Entering OuterEdit’s B Corp Era
From an experimental T-shirt project in 2011 to becoming a Certified B Corporation, OuterEdit’s journey has always been about more than what we make. It is about why we make, how we make, and who our work ultimately matters to.
In 2011, OuterEdit began with a fairly simple idea: bring artists and designers together, put their creativity onto T-shirts, and see what might happen. There was no grand plan to build a creative agency in Singapore, no carefully mapped business strategy, and certainly no expectation that this small experiment would eventually grow into the multidisciplinary practice OuterEdit is today.
What we did have was curiosity, a belief in collaboration and an instinct that creativity becomes more meaningful when it brings people together. Our early years were spent experimenting with how designers and artists could create with one another across disciplines and borders. We built an online platform, connected thousands of creatives from Singapore and around the world, and developed what became the world’s first online five-way creative collaboration.
By 2014, we had outgrown the tees. OuterEdit gradually evolved into a broader creative and design agency in Singapore, working with organisations to build brands, communicate ideas, create experiences and shape places. Fifteen years later, the scale and nature of our work have changed considerably, but much of the instinct that first brought OuterEdit into being remains.
Today, OuterEdit is a Certified B Corporation.
We are incredibly proud of that milestone, but we do not see B Corp Certification as a badge placed at the end of a journey. For us, it represents something more demanding and more useful: a commitment to how we want the next chapter of OuterEdit to unfold.
From Making Things to Making Meaning
How a graphic design practice became a multidisciplinary creative agency
There is a line we have returned to for many years: Make Meaningful Matter.
It began as a way of articulating what we wanted our creative work to achieve, but over time it became a useful compass for the kind of company we wanted OuterEdit to become. The phrase asks us to think beyond the artefact itself and consider what a piece of design contributes, who it connects with and what might remain after the work is gone.
We started in graphic culture, illustration and visual communication. From there, our practice expanded into brand strategy, graphic design, creative strategy, brand experiences, placemaking, exhibitions, installations, spatial activations, cultural programming and immersive experiences. What began on a T-shirt gradually moved onto walls, streets, public spaces, retail environments, festivals and entire neighbourhoods.
As a branding and creative agency in Singapore, we have since had the privilege of working across tourism, culture, retail, property, lifestyle, education, wellness, public institutions and community development. Some briefs have asked us to create a new brand identity. Others have asked us to rethink an environment, curate a festival, design an exhibition, activate a public space or help a community tell its story.
Increasingly, we think of our role less as producing individual pieces of communication and more as world-building for communities, cultures and brands.
That shift has been significant. It allows us to look beyond whether something is graphic, spatial, experiential or strategic and instead begin with a more fundamental question: what are we trying to make matter here? From there come the equally important questions of who it matters to and how design might help people see, understand, feel or experience it differently.
The disciplines may change from project to project. Those questions rarely do.
Design Is Not Only What We Make. It Is How We Make It.
Why B Corp Certification became a natural next step for OuterEdit
Creative businesses spend a great deal of time talking about visible outcomes: logos, campaigns, installations, exhibitions, environments and experiences. Yet behind every one of those outcomes sits an enormous amount of largely invisible work.
There are people, partnerships and livelihoods involved. There are decisions about materials, production processes and suppliers. There are relationships with clients, collaborators, makers and communities. There are deadlines, commercial pressures, compromises and trade-offs. There are also audiences whose lives our work enters and communities whose stories we are sometimes entrusted to interpret.
Over time, we have come to believe that good design cannot be judged only by how something looks, or even by how effectively it performs. How something comes into being matters too.
That was what made pursuing B Corp Certification meaningful to us.
The process asks businesses to examine their social and environmental impact alongside governance, accountability and transparency, and to think more broadly about their responsibilities to workers, communities, customers and the environment. For a creative practice built around the idea of Making Meaningful Matter, many of these questions felt surprisingly familiar.
At the same time, they made us look much harder at ourselves.
There was something reassuring in discovering a wider business community that spoke openly about many of the principles OuterEdit had been trying to build around. Purpose, responsibility, people, community and commercial sustainability did not have to be regarded as separate conversations. They could form part of the same conversation about what a good business might look like.
In that sense, B Corp did not suddenly give OuterEdit a purpose. It gave us a more rigorous framework through which to interrogate whether the purpose we spoke about was actually reflected in the company we were building.
The Work Behind the Work
Turning values and intentions into structures
OuterEdit has always been an imperfect work in progress.
Building an independent creative company for fifteen years has meant learning almost everything by doing. We have grown and contracted, experimented and recalibrated, succeeded and made mistakes. We have changed direction, questioned assumptions and reinvented ourselves more than once.
There have been exhilarating projects, creative breakthroughs and periods of rapid growth. There have also been difficult seasons, operational growing pains and moments where ambition moved faster than infrastructure. At other times, the realities of running a business forced us to reconsider how much we could take on, how we structured ourselves and what sustainability really meant beyond an environmental definition.
Purpose does not remove any of these realities. If anything, attempting to run a responsible company means confronting them more directly.
The B Corp journey required us to move beyond intention and look more carefully at what had actually been embedded into the way OuterEdit operated. It meant examining governance, policies and internal processes, looking at how we support the people we work with and reviewing our relationships with collaborators, communities, production partners and suppliers. It also made us think more deliberately about environmental responsibility, procurement, transparency, accountability and the long-term resilience of the business.
Some of this process formalised practices and principles that had already existed within OuterEdit. Other parts revealed areas where our beliefs had not yet translated sufficiently into structure.
That distinction became important.
It is relatively easy for an organisation to say it cares about people, sustainability or community. It becomes considerably harder when the questions become more specific. Where is the evidence of that value? How does it influence a commercial decision? What happens when following that principle is inconvenient, expensive or difficult? How do we measure whether our intentions are producing meaningful outcomes?
B Corp Certification gave us a framework for asking those questions more rigorously and, importantly, for continuing to ask them long after certification itself.
People Have Always Been the Point
Building a more human-centred creative practice
OuterEdit would not exist without people. Our first experiment was built around collaboration, and our earliest projects depended on artists and designers being willing to contribute, connect and make something together. Much of the work that has come to define the studio has continued along that trajectory.
Street of Clans, for example, grew from our appreciation for the cultural heritage of Bukit Pasoh and the creative community surrounding it. Instead of simply staging an event around heritage, the project explored how design could reconnect generations, makers, businesses and cultural histories. It became an opportunity to treat the neighbourhood itself as a living platform for storytelling and participation, and the project was subsequently shortlisted for Design of the Year at Singapore’s President*s Design Award.
Our Don’t Mind If I Ask initiative turned the lens onto our own profession. Through conversations with people across Singapore’s communication design community, the project attempted to create greater openness around the realities, aspirations and uncertainties of working in the creative industry.
Across these and other public festivals, cultural programmes, retail experiences and placemaking projects in Singapore, we have continued to explore how creativity can invite people in rather than simply communicate at them.
That principle has become increasingly important to the way we work. We believe the strongest projects are often shaped with people, rather than simply designed for them. Community engagement should not become an ornamental layer applied at the end of a creative process. Inclusivity cannot be reduced to a visual language, and culture cannot be treated simply as an aesthetic resource.
Meaningful participation requires listening, humility, exchange and an acceptance that the designer does not always hold the most important answer in the room.
Good Design Should Do Good
Expanding our understanding of creative impact
Being purpose-driven does not mean that every creative project has to solve a social problem, nor do we believe design needs to wear its virtue visibly in order to create value.
Impact can take many forms.
A piece of graphic design can make information clearer and more accessible. A strong brand strategy can help an organisation articulate why it exists. A joyful installation can turn an otherwise ordinary journey into a moment of discovery. Thoughtful placemaking can give neighbours new reasons to encounter one another. An exhibition can make an unfamiliar or complicated subject accessible, while an immersive experience can turn a passive audience into active participants.
A well-designed public programme might simply give people of different ages, cultures and backgrounds a reason to occupy the same place.
There is meaning in utility, and there is meaning in delight. There is meaning in creating something more understandable, welcoming, participatory, memorable or culturally resonant.
Our ambition as a creative agency in Singapore is therefore not to prescribe one narrow definition of what socially responsible design should look like. Instead, it is to become more conscious of the effects our choices create and more intentional about the role our work plays within the larger systems around it.
Creativity has influence. With the privilege of shaping how people encounter brands, spaces, ideas and one another comes a responsibility to consider what those interventions put into the world.
From Graphic Design to World-Building
Evolving OuterEdit’s role as a branding, experience and placemaking agency
Over the years, the boundaries between creative disciplines have become increasingly porous for us.
A branding project can become an environment. An environment can become a story. A story can become a programme, and a programme can become the basis around which a community gathers. Over time, that community can begin to shape the identity of the place itself.
This is why OuterEdit today operates across creative direction, brand strategy, graphic design, experience design, exhibition design, installation design, spatial activation, cultural programming, brand activation and placemaking strategy. We remain deeply committed to the craft of communication design, but we are increasingly interested in what becomes possible when different disciplines are combined to create a more complete world around an idea.
For a brand, that may mean developing an identity that moves coherently from strategy and storytelling into a physical environment and an experience. For a district or development, it can involve using creative placemaking to strengthen the relationship between people and place. For a cultural institution or museum, it could mean combining exhibition design, storytelling and immersive experiences to turn information into participation.
For communities, it can mean creating platforms where people become contributors to the story rather than merely its audience.
Our ongoing work with Singapore Science Park is one expression of this thinking. Across placemaking, programmes, installations and design-led experiences, our role has gradually expanded beyond individual interventions towards the larger question of how a district can feel more connected, vibrant and meaningful to the people who encounter it.
To us, these are not really separate creative services. They are different tools for achieving the same ambition: making ideas matter in the lives of people.
What B Corp Means for a Singapore Design Agency
Considering the business itself as a creative medium
There is something particularly meaningful to us about achieving B Corp Certification as an independent design and creative agency in Singapore.
Design studios are not usually the first organisations that come to mind when people talk about large-scale systems change. We do not operate essential infrastructure, formulate public policy or manage multinational supply chains. But creative businesses influence considerably more than we sometimes acknowledge.
We help organisations decide how they present themselves and how they tell their stories. We help determine what gets communicated, visualised and amplified. We make choices around suppliers, fabricators, freelancers, makers and production partners. We influence materials, environments and forms of consumption. We help shape public places and contribute, in our own small way, to culture.
Through the organisations we work with, even a relatively small creative studio can create experiences that reach thousands or, over time, millions of people.
The way we choose to operate therefore matters.
Becoming Singapore’s 62nd Certified B Corporation connects OuterEdit to a growing global community of companies attempting to demonstrate that positive impact and commercial success do not need to sit on opposite sides of an equation. That proposition resonates deeply with us because it suggests that the business itself can also be treated as something capable of being designed.
Policies can be designed to be better. Relationships can be designed to be fairer. Procurement and production systems can be redesigned. Workplaces can be shaped with greater consideration for people. A creative agency can be more deliberate about the clients it works with, the opportunities it pursues and the consequences of its choices.
Even the future of a company can be designed.
In that sense, B Corp has encouraged us to consider OuterEdit itself as another ongoing creative project.
Purpose and Profit Are Not Opposites
Building a creative business that can endure
One lesson that fifteen years of running OuterEdit has taught us is that purpose alone does not keep a company alive.
A responsible creative business also needs to be a resilient one. It requires healthy client relationships, commercial discipline, clear boundaries, capable people, sustainable workloads and organisations that recognise the value of thoughtful creative work.
There will always be tensions within an independent creative practice. There is tension between creative ambition and commercial reality, between doing more and protecting the people responsible for delivering it, and between creating something extraordinary and ensuring that it is produced responsibly. There is also a constant tension between remaining open to possibilities and knowing when saying no is healthier for the company.
B Corp Certification does not resolve these contradictions. What it offers is another lens through which we can navigate them.
For OuterEdit, balancing profit with purpose does not mean regarding profit as something undesirable. A financially sustainable company can pay people properly, invest in ideas, nurture talent, support independent initiatives, experiment, learn and continue doing meaningful work.
The more interesting question is what a business chooses to do in pursuit of profit, and what it chooses to do with the capacity that profit creates.
Our continuing challenge is to build a model in which commercial sustainability and meaningful creative impact strengthen rather than undermine one another. We do not pretend to have solved that equation. We are still learning how to do it better.
Certification Is Not a Finish Line
Accountability for what comes next
Perhaps the most valuable consequence of becoming a B Corp is that it has made us even more conscious of how much further there is to go.
Certification is not permission to call ourselves perfect. In many ways, it creates the opposite condition. It gives us a clearer benchmark against which our future decisions can be measured and makes improvement a continuing responsibility rather than a one-time exercise.
There are practices within OuterEdit that we want to strengthen and ways of measuring our impact that we need to become better at. There is more we can do around responsible production, procurement, environmental impact and material choices. There is more we want to do for the wellbeing and development of the people who work with us.
There are also more opportunities for us to use our capabilities in support of communities, culture and causes that deserve greater visibility, and more conversations we hope to contribute to around what a healthy, progressive and sustainable creative industry in Singapore could look like.
B Corp Certification has not answered all these questions for us. It has made us more accountable for continuing to ask them.
Our Next Edit
Where OuterEdit hopes to go from here
The word Edit has always carried particular significance for us.
An edit is rarely an ending. It is an act of looking again: deciding what should remain, what should be removed, what needs to change and what other possibilities might exist. Editing requires enough conviction to make a decision, but also enough humility to recognise that something can be improved.
That feels particularly appropriate at this point in OuterEdit’s story.
As we enter our B Corp era, we want to become even more deliberate about the work we pursue and the worlds we help bring into being. We want to partner with organisations that see design not simply as decoration, but as a strategic, cultural and social force. We want to deepen our work across creative strategy, brand experiences, cultural placemaking, community engagement, immersive design and experiential storytelling.
We are increasingly interested in the larger questions around how people will live, work, gather, move, play and belong, and in the role that design can play in helping communities and organisations navigate those futures.
We want to create more projects that connect people across backgrounds and generations. We want to continue exploring sustainable design and more responsible forms of production, while strengthening our relationships with local makers, specialists and creative collaborators. We want to advocate for human imagination, ingenuity and craft at a time when the conditions of creative production are changing rapidly.
We also want to share more of what we learn, support the next generation of creative practitioners and continue contributing to a stronger design ecosystem in Singapore.
Through all of this, we hope OuterEdit retains the curiosity and slight restlessness of the studio that began in 2011 by putting artwork onto T-shirts and asking what might happen if enough good people were given an opportunity to make something together.
Forward, Always
Making Meaningful Matter, with greater intention
OuterEdit has travelled a considerable distance since 2011. We have moved from graphic design and T-shirts into multidisciplinary creative direction, and from individual pieces of communication into brands, exhibitions, installations, festivals, public spaces and experiences. Along the way, we have become increasingly interested not only in the things we create, but also in the relationships, systems and communities that exist around them.
Yet in another sense, B Corp Certification has brought us back to where we began.
Our story started with people, collaboration and curiosity. It started with an interest in what might happen when creativity became a platform for connection rather than simply an act of self-expression. Fifteen years later, those ideas remain central to how we understand the work.
We are proud to be a Certified B Corp creative agency in Singapore. More importantly, we are conscious of what that commitment asks of us from here: to care as much about process as outcome, to balance ambition with responsibility, and to build a business capable of thriving without forgetting why it exists.
It asks us to keep reconsidering what good design can do, who it can include and what it leaves behind.
And it asks us to remain accountable to the three words that have guided every version of OuterEdit so far:
Make Meaningful Matter.
Here is to the next edit.
