BRITISH COMPANY OF THE MONTH
Think you know who Serif are? Think again, as the crown prince of Windows desktop publishing is now a darling of Apple. And it’s all down to a sense of Affinity. We talk to the boss who helped make it happen.
How many tech companies have ever successfully reinvented themselves? Apple is an obvious case in point, but it didn’t change markets or target a completely new audience when it revived itself in the late 1990s – it simply (and brilliantly) reconnected with the customers that it had lost.
British software firm Serif, on the other hand, practically threw out the kitchen sink. Long established as a maker of Windows desktop publishing and photo software – perhaps uncharitably, the kind of software that your dad might use to make the Neighbourhood Watch newsletter – Serif has transformed into a cutting-edge multiplatform rival to Adobe in the professional creative software space. Its reputation has had such a makeover, that it was recently invited by Apple to appear at WWDC to show off its new Affinity Photo app for the iPad.
So how did Serif make the leap from steady Windows software maker to developer of award-winning creative apps? We caught up with managing director Ashley Hewson to find out.
Working your way up
Before Hewson set about reinventing Serif, he did a stellar job of reinventing himself. His first job at Serif was as a telesales worker in the call centre in 1998. Nineteen years later, he’s worked his way to the top, having taken on roles in data analysis, operations and logistics, and training along the way.
Nobody goes to their careers officer and says they want to be a telesales worker when they grow up, but Hewson says the much-maligned role rebuilt his fragile confidence after dropping out of the local university in Nottingham. “I wasn’t necessarily expecting at the time that I’d be at Serif for very long,” he told us. “It was a stop-gap thing.” That expectation proved very wrong.
“The big proving ground for me was the 18 months or so I spent on the phones in the call centre. When I started, I wasn’t that confident, couldn’t necessarily communicate all that well. For me it proved to be a fantastic experience in terms of learning to deal with knock-backs, communicating with people well. It really changed me as a person.”
Now in charge of Serif’s 70 staff, he’s learnt everything on the job, including how to use the company’s products. “I’ve always had an interest in computers and a bit of interest in creative software, but it was definitely my first few years at Serif that taught me the ropes, both in terms of using that kind of software... but also the general skills you need as a manager.”
Starting over
Another key management skill is knowing when to listen to your employees, and Hewson is generous enough to credit the firm’s head of development with coming up with the idea to start from scratch, even if other people had seen the writing on the wall. “We’d gone about 20 years selling consumer-focused software on Windows,” explained Hewson. “A lot of the products we were selling, like PagePlus and DrawPlus, were built on a relatively old codebase and we kept putting features in every new version, but there’s only so far you can keep stuffing new features in, frankly. The software became quite bloated. We started to feel like these apps are going to have a certain shelf-life.” “It was about eight or nine years ago now that our head of development, Tony Brightman, came to the board and said ‘look, I really think we should start from scratch and throw all of the old code away, and build some new apps from the ground up’.” Starting afresh, Brightman argued, would allow the apps to take advantage of new hardware and advancements in GPU technology that the legacy software simply couldn’t tackle. There was another reason for ripping up the current code and starting again – Serif wanted to target a new, more lucrative
We didn’t have any existing userbase to talk to about Affinity because 99% of all our customers were on Windows
audience. That required a fundamental change to the way the software was built. “We wanted to focus the new apps on a much more professional market,” said Hewson. “We knew that we were missing a trick by not being on Macs, and in creative software, if you want to be taken seriously, it’s important that you support Mac. It was pretty much impossible for us to port the old Windows apps onto Macs... so the other main part of the development on the new range was that we were basically going to make them completely independent of operating system to make sure the codebase was going to be future proof on whatever operating systems we might want to run on in the future.”
It wasn’t only the old code that Serif was burying, but the name and brand of the company itself. If you go to the website for the Affinity software range now ( affinity.serif.
com) the only mention of Serif anywhere on the homepage is – oddly – in the URL itself. I’ll be completely honest: when I first set about reviewing Affinity Photo for this magazine, I didn’t even realise it was a Serif product.
Did Serif set out to look like a new startup rather than the fusty software brand it had become? “It wasn’t so much to try and look like a startup,” said Hewson. “We knew the Serif brand was associated with more consumer-focused apps. There’s nothing wrong with that, but that is what people would associate Serif with. It wasn’t an Adobe competitor, it was the home or hobby user.”
The other reason for turning to an entirely new brand was that the Affinity software took three or four years to develop. Serif was still updating and selling the legacy apps during that period, and didn’t want to spook customers if word got out about new ‘Serif’ products that weren’t ready yet. “With Affinity, we were starting from scratch [on Mac, initially],” added Hewson. “We didn’t have any existing userbase to talk to about Affinity because 99% of our customers were [on] Windows.”
Gambling the farm?
Turning away from the customers that had stayed loyal to Serif for 20 years, spending years writing a set of completely new apps, and launching a new brand in direct competition to a multinational giant such as Adobe takes balls. There must have been times when Hewson wondered if this huge gamble would pay off?