Our spotlight this month is on eHouse Studio, a long-time customer and friend of Kin. Located in beautiful Charleston, South Carolina, eHouse Studio specializes in user experience via web, mobile, and marketing and branding. As a small, family business, they face many challenges but have managed to overcome them by staying honest, transparent, and ensuring everyone on the team feels the love. Read on to learn more!
Who are you, what’s your role, and your favorite hand-held food?
[CQ] My name is Chris Quinn and I’m a Founder and the Director of Operations for eHouse Studio. Tacos all the way!
What’s the story of eHouse Studio?
[CQ] eHouse Studio was founded in 2002 in Boulder, CO by my husband Aaron Quinn. The company was a “one man” show for the first few years, which is why it was easy for us to pick up and move locations to Charleston, SC in 2006. After a year in Charleston, we decided it was the place for us to call home so we decided it was time to start growing eHouse as well! I joined the team, as well as Aaron’s father, Rick, and we’ve been growing ever since. Now, we’re a team of 17 in Charleston (and Texas), along with a great team of 5 partners we work with on a regular basis across the country.
Our expertise has always been in the craft of creating quality customer experiences online. Our focus is trending in eComm and we truly enjoy creating great experiences for our client’s customers.
What’s great about working at eHouse Studio?
[CQ] At eHouse Studio we’re all about honesty and respect. As a family-run business we realize that there are no perfect employees, leaders, and/or owners so we do our best to embrace everyone’s strengths and weaknesses, and encourage people to be upfront and honest about them versus trying to hide them like rocks in your pockets.
There are going to be great and challenging times at the office, but if the team feels supported and respected, it always ends up ok. Kind of like family. I think being able to truly be yourself is kind of awesome in and of itself. Every Friday, we have a “happy hour high five” to end the week. Working in the digital space, we’re always problem solving (which we love), but at times it can leave you feeling like you’re always fighting an uphill battle. During our high fives, we take the time to recognize great things from the past week. This can be anything from “Hey, great job on the client presentation, I heard you rocked it,” to “Hey, thanks for running out over lunch to get the office more toilet paper!” All recognition is equal and is a great way to start the weekend by feeling like you made a few strides up that hill!
Please share some insight into eHouse Studio’s approach to employee and workplace operations. How has Kin played a role?
[CQ] Similar to our culture, in the operations of the business we treat everyone with respect and expect that each person on the team will do what it takes to get their job done. However, with growth comes the need for more process and defined accountabilities, expectations, and dare I say policies.
“KinHR is for Operations like InVision is for designers, and I could not imagine working with out it.”
KinHR has been a great tool for us in the way that it keep each employee’s individual operations in one place, which helps enable them to manage some of their own HR needs, as well as keeps those policy items in one user friendly tool. From the Ops side, it has been invaluable to me in regards to the management of the team’s needs and has proven to be a huge time saver!
Anything notable going on lately?
[CQ] We’re excited to be working on the re-design of 4 eComm sites for a large national jewelry retailer. On this project, the team has been doing rapid prototyping, which has been great on the client side for showing them the designs in context in a responsive environment. This process has also been great for our team in terms of awesome collaboration and development of expertise in user experience from start to finish. We want our entire team to be customer experience focused, not just the strategist or designers, so the prototyping has supported that process.
Our responsive ecommerce site for Twelve South was selected among the top 1% as Best-in-Show for a mobile eCommerce site by the W3 Awards. If you’re Apple fans like us, then Twelve South products are a must!
Also, we are very excited to announce that Inc. has included eHouse Studio in their 2015 list of the fastest-growing private U.S. companies. Check out our blog post on the honor.
Finally, we’re always looking for the right people to add to our growing team so if you are interested in working hard, giving a high five at least once a week, and heading to the beach, email your resume to chris@ehousestudio.com or jobs@ehousestudio.com.