Rodrigo Bondioli — Info

There was never money to spare at home, but there was art in every corner. My grandmother was a visual artist who painted and sculpted, and together with my mother she melted down materials in the backyard oven to make costume jewellery to sell at craft fairs. My mother also made dolls and lamps, and played the piano so well that every party ended with someone asking her to play Pink Floyd, even though she was dying of embarrassment. Among uncles and cousins, everyone played something, and I grew up thinking it was normal to spend the whole day making things.

At school, though, nobody gave grades for that. I sat in the back row drawing Roger Rabbit in my notebook while the teacher went through the lesson, and my report card was a disaster. I was expelled from five schools and to this day I stall on the eight times table. The one thing I really stood out at was drawing, and that's what I went on to study, first comics at ABRA and then advertising.

Computers came into my life through my uncle Mário, who was a Mac technician. I got a 486, learned HTML, then FrontPage and Flash, and that's where I brought together the two things I loved most.

But to pay the bills I worked as an office messenger at a multinational company, and a skinny kid with a skateboard and purple hair didn't fit that place at all, let alone a career plan that ended at an office desk. I quit, sold pagers, picked up jobs as a house painter, until someone I knew took me to an agency that made websites. That was Paintbox, in 1997. I've been in the industry ever since.

I started as a junior art director and made it to creative director, working at shops like McCann, W/Brasil, AgênciaClick and Tribo, which served Grupo Ogilvy. I took on projects abroad, from Germany to Japan, and won awards at Cannes and the Clio.

When e-commerce started to grow in Brazil, I moved to Rio to be head of design at Americanas.com, went through Shoptime and then took the same role at Netshoes. In retail, nobody in the meeting wanted to know whether the screen looked good. They wanted to know whether it drove more sales, reduced customer service calls and brought customers back. I started holding my own work to the same standard.

After so many years between agencies and retail, the routine wore me out. The all-nighters that were fun in my early twenties became an obligation, and a lot of people's egos weighed more than the work. I tried to open a web agency twice, once with my father and once with a family friend, and both partnerships ended badly.

So I decided to bet on a physical business and built Tattoaria, a tattoo studio, from scratch. Within two years, it was bringing in an average of R$400,000 a month in revenue, had been featured in Veja, Estadão and Pequenas Empresas & Grandes Negócios, and had a studio set up inside Lollapalooza. I took care of the concept, the brand, the positioning and the growth, and for the first time, every design decision had a direct impact on my own bottom line. (The full case study is here.)

In 2020 the pandemic came and shut everything down. I walked away with debts and lawsuits to sort out and went back to working in design, feeling like I'd been out of the market for too long. I needed money, so I started taking pretty much any project, for whatever it paid.

On one of those jobs, a client who installed safety nets on windows and balconies asked me for three websites, delivered in a single weekend. I charged about R$2,500 for all three because I needed the money. I spent Saturday and Sunday building the sites and delivered everything.

But it stuck with me. I had already done projects for Nike and Embratel, worked at big agencies, led design in retail and built my own business, and that weekend there I was, taking a brief and executing it, as if none of that experience mattered.

After that, I started rethinking how I presented myself and which projects I took on. I began learning more about positioning and showing clients the thinking behind my decisions, and I understood that my work couldn't start only after someone had already decided what to do. Over time, the kind of clients I attracted changed, and today I choose who I work with and charge what the project is worth.

Now I come in before the brief is closed, help decide what's worth building and then get my hands dirty until the project is live. I've sat in meetings where the wrong thing got approved and no one said a word.