The Importance of Side Projects — Building Wonderland. — Medium

Here at Wonderland, it’s an important part of our studio culture to consistently have fun and cool side projects on the go. Alongside our digital projects and achievements, our physical products such as The Cool Club playing cards and Sweaters began as small side projects to explore a completely new area of design for us. We try to keep a red line around all of the things we create and whatever the project, “cool” design has to be within this boundary. We want people to have a real “wow” moment when they see the products we’ve made.

Take The Cool Club, for example. One Thursday afternoon we sat in our office discussing an innovative way to “market” ourselves, to put our name out there and be recognised for something. The night before I had been having some drinks with a few mates and we had played a card game, which I remember thinking was boring as hell. That night, I thought what if we created a card game that everybody would love, and where the design of each individual card is the main feature. The next day, we brainstormed long and hard — or until our Nespresso pods ran out — and we began thinking of cultural icons that we could add our own Wonderland spin to, by way of some seriously fresh illustration. And just like that, The Cool Club was born.

The Cool Club is a deck of cards with serious swag garnished with a generous serving of class. From influential thinkers who have helped shape the world we live in, to culturally iconic players of the field — whether it’s football legends or wicked womanisers — these 53 men are heroes. They’re our heroes, and we want to share them with you.

The Psychology

San Francisco State psychology professor, Dr. Kevin Eschleman, and his colleagues measured the effect of creative hobbies on over 400 employees. In two separate groups — one rated by coworkers and one self-rated — those with a creative hobby were more likely to be helpful, collaborative, and creative with their job performance.

As an added bonus, outside of work those with hobbies felt more relaxed and in control. Eschleman explains:

The results indicate that organisations may benefit from encouraging employees to consider creative activities in their efforts to recover from work.

Creative activities are likely to provide valuable experiences of mastery and control, but may also provide employees experiences of discovery that uniquely influence performance-related outcomes.

As of this moment, we sell The Cool Club in both a Men’s and Women’s version in a number of stores across Amsterdam and the surrounding area. And what’s more, our efforts have been acknowledged through some seriously cool press features, from Esquire to ELLE, and Quote to Playboy.

Not only have we developed new relationships and further projects from our initial side project, but we also got our investment back and people began to recognise Wonderland and our unique style.

What’s next?

Right now, we’re focussing now on creating two things. One of which is an internal tool which will be online for everybody to use by the end of October 2016 and the other is an interaction blog, called TOD, which will be online at the end of July. TOD will be a mix all the interactive designs (web/mobile/app) that we find on the web and will act as both a source of inspiration and a platform for the experiments we run within our studio. We can’t spill too much about the other tool right now, but keep your eyes on our Medium blog for any updates and sneak peeks.