Back in 2005 I was sitting in South African waiting for my Swedish development team to deliver something I could release in South Africa. We were already half a year late and if I had known that it would take as longs as it did I would have decided on doing something different. But anyway here I was.

I met a guy who ran this new media shop developing designs and websites for established companies and start-ups. I had recently bought a luxury chocolate shop for my sister and it needed some brand and design work, so I asked this person to come up with some ideas.

I loved the pitch and bought the design works from the team. Being a sucker for good design I fell in love with the people that did the work. As days, week and months went by I figured that perhaps we should do something completely different when launching in South Africa. After all our web pages was the same since 2000 and I was tired of the same gloomy colours and pictures. It bored me to death.

So I asked the designers if they would be interested in joining me as employee #1 and #2 in our newly founded venture Travelstart South Africa. It didn’t take much to convince them.

The design work started and after a week or so they pitched me their new idea. It was terrible. The website looked like Schiphol airport. Damian the UX man told me the underlying rationale behind the idea and I understood that I probably gave them the wrong idea on what this company is about.

I told them it’s about people and I need something WOW!

A week or so later I got a completely different pitch, which was about exactly - people and WOW.  I asked them to continue work with the sketches. Meanwhile we moved into a small office space of perhaps 10 sqm or even less. We had a monumental view over Cape Town and Table Mountain. Here we planned the next website and the move to our next office, Avalon.

The design work took some six months and covered everything from booking flow for air, and blogs, my account pages and several other sections that we never launched. Other sections of the website like hotels, cars and matrix presentations were all added later.

Our strategy was to first launch the new website in South Africa and then roll out in the other countries. The website was launched in July/August of 2006 in South Africa. The positive thing about the delay was that the South African market had matured somewhat in the meantime. I had had time to understand the market and launch a much bigger scope than was originally planned.

It is hard to manage artistic people, but having worked with musicians for ten years I had some experience. There were often were clashes between commercial, design and development. My experience is that commercial must always go first but it’s easy to quench the artistic drive if you’re not careful, which is exactly what we did as the company and complexity grew. Sad.

We still to this day use the same designers who now have set up their own successful business.

Our design and user experience is appreciated all over the world and not a week goes by without people contacting me for using our technology. They all fall in love with the clean lines and the colours and it really has nothing to do with the underlying technology.

Design and user experience will always be at the core for Travelstart because of Anne Sophie and Damian.

The luxury chocolate store was closed down only a couple of months after the pitch. My sister got bored and the designs were unfortunately never used.