When you pay a designer, you are paying a family

In short

In the holistic world, the person you hire is often someone you have danced next to, or shared cacao with at sunset.
When you pay a designer here, you are paying a family, and that money helps a family provide for itself.
That makes the work more than a transaction, because it is tied to what each of us is here to do.

Words by IrinaIrina is my partner and Kai’s mother. This is what she sees when someone in our world pays me for a website. They are her words, and I only put them in order.

Where we meet

Most of the people Tiago works with, we met somewhere without a screen. At an ecstatic dance, a cacao ceremony, a gathering in a field where the children run around barefoot.

At those events nobody cares what you do for a living. The CEO of a big company and someone going through a hard year are dancing on the same floor, with the same energy. Nobody is drinking, and still everyone is free, dancing, talking, resting, letting go.

From the outside it can look a bit crazy. For anyone who has been to an ecstatic dance or a cacao ceremony, it is a feeling of belonging, a happy energy that is almost like being a child again, and it rarely happens in the corporate world, where everything is about results.

Tiago with his eyes closed and a moon drawn on his forehead, at a summer cacao gathering under the trees

The conversation comes first

Everyone there has a story behind them, and their own hidden treasures. The children are happy, the adults are calm, and two people start talking, maybe at sunset over a cup of cacao, maybe lying on the grass looking at the stars with a few strangers. In any other setting that openness of heart would be unthinkable.

Only later, on Instagram or LinkedIn, do you find out what the other person does. Oh, I know her, I had no idea she did this. The connection comes from a natural conversation, and the work comes after it.

When you pay a designer, you pay a family

So when someone in this world pays someone else for a service, a website from Tiago for example, it means something deeper. The work is tied to what each of us is here to do. And we know each other's families. We have seen each other's children play together.

When you pay a designer, you are paying a family, so that it can provide for itself.

I find that beautiful. The money goes home to our family, and the site Tiago builds goes back into your own work, the work that feeds your family. There is a transaction, and underneath it there is trust, and a little intimacy, that two people built long before any invoice.

Tiago and Irina sitting on the grass at a gathering with their son between them, his face covered with an emoji

What changed in us

Since Kai was born, we have both changed a lot. We have grown up, and we are still learning to accept certain things.

Tiago wrote about the money side of this in The client can feel it when you need the money. This is the other half: when the money comes from someone you know, it also carries their trust.

If we have met at a gathering, say hello.

And if we have not met yet, a message is a good place to start.

Talk to me