Hamburg, August 7th, 2024

Refokus is a forward-thinking web agency that combines Web Design, Webflow Development, and Creative Development to create cool websites that help brands position themselves as market leaders. They work with a range of clients from startups to Fortune 500 companies.

Leonardo Zakour is the Co-founder and CEO at Refokus, based in Germany. In an interview with TIA, he described the start of the agency and how it has evolved over the years. He also highlighted the importance of communication in his daily tasks and listed the key components of a creative development.

Thank you for joining us, Leo. Let’s start by getting to know you a bit better. Could you share with us where you were born and raised?

I was born and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It’s hard to answer the “not so touristy” question, as when I go there, I feel a little like a tourist. For the past 10 years, I have been living in Hamburg, Germany. The food scene is absolutely amazing in Buenos Aires, and of course, you have plenty of barbecue places, but something that is amazing in Argentina is Nikkei cuisine, which is basically a fusion between Peruvian and Japanese cuisines. Highly recommended!

For those who aren’t familiar with your career, can you provide an overview?

Over the last 20 years, I have been building and supporting companies in the digital world. With a background and education in design, I have been in roles along the whole lifecycle of startups and digital agencies across Product & Web Design, Front-end Development, Branding, Business Strategy, Growth, Sales, and Marketing.

In January 2021, together with Stefanie (my wife), we launched Refokus. A new breed of Webflow Agency. Our goal when we started the company was to shake up how agencies deliver value and deeply explore different ways of working. Starting fully remote and experimenting with different ways to engage with our team and clients. Quickly, our unique ways of working paid off, positioning ourselves as a Leading Webflow agency, winning multiple awards, and being nominated for Webflow Agency of the year two years in a row.
Today, we are at the top of our game as a Webflow Agency and pushing boundaries on how agencies work, how brands position themselves, and what’s possible with Webflow and beyond.

Could you walk us through a typical day in your life?

Every day is quite different. When you have goals that excite and challenge you, you’re naturally driven to achieve them. This means that balancing life and work isn’t about separating the two; it’s about integrating them. Work and life are one and the same for me. My wife, who is also my co-founder, is a huge part of this balance. We wake up and immediately start thinking about Refokus, and our conversations over dinner often revolve around our work.

For instance, we recently planned an offsite on my wife’s birthday. We discussed our strategies and how to improve our agency, which was both work and a personal celebration. This integration makes our work powerful and interesting. It’s not just about the tasks at hand but also about having goals that align with our passions.
Balancing work means doing the tasks you need to do, even the ones you might not enjoy, like handling project management. While I used to excel at project management, my focus has shifted.

Now, I spend as much time as possible working on the company rather than in it. This involves strategizing, getting better clients, helping the team succeed, and defining our agency’s direction.
It’s not about taking more holidays but about doing meaningful work. When you do what you love, it becomes a part of your life, and you can’t help but think about it constantly. Balancing work and personal life is about being fully engaged in both and finding joy in the integration.

What are your main focuses at the moment?

Communication.
Humans are terrible at communication. We are ambiguous, context-based, emotional, biased… you name it. We’ve been trying to communicate with each other for centuries and still can’t achieve 100% precise understanding, even with friends, significant others, or with our kids.

Our main focus right now is to bridge communication gaps at work, both internally and externally.
Internally, we want to keep doubling down on designer/developer/PM collaboration, helping them bridge their communication gaps, mostly driven by context and knowledge gaps. The better designers and developers understand each other, the better they collaborate, and the better work we produce at Refokus.
Externally, we want to help our clients better communicate with our teams. We want to get them into a place where they can express what they need and want and, again, create better collaboration with them.
My son, when he wants water, just tells me, “Water!” So I make fun of him and I ask him: water? like in your head? And then I explain to him, that the more precise he is, the most likely he will get what he wants; he can either tell me, “I want a glass of water with a straw,” or he can even tell me, “I’m thirsty, can I get a glass of water?”. But the more precise he is, the more likely he will get what he really wants.

This is exactly what we want to help with our clients, so instead of saying “bold”, “modern”, or “I like stripe website”, they have the tools to communicate their needs properly and wants. Of course, our experience as an agency allows us to decipher what they want and need quite successfully. Still, the better that communication is, the more time we can spend creating solutions vs getting on the same page.
From our side, this involves asking them the right questions and providing clients with the tools to give the right answers. By doing so, we improve human-to-human communication and ultimately help our clients achieve their goals more effectively.

A fundamental aspect of business is encouraging innovation. What steps have you put in place to guarantee this happens in your agency?

This is super related to my previous answer! Communication is a key factor here. The better we communicate, the better we collaborate across teams, and the better stuff we create.
In addition, as a Webflow Agency, we embrace technologies that help us reduce development cycles and save time. Incorporating AI at every stage of our workflow is also a huge game changer for our productivity and our ability to innovate. That’s how we continuously push for innovation, even in a market where time and budgets are getting increasingly shorter.

Many of your projects are no-code and Webflow creations. You have described this as ‘a positive shift’- can you explain what that entails?

Webflow allows us to cut development times and costs by 50% to 70% compared to traditional approaches. But instead of just saving time and doing more of the same, our focus is to save time so we can reclaim it and use it to spend more time creating better experiences.
Also, Webflow CMS is a huge upgrade on the client experience, who is empowered to own and manage their website without the need to create retainers for us to do fixes and maintenance.

Connecting with an audience has never been more challenging for businesses. What are the key components of a creative development?

Creative development adds a layer of interactive elements and animations that not only enhance user experience, but it also creates emotional connections with visitors. In a world where everything starts to be “generated” and optimized, it’s important to add that layer of sophistication and engagement to websites to stand out.
For Refokus, Creative Development is not just flashy stuff to show off, it’s to add business value and skyrocket engagement. It goes from creating an immersive experience by integrating WebGL on top of Webflow or its tiny interactions and animations with GSAP to having that high-end feeling of a brand.

Are there any exciting projects that Refokus is working on that you can tell us about?

Yes! We are soon launching a few Webflow Apps, resources, and frameworks to help clients (marketing managers, founders, etc.) better work together with agencies, not just with us but with any agency. We want to stop this rivalry of client vs designer and get everyone on the same page, collaborating and building better stuff together.

What trends do you foresee in the battleground to retain relevance for 2024?

The market is changing a lot, and still, brands are trying to understand what type of website they need the most. There is this ongoing fight between conversion websites and branding websites. There are brands that believe they don’t need to spend much to get their KPIs, but as the market becomes more competitive, a conversion website is the basics, the bare minimum. And brands are starting to understand that if they are investing in marketing, lead generation, and sales, they are missing out on a huge stream of conversion by only doing conversion websites. They are seeing the conversion lifting even more when those websites are embedded with award-winning designs and emotionally engaging experiences to make them look unique.

When taking on a new client or project, what factors do you consider when selecting the team or technical profiles that will be assigned to it?

Our team is incredibly diverse, both in terms of where they come from and the type of work they produce. Still, if you see our portfolio, you will see that we don’t have a staple design: everything we do is completely different and unique to the brand and client we work with.
So, when choosing our team, we try to mix them up as much as possible so they can bring all those diverse styles, backgrounds, and skills into every project. Sometimes, we bring designers to projects to help out and collaborate temporarily. We also hold weekly design round tables where help each other, bring issues on individual projects, or just touch general topics like tools, trends, collaboration with dev, and more.

Given the evolving landscape of web development, how do you foresee the future trajectory of platforms like Webflow compared to traditional CMS systems like WordPress, Drupal or Magento?

WordPress, Drupal, or Magento are tools of the past. Don’t get me wrong, Webflow is not the solution for any problem, but there is no better CMS for marketing websites that balances innovation, speed to market, and user experience like Webflow CMS.
There are other players in the market, like Contentful or even headless CMS, but they typically serve really specific use cases and require a lot of hands-on in continuous infrastructure and maintenance cost and time. With Webflow, we don’t need to do maintenance work, which talented developers typically hate, and you end up hiring juniors to do patchwork.
And most importantly, it’s better and easier for our clients to work with Webflow, saves time, and costs, and it has a better overall experience.

What are your thoughts on A.I?

AI is at the very beginning. We are seeing the rise of a new technology that will change everything, so what we see today is the dumbest version of AI that will ever exist. Still, this dumbest version is already changing everything and evolving at the speed of anything we’ve seen before.
At Refokus, we are super excited about the future, and we embrace AI daily on every level of the company: as a code companion, to create design concepts, to create assets, to transcript meetings, to help with content migration, to research, and many, many more use cases. For me, it’s like electricity: you can use it to light a room, or you can use it to power up factories or quantum computers. So, it’s a lot on how we use it.
That said, as it evolves, our job as an agency will evolve as well. I’m seeing ourselves moving away from builders to curators, the same as with the evolution of many tools and technologies.
Now, if we are talking about AGI, then that’s a completely different topic, and we will need to see what that looks like. But I believe we will find purpose once we are there.

Are there any hobbies or activities outside of work that you enjoy and find inspiration from?

Tennis. It doesn’t really inspire me, but it helps a lot to clear my mind and get back to the computer completely refreshed. There is something about hitting a ball and thinking about every movement you need to make that puts my mind into focus mode and resets it.

What’s your preferred way of dealing with distractions while working?

Oh, I don’t. I have a massive ADHD. Although I’ve figured that instead of fighting it with the countless techniques you find around, from focus music to Pomodoro timers, I was better off embracing it. So, I’m a massive multi-tasker: I got this 49” ultra-wide monitor, and I just let it flow. I’m mostly having everything WIP until the very end of the day when everything magically aligns, and everything is simultaneously done.

Can you name a fun-fact people would be surprised to learn about you?

I only wear red shoes. Not because I overly like red shoes, but I’ve figured when you go buy shoes, there are just a few shoes that are red, especially for men, so I only have to decide among 4 or 5 max, instead of 100 of black or white shoes.
I also buy clothes in bulk; when I like a T-shirt, I just buy 20 of them, and that task is done for the next couple of years. It’s all about prioritizing the brain power for important stuff and reducing daily decision taking.

Thanks Leo!

Learn more about: Refokus

Follow Leo Zakour on social media:  Linkedin

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Brand strategyCreativityWebdesignWebflowAgency