For many, Mondays are something to be endured. But for James and Tony Soames, owners of the branding and design company Subkarma, kicking off the week is something they look forward to.
Fifteen years ago, Tony Soames accepted an invitation from a Taiwanese-English friend to come to Taiwan.
“I met him [the friend] in sixth form — in UK we don’t say ‘high school’ — and he just said, ‘Hey how about coming out [to Taiwan]?’” Tony said.
The two brothers arrived together, but only one of them returned to the UK after their two-week vacation ended.
“I had no idea where Taiwan was, did no research before we came over,” Tony said in an interview with the Taipei Times. “Just came here and that’s it, never went back.”
He was 19 years old at the time.
“A month later I met my wife, so she was the main reason why I decided to stay,” he said.
At first, Tony did small designing jobs. But one day, his boss walked up and asked him, “Hey, if you like what you do, why don’t you start your own business?”
So he did.
“In 2002, I set Subkarma up properly as a company limited, with full design services, and James joined me in 2004,” Tony said. “We’ve enjoyed every minute.”
In the beginning, Subkarma was only a design company, but it has grown into a company with 23 employees that offers branding consultancy, commercial design, product design, Web design, advertising and market research and analysis.
“We really love what we do,” James said. “It’s not a job for us. Sometimes it is because you have to have deadlines and pressure, but actually it’s not a nine-to-five job. On the weekend, we look forward to Monday.”
The two brothers say that although not all of their projects make money, they are trying to give back to the Taiwanese community.
Many of Subkarma’s projects are about promoting and branding Taiwan as a country. One of their current projects, “We are Taiwan,” invites businesses and individuals to select photographs of Taiwan from Subkarma’s photo bank and print the pictures on the backs of their business cards, much like a small postcard.
“I came out here with absolutely nothing. Now I’m married, my daughter is half-Taiwanese, our customers are mainly Taiwanese, so everything we ever got came from Taiwan,” Tony said.
The two brothers say that they believe Taiwan is “a nation of survivors.” But in the sense of branding, Taiwanese “have to have a consensus on what the country stands for, what the strengths are, and how to promote the country as a whole,” Tony said.
“A lot of [the] success of Taiwan is going to depend on how we read Taiwan in the international market,” said James. “Foreigners have a high responsibility to build up an image of Taiwan.”
“Taiwan needs to have a sense of identity before we can start creating the Taiwan brand,” he said. “If Thailand says, ‘We’re the country of a million smiles,’ well, people have to smile, right?”
When asked why the company was named Subkarma, Tony said: “Actually, Subkarma has no meaning … It just sounded good.”
Having graduated from the Blake College of Arts, Tony studied art most of his life.
“I’m not the biggest business person. I got the company as big as I thought we could go. [In the second year we had] 12 people, a full schedule, lots of delays and we were losing money every month, even with a full schedule, which didn’t make sense,” Tony said. “So I called James.”
James, 18 months older than Tony, had graduated from the European Business School of London. His two-week trip came just before graduation. James returned two years later to study Mandarin, but at the time he did not plan on staying for good.
“I thought studying Chinese would be a good way of increasing my skills and opportunities for a job, but my idea was always that I would go back to find a job in Europe,” he said.
A few years later, James went back to London to work at Mars Foods, a company that markets foods and drinks under major brands such as Snickers, M&M’s and Skittles.
James was in charge of sales adoption, which allowed him to travel to many parts of Europe, and part of his job was to convince the heads of branch offices to adopt similar sales strategies.
Prior to Subkarma, James had worked in big companies almost all his life, while both his parents and his brother owned their own businesses or worked for themselves.
“Only me, working for a company with 45,000 people. And when you work in a big company, it’s always about politics,” he said.
When Tony called him in 2004 to ask if he wanted to help him run Subkarma, James accepted.
James said that what he had learned helped him “get change in a company,” which he said was important to his role at Subkarma, now that he looks back on the experience.
“When you do branding, one of the biggest challenges in Taiwan is getting people internally in a company to change the way they work,” he said.
“[For companies] that don’t do branding, you have to think different, work different, use different tools. And in Taiwan, when you have 100 employees who’ve been there for 10, 20 years, it’s very difficult [to get them to change,]” he said. “[It may be even more difficult] to get the boss to change.”
When asked about the division of labor, Tony said “[James] runs the business and I run the design … He does the clever things, I do the fun things.”
“[Tony] has a lot of creative ideas, and I say, [can] we do it or not? I try to slow it down a little bit, and it works well,” James said.
The two brothers say they don’t get involved in politics, but that they “love Taiwan.”
“Everybody should love Taiwan, no matter green or blue,” James said.
Subkarma has received a lot of invitations to go to China for business, but the two brothers say they choose not to be in China because “it doesn’t make any sense to help our competitors in China,” Tony said.
He said a lot of companies in Taiwan want to compare themselves to companies in China, but “it’s not about being better than China, it’s about being as good as Japan or Italy or Germany.”
James hopes that one day, Taiwan will not be about “I’m better than …” but rather, “I’m different.”
“I think it’s time for people to wake up and discover what the Taiwan identity is. There’s too much infighting, too much politics. It’s distracting from the economic progress of Taiwan,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with linking stronger ties with China, for example. There’s great opportunity in the Chinese market. There’s nothing wrong with embracing preferential ties that are being developed now, and also nothing wrong with being proud of Taiwan.”
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