Makers making what?

➔ Jack the Maker

Born in 2015, Jack the Maker first settled in Marvila, a borough glued to Beato. They moved away for a while but always wanted to return. In 2019 they found NOW - No Office Work, a coworking space next door to Factory Lisbon, and returned to this part of town.

“We didn’t want to be alone in a place. We wanted to be part of a community, an ecosystem, and be more open to partnerships. I don’t mean just having access to networking and customers. I mean talking to people with different views of the world”, cofounder Ricardo Espada explains.

Get Smart

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Jack the Maker, he tells us, was named out of a play on words: jack-in-the-box meets the maker’s approach, since in their early days every project was a bit of a surprise. The purpose was to take ideas that people had in their drawers and turn them into reality. Most of these ideas came from advertising agencies, for campaigns and event activations.

We would work on an idea, research and develop a technology and, for the clients, that would be enough. But it left us feeling that we could take that knowledge further.

Their first project was a campaign for Smart, the car. The idea offered by a creative agency was that when you need to park a Smart, you may think it won’t fit but then it feels like the other cars around it shrink and it always fits. Jack the Maker proceeded to build two lifesize cars that shrank when Smart tried to park between them.

The cars looked and felt real, Ricardo swears: “this idea could have been developed using a computer generated image (CGI), but it wouldn’t have had the same effect”. From the start, Jack’s clientele was mostly creative agencies and they were always responding to that market since it generated a lot of requests to keep them busy. Ricardo remembers that “for a while there, we even forgot we were also building a company”.

Second life

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Jack’s crew started out doing one-offs for brand activations, productizing ideas, mostly hardware. “We liked it, but we realized that a lot of the ideas we were developing for advertising and
events could have another life. We would work on an idea, research and develop a technology and, for the clients, that would be enough. But it left us feeling that we could take that knowledge a bit further, reuse it in other projects and for different industries. We had this view that they could be more than just communication products - they could be used in our everyday life”, Ricardo explains.

The pandemic was a turning point for Jack - as for most of us. Events got canceled, which had a negative impact on the business. But it gave Jack’s core team more time to start thinking about the products they had worked on and go past the proof of concept and prototyping stages, even into B2C marketable
products.

Nowadays, they also work for tech startups, acting as a research department, and for large multinationals, bringing flexibility to their innovation processes and product development.

The Tinder-friendly mug

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Seven years later, Jack has transitioned into a less experimental version of itself. Short projects became longer and technologies originally developed for single use are being explored for wider applications. They also develop digital products now, even though building actual physical objects is considered their differentiating trait in the market.

If you have the luck of getting a tour of Jack’s workshop, you’ll see wires and circuits hanging from shoes, helmets and objects you won’t dare guess what they’re for. But it definitely smells of innovation.

If you have the luck of getting a tour of Jack’s workshop, you’ll see wires and circuits hanging from shoes, helmets and objects you won’t dare guess what they’re for. But it definitely smells of
innovation.

For example, Ricardo recalls having developed a product for Mercedes.io when their people were working from home: a mug on a base connected to the wifi, which would send the user notifications. You could configure your own mug. It would blink green if you had a meeting in 5 minutes with the boss, for
example. “Of course people can program it for whatever they like. If they want it to blink when they have a tinder match, they can”, he explains.

Feeding on the local energy

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Today with a team of 12, comprised of engineers, architects, lawyers, people from an advertisement or a gaming background,Jack also hires different consultants from a tight group, which they work with frequently: "we want to have the best people for each project, while also being able to have a multidisciplinary mind frame".

"For me, that’s one of the coolest things about working with Jack: you never know if you’re talking to an engineer or an artist", says Ricardo.

Having been one of the first comers to this part of town, the team is excited to see how things have been shaping around them. Ricardo thinks that “Beato hasn't reached its full potential yet - not even close! But being here now is being in a place with a perspective of growth and constant dynamics. Even if things are not changing as much or as fast as imagined, you can feel the energy here. With more people coming to see what we’re doing here, it’ll be even better.”