Why PlusX Shares Its Secret Sauce
PlusX, a design agency with an unmatched reputation in Korea, is solidifying its place on the global stage. In 2022, the company took on an entirely new challenge, beyond its usual design projects, and as the year came to a close, it revealed this new venture to the public. In collaboration with Fastcampus, PlusX launched ‘PlusX ShareX,’ a platform that shares the company’s design methods as educational content. Considering that PlusX is a company built around IP (Intellectual Property), sharing how they work might seem like revealing trade secrets. So, why did PlusX choose to make this decision?
We spoke with PlusX to find out.
Sharing That Created Uniqueness
Sharing and uniqueness—two concepts that might seem incompatible—are paradoxically interconnected at PlusX, where one has driven the other.
PlusX’s guiding principle is integrated brand experience design. They focus on establishing a brand’s identity and ensuring that every design element aligns with that identity, creating a cohesive experience across the brand. Today, we might take it for granted that brand design should be consistent. But remarkably, before PlusX entered the scene a decade ago, this wasn’t the norm. Companies used to outsource different aspects of their brand design to various agencies, resulting in fragmented design strategies. Even within the same company, products and services often followed different design paths. PlusX aimed to bring order to this chaos by becoming an agency that helped consumers experience brands in a unified way through design.
But simply having multiple designers working in one place didn’t naturally lead to an integrated design strategy. Each designer specialized in a different field, and getting everyone to understand one another’s perspectives wasn’t easy.
“At first, we thought it would happen naturally with a diverse group of people, but balancing everyone’s interests was a real challenge.”
Byun Sa-beom, Co-Founder of PlusX
“It felt like we were speaking different languages. One side was speaking Korean, and the other was speaking German.”
Shin Myung-seop, Co-Founder of PlusX
To build a consistent brand experience, a design approach from one field must effectively apply to another. This requires understanding, discussing, and aligning across disciplines. Even the most talented designers can’t create a seamless brand experience if they insist on imposing their own styles. Rather, a more valuable design emerges when designers, even if slightly less experienced, collaborate, compromise, and align their vision.
PlusX’s industry-leading position, its cohesive brand identity designs, and its groundbreaking approach are the results of experts sharing, compromising, and aligning their ideas—without letting individual egos take the spotlight.
Sharing What We Value, Once Again
“When we started in 2010, our approach to work wasn’t the norm. We knew we had to let people know what we were trying to achieve.”
Shin Myung-seop
“When we released a design, people often asked how we created it and how our internal process worked. That’s when we thought it would be great to organize and explain these things.”
Byun Sa-beom
While universities teach the fundamentals of a specialty, the knowledge from school often isn’t enough to jump straight into the workforce. The business world moves much faster and is full of variables. PlusX’s team members have all experienced the gap between academia and real-world practice and understand the need for re-education in the field. So, sharing their expertise was a way to contribute to both the design industry and design education.
Some might worry that sharing their know-how would expose them to competition. But PlusX saw the bigger picture. They didn’t view sharing their knowledge as a simple cause and effect of “revealing secrets → competitors catching up.” Instead, they recognized the potential benefits.
The process of organizing years of accumulated knowledge into educational content was also an opportunity for internal growth. Plus, by turning their expertise into content, PlusX could expand its business. Ultimately, PlusX hopes this exchange of knowledge will benefit the entire creative industry, sparking new ideas and innovation. That’s why the platform is named Plus X Share X—short for “Plus Experience Share Experience”—symbolizing that by sharing one experience, everyone can add to their own.
“We’ve put in everything we’ve got—maybe more than we should have. Whether directly or indirectly, it’s a chance to learn from our experience. We hope the courses we’ve prepared help you take another step forward.”
Yoo Sang-won, Co-CEO of PlusX
Why Fastcampus Was the Perfect Partner
There were many other educational platforms that PlusX could have partnered with. They even had discussions with other institutions and startups. But the reason they chose Fastcampus was clear. Fastcampus’ philosophy of teaching practical knowledge and insights directly from professionals in the industry aligned perfectly with PlusX’s goals for creating educational content. Both companies value continuous growth and improvement through sharing knowledge, making Fastcampus the ideal partner for this new venture.
“The era of rapid growth is here because the speed of information sharing has increased dramatically. We hope that by sharing our experiences and insights, we can help others produce even greater value and spark new growth.”
Shin Myung-seop
✍️Key Takeaways
- Rather than competing based on individual expertise, significant synergy can arise when experts share their knowledge and collaborate on a project.
- When applying a unified strategy to a multi-disciplinary project, each expert must consider how the approach used in their domain will affect other areas, leading to discussions, compromises, and consensus.
- Sharing a company’s collective expertise can lead to internal growth and elevate the industry as a whole.
