Washington, Jun 22nd, 2021

Lounge Lizard Worldwide is an award-winning web design and digital marketing agency with offices across the United States.

Growing from roots in the advertising industry, Lounge Lizard understands the importance of brand and marketing strategy and has delivered websites and mobile applications In line with their clients’ existing corporate image. 

Jayme Birgy opened up Lounge Lizard’s branch in Washington DC and is now the Director of Operations.

In an interview with TIA, he described his role in detail and went through the challenges faced by the agency amid the pandemic.

He also described the agency’s recently developed LOOP-LOC Backyard Accents. 

What brought you to Washington DC to work?

I’m a DC transplant and lived here for the past 15 years. I opened the DC office for Lounge Lizard Worldwide to bring an “ungovernment” look and feel to the market.

The trend in interactive design in the DMV area tends to skew towards out-of-the-box and bland. My team lifts our clients’ design aesthetics — we’re here to save DC from Brutalist design in the digital arena. 

Tell us a bit about your role as the Director of Operations of Lounge Lizard.

I am responsible for all work that comes out of the DC office and business development in DC, MD, VA, DE, and south-central PA. Within Lounge Lizard I am the expert in federal contracting and liaising with subcontractor teams.

I’ve worked on many enterprise-related interactive design projects for DoD, DoS, SEC, USPS, IRS, HHS, National Gallery of Art and others.

Working with the right agency can be a valuable partnership. What attributes do you associate Lounge Lizard with?

It is my goal to bring a strategic mindset to all of our clients and partners that ultimately brings value in the form of building experiences that are intuitive and easy to maintain, identifying areas where we may be adding new business operations, and bridging the gap between best-practices and business needs.

Name a challenge your team is currently facing.

We’re currently trying to add an hour to the 24-hour day. Joking aside and without rehashing the myriad of issues spawning from the global pandemic, we’ve got our strategic hats on helping many clients transition all sorts of processes to the new digital way of doing business and serving their customers.

One of Lounge Lizard’s recent work is LOOP-LOC Backyard Accents, can you walk me through how the team came up with this idea. How was the process of making this experience and which were the results?

LOOP-LOC had a clear mission for Lounge Lizard: position the new product line and brand of “Backyard Accents” as a luxury poolside brand that turns any home pool and backyard into an elegant and inviting spa-like resort. The objective, from a design perspective, was to take a high-end luxury approach to visual design while seeming approachable and affordable to consumers. Secondary objectives were to craft a digital marketing and social strategy to identify the right end consumer and start selling the Backyard Accents product lines at a customer acquisition cost that made financial sense and set the company on the path to profitability and growth of market share.

Lounge Lizard started with the creation of the main corporate identity, the logo. We decided to recommend a re-imagination of the LOOP-LOC logo and mascot, Bubbles the Elephant. The product line of Backyard Accents embodies high-end and creative design patterns that mimic some of LOOP-LOC’s most popular luxury pool liners, so we decided that the logo should incorporate splashes of colors. The outcome is a super-creative looking Bubbles the Elephant.

Once the brand ID was approved, Lounge Lizard designed the products packaging from packaging material recommendations to a full design for the full product line and patterns of the pool towels, outdoor pool covers, pool float covers, and beach totes. A lifestyle and product shoot was coordinated and Lounge Lizard provided mood boards, and model demographics that exuded the ideal demographic and lifestyle of Backyard Accents.

Lounge Lizard started the next brand deliverable a fully functional Shopify Website. User experience design was crafted around best practices in ecommerce design while executing a design that was on-brand and fresh and modern. The entire shopping experience takes users on a journey of easily exploring products and product collections while moving consumers into the shopping cart. Before the Website was ready for launch, Lounge Lizard crafted a strategic digital marketing plan and social media strategy to execute upon site launch.

Upon ecommerce site launch digital marketing and social campaigns hit the Internet, across social channels, and on Google shopping. Almost immediately sales hit. On a daily basis, Lounge Lizard is fine tuning all marketing communication channels for optimal conversion rates and keeping a close eye on the acquisition cost of a customer while crafting remarketing strategies.

Feel free to also check one of the recent Lounge Lizard branding work for PEO DHMS: www.hive.gov

What metrics do you track on a daily basis? 

I track overall project health, risks, and timing. I evaluate results by comparing them against previously agreed upon success metrics.

Based on your experience, how do you organize and prioritize your workload? 

Fires, deadlines, then everything else. Open communication is key to monitoring tasks I’ve assigned. The expectation is that if a task is running late or if issues arise that it is brought up soonest.

Please walk us through your development processes. Do you handle all development work in-house? 

This is an amorphous question because each process is a little different based on overall project needs. And no, not all development is done in-house. We utilize a hybrid model that allows us to scale based on skillset and level-of-effort required.

In your opinion, what ingredients are key to manage a successful project?

There are two things I need to manage a successful project: I need the right people to do the work and I need the time to get it done properly.

What advice would you give someone going into your position for the first time?

Read the fine print.

Is it better to be good and on time or perfect and late with your work?

Delivering on a project isn’t like a latching relay switch but eventually, everything will be perfect.

Is there a question you wish people would ask you more often?

Yes, “What do you think?”

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

I’m an FAA-certified UAS (drone) pilot.

Thanks Jayme!

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