Onwards, upwards and outwards!

Location, Location, Location

First of all, we’re super excited to be moving to a new office tomorrow! It’s a larger space on the ground floor of a nice little building near Aoyama Gakuin. We love the feel of the place, it’s not too corporate and has a boutique kind of vibe. I’ve just finished updating our contact page, Facebook page, Google Place details, Foursquare entry etc to reflect our new address, so if you’re planning to visit us any time soon, please be sure to check the new details. The new place is just around the corner from where we’re currently based, so if you’re used to visiting us already you shouldn’t find a big change in travel times.

It will take us some time to renovate the space (we’re thinking color and comfort to assist creativity!) and get properly settled, but for the time being it will be great to at least have more room to throw ideas around.

One of the big things that we’re looking forward to is being able to host events in our more open space. Being on the ground floor should really help to make it an inviting place to come and interact with the community.

We’re still working out the details for the events we’d like to host, but we’re pleased to be able to offer our humble space to friends of Tacchi who need somewhere to hold their shindigs. In fact I’m really happy that the first of these events is already planned, and will be held on the 22nd of this month (March) by our great friends at Tadaku. Please check out the details and sign up to attend at https://www.facebook.com/events/1395875904059062/.

At this point you may be asking, “but Mark, why splash out on a larger space?”. Well, I’m glad you asked…

People, People, People

We’d have a team photo here, but we haven’t had a chance to get one taken yet!

As we continue on our quest to become the Ultimate Holistic Digital Product Agency™, we’ve been spending a lot more of our time on UX process over the last year. In order to continue this upward spiral, we’re lucky enough to have met Junta Mitsugi, a passionate and talented UX practitioner, who has joined us this week as our UX Product Manager.

His role will be varied, including responsibilities for carrying out ethnographic and business validation research, usability studies, being a core part of our collaborative Lean UX design process and more.

He’s already jumping in at the deep end – getting to know our projects inside-out and impressing us with his insights and ideas. I’m really excited to know that the products we build over the coming months will feature even more effective experiences thanks to his involvement.

I’m also really pleased to have yet another super talented developer join our ranks at the end of this month. Adam Akhtar has been a friend of Tacchi through the Tokyo meetup scene for a while, and we got to talking about his possible involvement in the studio a couple of months ago. A very talented Ruby on Rails and frontend developer, Adam quickly proved himself to be more than just an engineer through his passion and understanding of all aspects of digital product creation.

A couple of other companies were trying their best to lure Adam away, so we had to work hard to seduce him. Luckily for us, he made the decision to join our merry band of digi-prod otaku. He’ll be working with our team as a full stack web developer on user-facing web apps and services to support our mobile apps.

It’s great to have Junta and Adam join the Tacchi clan. Robbie, Marc, Michael, Cleo, our regular collaborators and I are all really excited to see what we can produce together.

One more thing…

To talk a little about the future, we’re also in the early stages of an exciting rebranding for the studio. It will be great to have a new logo, website, business cards and more to go with our upgraded team and workspace. We’ll be sure to let you know when it’s ready for public consumption.

As always, thanks for reading, and big thanks to everyone involved in the Tacchi story so far. It’s going to be an exciting year!