By Max Van Kleek
Razorfish: one of the highest-profile tech consulting firms, with
an enormous staff and corporate clients from all over the US, Europe
and Asia. Since it was founded in Silicon Alley, NYC in 1995, grew
exponentially to over 2100 employees. Razorfish established offices
in Boston, Helsinki, Frankfurt, San Francisco and Tokyo. It also gave
birth to Razorfish Studios, which runs rsub.com, a music and media
publishing studio.
Razorfish was founded by MIT Media Lab's Visual Language Workshop
alum Craig Kanarick and partner Jeffery Dachis, who aimed on creating
a creative studio that would focus on designing for the web and helping
companies create their corporate identities. From its outset, Razorfish
distinguished its work from other design consultancies because it
had its own visual brand, which was visibly consistent across clients.
As Razorfish grew, however, it suffered from starting to lose its
visual brand, and corporate identity. With hundreds of designers,
the style and quality of work done by Razorfish started to vary between
clients. Moreover, Razorfish's own corporate web site, http://razorfish.com,
was redesigned multiple times, and the current incarnation suffers
from not only being uninformative, but also fails to link to many
of the more useful resources on the site.
In late 2000, Razorfish suffered unprecedented harsh financial troubles
as earnings came out to 50-87% below analysts' predictions. In addition,
over the course of the year, Razorfish's share prices slid from $56
down to $4, and the company was force to lay off 200 of its employees.
Although Razorfish's recent webwork seems uninspired, it seems to
be pushing ahead in mobile and wireless technologies. It deployed
several WAP applications, such as FinnAir's WAP-online airline reservation
and schedule verification system, and Pohoja's WAP online Insurance
Agency. Razorfish Mobile seems also to be currently working on applications
for Bluetooth technology.
Meanwhile, Razorfish Studios and its subsidiaries have taken off.
RSUB has become a streaming media publisher and a record label under
the name, Rsubsonic, and maintains an online animation gallery known
as The Blue Dot. They also host the notorious "hidden truth"
news service Disinformation, and is home to a number of hip eZines,
including Bust, an eZine for young wired women.
Whether Razorfish will survive the .com slump is still an open question.
In an interview, Jeff Dachis gave the impression of being confident
that Razorfish will continue to pull in profits. By regaining visual
brand and striving to distinguish its image from other web consulting
rivals, Razorfish might just be able to pull out of its downward spiral.