What’s It Like Running Your Own Small Business?
Mandy Lamb is an award-winning designer based in Chattanooga, Tennessee. She created the logo for toby bar and is the owner of Mandy Lamb Design. We talked with her recently about her business.
What have you learned in starting and managing your own business?
To me, running a business is like having a baby that never grows up. It needs your constant care and attention to thrive, and although you pour everything into guiding it, the market, timing, and chance all have a say. It certainly isn't for everyone, but I have personally enjoyed the self-reliance, freedom, and possibility that business ownership provides. There is no ceiling and no floor. I think this is just one of the reasons why I enjoy helping startups transform their business ideas into tangible identities.
Since you deal with so many different companies, how does your creative process work for so many different businesses?
Although my clients are in many different industries, I find that the design thinking process of empathize, define, ideate, and test provides a through line for all of my projects. In the empathy phase, I ask a lot of questions, which helps me understand the client's world and their audience. From there I define the problem I am trying to solve with the branding. The next phase is what people might be more familiar with — the sketching phase, where I explore many different design directions toward a solution. Finally, I return to the original problem to test whether the designs truly solve it. With any given project I usually iterate and repeat the last two steps many times to arrive at a solution.
What was the most challenging part of coming up with the toby bar look? We're delighted we've gotten so many unsolicited positive comments about it.
It may seem counterintuitive, but simplicity is the most complicated thing to achieve in design. Sometimes words give you a gift, and early on I noticed the letterforms in the toby name lined up to evoke the image of a face. But it took a lot of iterations to find the exact typeface to create the perfectly round eyes, strip away unnecessary details while still giving just enough to complete the image, and land on that joyful expression. Our goal with the branding was to elicit the feeling of a simple joy that would appeal across generations — just like the toby bar itself. So hearing that it's resonating with people in that way means a lot!
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