to ‘kinda-normal’ I exited my previous agency and went full time, with my new agency PBZ, combining award winning creative direction with excellent hand’s on fabrication.
Nils, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
What we do at PBZ is create both in concept and reality award winning experiences. This could be a conference, a party, a launch event, a movie set, a music video, or just an amazing immersive experience. We have a relatively unique business model as we are known both for our creative practice and our fabrication services. Most creative agencies outsource their fabrication and most fabrication shops don’t develop concepts and strategies. We offer both in a one-stop shop for the creative process. About 70% of our work is creative and 30% fabrication services. We are often white-listed to other agencies who need highly developed creative thinking while we can also integrate directly with brands to circumvent them needing a creative agency and fabrication shop.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on NFTs. (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice
I think NFT’s are nonsense. Truly an emperor’s new clothes situation that, if anything, just shows how corrupt and hype-based the current thinking on art and design is. It wouldn’t surprise me if Banksy one day came out and said he created NFT’s as a piece of performance art to highlight how ridiculous the art culture is.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
I don’t know if it’s a lesson I had to unlearn specifically but it’s related to the same idea. I thought I needed a sales person, a producer and a client liaison because I learned in an agency environment about how a team is traditionally put together. I had to ‘unlearn’ that when we started PBZ because I took on that roll along with creative direction to great benefit. Our clients can talk directly to the lead creative team and we’ve found that this flat structure in communication has really benefitted our clients and our work. It cuts out a level of interpretation from brief to presentation.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.peebeezee.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pbz.llc
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/peebeezee
