Yes, we met on a Flash forum, being pretty horrible about 'coolsites'..we hated most flash sites that were being made and took the piss on a forum, like the nerds we are. We talked loads for a month or so then said 'lets make a site!'.

So we, as usual, bit off more than we could chew and decided to make a T-Shirt site for selling T-Shirts that we hadn't made yet, and that was hungout.com. We had a laugh making that and so we went and made Wefail. We were still working really shite day jobs at the time though and I remember sneakily working on Wefail when the boss was out.

Hungout lead to people ordering tshirts that we'd only made 20 of. So no, it really didn't lead to any commercial work. But when we launched Wefail we got a lot of emails asking about work. We were idiots though, so we'd get really big brand clients trying to low ball us some appaling fees, and we'd say yes. Then work 3 Months for $300 a week.

We made nothing off hungout, the TShirts actually cost us more to produce than to sell. Twats. Then we'd get missing orders and people phoning up, or emailing and asking for replacement shirts cause it'd got lost in the post. It all got to be a lot of work for nowt.

At the time, Jordan lived in Austin and they found him. So we took on Bob and he was a great client. He just let us do what we wanted and didn't worry about how he was being portrayed. We thought that was how everyone would be later on, but we soon found out the opposite. So yes, Bob was a great first client and we got to experiment loads and have a laugh with it. The site's still up now so something worked. Though he did just email us and ask for the word dickhead to be taken out of his site cause he's going mainstream. But dickhead's going nowhere.

Billy's the guitarist, or was the guitarist in Bob's band. He came along at a time when we were trying to get big clients with some money so we could leave the dayjobs. I remember being stuck with a really boring job for MTV and Jordan started the Billy job. So I was there dealing with a room full of ad agency MTV bigwigs talking utter shite for hours and meanwhile he was having a riot with Billy's site. I hated it.

I left first, I was pushed. My day job sacked 30 people and I was one of them. So I bought a dog with my redundancy money, and set up my home studio. We then took on Christian Aid and built Mail Order Chickens. Jordan left his dayjob in the middle of that I think. So we'd somehow stumbled into being a fulltime studio. Christian Aid was a huge job, I mean in man hours..it was so tiring but we had no idea how to pace anything so we'd go at it 16 hours a day then feel like shite for weeks after it launched.

It happened overnight. It was weird to have no calls or emails and be used to that, then launch the Wefail site and have all these companies call us asking about working on a project for them. A lot of that was bullshit though, at the time we thought they were all great opportunities but in reality alot of it was "why not build us a site for no fee, but lots of prestige!" hahahaha...yes why not! We'd love to! We never did, even we're not that stupid. There was one Ad Agency that had Hummer and Gap in their client list but still told us they had no money spare so could we build it for free.

Oh god yes, and that's why we got companies trying to bumrush us. We've had so so many morons trying to put up a whacky facade but behind it they want us to build them a site for fuck all. But yes we both came from Art backgrounds and fell into design, so business was never something we'd dealt. We were ripe for getting humped.

Well in 2003 it went stupid really. We were talking to maybe 10 companies at one time and putting a lot of effort into pitching for them then maybe getting 0 results. So we'd now gone from falling into a studio, to falling into being marketing people and trying to sell our ideas to companies that had contacted us. Little did we know that most of that would come to nothing, but we put a load of our time into chasing crap like that. Then Cartoon Network came along and they took us straight on and paid us our first real amount of money. Exciting times, they were a great client. Left us to it and paid on time, you don't get that often.

A major problem we have is that a client will approach us because they've liked our past work. But as soon as we put the same sarcasm and method of working onto their brand, they get defensive and vito it all. One poor person we had to convince was Matthew Mahon, he really didn't want his videoheads on the site, we told him he should just go for it and no one would laugh at his monstrous face, they'd laugh with it. In the end he buckled but there was a point where we all banged heads and we were going to drop it. He's a lovely gentleman though and we got our own way in the end.

We always said that when the laughter had gone out of working then we'd drop it. We've really been tested, especially in 2007 but we're still laughing, albeit a forced laugh that yearns for house payments.

Years ago when we started up, Florian Scmitt...ouch my toe! (that was a name dropping joke, it was well funny) told us to enjoy the early years because that's when you have no worries on what you're doing and you can just enjoy making the sites and doing creative stuff. He was right, as the jobs rolled on I started to notice that I was spending way more time pitching, dealing with conference calls, emailing clients back and all other kinds of utter bollocks than I was spending time designing. Fast forward two years and it's all the above, plus chasing accountants and speaking to our lawyer every other day. It all got out of control for a while but by the end of last year I decided to stop worrying about the admin side and enjoy doing the design.

Schnitt

hahahahahaha

Schmitt

[laughter]

Actually by the end of 07 I'd decided to stop worrying because I was a nervous wreck. I ended up in the Doctors thinking I was having a heart attack.

We love it. We're always emailing back and forth about anything but work, I talk to Jordan more than I talk to anyone anyway. And then the work slots into the middle of that. It's like we're two OAPs in a home, talking the day away but also knitting a fantastical jumper between us..a sleeve each, finally meeting at the head hole. What's the head hole of a jumper called? I would call it SYNERGY.

Though end of last year our chat was revolving around awful fucking client problems and the joking took a backseat for a while. It changed us, no more joking, only fighting with arseholes that weren't paying us. Horrible, vile beasts, filthy animals. They wanted to finish us.

It's changed me... mostly with my patience for people. I've always been a very mellow laid back person, but now I can be snappy and have quite a short fuse. The studio's changed our lives though, we're our own boss. It's weird not answering to anyone and it also makes you grow up some too.

It gets harder every year. At the moment it's very hard to get motivated. But the client site we're making right now just turned a corner and I can see the light...so that always gives you a push. A few weeks ago I was dead on my feet but now I can see a coming out of it all. It's been over a year since we launched an original site cause our hands were tied last year with deals gone bad and court. We were like 2 George Michaels for a while.

My highlight so far would be in the bleakness of last year we got one cool little site to build for X Games. We had 2 weeks to build and launch it but the schedule fell right on when my wife and I had booked a holiday down in Devon and the house was being rewired. So I couldn't stay here and work but I couldn't work from the place we'd booked in Devon either cause they had no broadband. So I went a bit mental and booked us in on a private island hotel on Burgh Island. I tool a laptop with the Xgames work on it and I built the site from our room. The place is an Art Deco hotel so a lot of the time it felt like I was making the site in the the Shining. You had to wear a tuxedo all the time and got afternoon teas whilst 20's music played. It was great apart from their temperamental Wi-Fi and that fact that my borrowed laptop was on Vista..fucking hell that was a nightmare.

Actually, wearing a suit all day eventually got on my tits.

Inspiration, I have no inspiration anymore. I used to be a big fan of web studios but that got boring. I dont have any inspiration now. We're working on our own new concepts now that will be original to us. So that's been inspiring, playing around with video cameras and animation in flash.

Don't let the fact that its a big brand client fool you into thinking they'll be trustworthy. Handle all clients with care, and get a fucking good contract drawn up. Clients are, and always will be, maggot people!

Wow, I just sighed at the thought of it... but I'd be some subserviant gonad at a Studio doing web work that I'd hate and disagree with, for some cheesey twat. God I'd hate it, I'd probably massacre the whole office in a rage of failure. Better we keep Wefail going for everyone's sake.