A passion for online opportunities

‘ENTHUSIASTIC’ is a word that readily springs to mind when you meet Ella Sayers-Anderson and Cam Worth, owners of web design company Red Tiki and its not so outlandish and more refined sibling company, Simplisite.

The business partners and long-time friends are openly passionate about the web and their companies, but Red Tiki seems to have unleashed nine years of creative juices built up while the pair worked for corporate clients.

Frustrated by operating within conservative web design boundaries, Ms Sayers-Anderson and Mr Worth bit the bullet a year ago and started Red Tiki – a web design firm that has thrown out the rule book and is catering to a new market that isn’t afraid to step outside of the standard website.

“We did our time in the corporate world and decided about two years ago it was time to start trying to change things and move away from that model of being at the mercy of the client and start directing what we were doing,” Mr Worth said.

The business’s own website is filled with animation and is based on the user interacting with it – a key element to what they are doing differently to text-laden websites.

Red Tiki is sponsoring Black Swan Theatre Company and networking group Women In Media, and while this has come out of their passion for the arts, the sponsorship has helped Ms Sayers-Anderson and Mr Worth to grow their name and client base.

The business now has three staff and 40 clients – growth Mr Worth said he didn’t expect at this stage.

It took eight years of developing Simplisite before the business partners were confident enough to start Red Tiki.

They started Simplisite about a decade ago, driven by the unknown power of the internet as a business and marketing tool and the limitless design opportunities that came along with it.

“Nine years ago when we were starting the whole Simplisite business up, we really wanted to be Red Tiki,” Mr Worth said.

They had smaller-sized corporate clients to begin with and over the years have built more than 100 websites. Simplisite currently has 30 clients on its books, with four of those being major WA corporations.

“We spent a lot of time building that up, we all worked on the Simplisite model on more of the corporate stuff,” Mr Worth said.

“Simplisite is still a significant component of what we do.

“The bottom line is that, before we were a tool of the trade if you like; businesses would work with us because we were good at making websites, and we have always had a love of the web ... and so we wanted to give back something to it.”

Having two companies servicing very different markets has opened opportunities for both businesses.

“Generally if clients come to us and they want a website and they are very corporate, and Red Tiki is going to be too out there for them, we will handle it as a Simplisite job,” Ms Sayers-Anderson said.

“We like to be quite picky about the jobs we take on as Red Tiki, just to keep the brand really solid.”

They are equally protective of the Simplisite brand.

“We wanted to branch out into some new clients, make a name for ourselves and do some crazy stuff without damaging the brand of Simplisite or upsetting any of the clients we had. Red Tiki was, ‘let’s go crazy and see what happens’,” she said.

Mr Worth said they have taken an organic approach to growing the client base and have waited for clients to come to them, rather than approaching businesses – the opposite of how Simplisite works.

“We have turned down some projects because we just don’t think they are suited to where we want to go, they are buying into our brand as much as we are buying into theirs,” he said.

Protecting the Red Tiki brand is integral to the business, given where Ms Sayers-Anderson and Mr Worth are planning to take the business.

They have recently been named a finalist in the interactive awards at the international music, film and interactive festival South By Southwest to be held in Texas in March and plan to leverage off the exposure.