Technology is the enabler, not the dictator TEXT: MICHIEL STOL | PHOTOS: NOVEMBER FIVE
Digital technology is beautiful. It can help you to fully interact with your audience in the most sophisticated ways, but also make your business run even more efficiently by using it to connect your employees with each other. That is why they love all things digital at November Five and create digital solutions for your company. “We shoot for the sky,” tells cofounder Tom Vroemans. November Five is an independent agency from Antwerp that creates solutions to improve and simplify the interactions between a company and its customers. “We’ve built client portals for companies such as BASE, handling everything from topping up call minutes, changing your tariff plan and then invoicing,” explains 74 | Issue 33 | September 2016
Vroemans. “But we’ve also created content-driven apps, like the VTM app for Belgium’s leading commercial TV station, bringing great content and interactivity to the viewer in a user-friendly format.”
Five represents our roots and the many possibilities we see in the future and that will keep fitting us as we keep iterate and evolve with the world of technology.”
End-to-end partners Vroemans is one of four co-founders of November Five. “Together with Vincent Pauwels, Nick Ver-baendert and Thomas Van Sundert we started the company, then called Appstrakt, on 5 November 2009. We saw that mobile apps were quickly gaining traction, but that relatively few agencies were focussing on them specifically, so we jumped on the chance ourselves.” However, the name Appstrakt tied the company too much to ‘just creating apps’. They had outgrown that. “So we decided to kick 2016 off with a new name and branding. November
“November Five is a full end-to-end partner to our clients and we take them from the first spark of an idea to a finished product,” tells Vroemans. “We believe in continuous improvement and constantly challenge our own way of working. Our strategic trajectories can shape, challenge and enrich any idea into a strong business case. Our experience designers will shape the solution visually and according to the best user-driven standards, while our development teams can build the actual product. We then introduce it to the market together