Today is a very special day for Bit Zesty—it’s our 10-year anniversary as a company. But before we put on our party hats and pour out the bubbly, we’d like to take a look back at the last decade.
A journey inspired by tech
Bit Zesty was founded in 2009 by our directors Matt and Laura. Inspired by the tech boom happening at the time, they both left their jobs to start their own digital service agency—a brave move considering the country was in a
The company had humble beginnings, with both founders originally working out of their homes. However, things took off quickly. Bit Zesty hired its first employee within the year and moved into a shared office space in trendy Shoreditch.
Evolving as a company
While Bit Zesty started as a specialist Ruby on Rails agency, the team soon realised that you can’t build great products without talking to users, both to understand their needs and make the digital products easy to use. User Research and UX Design was added to our services around three years in, and user-centred design has remained core to what we do ever since.
The last four years also saw us evolve into a digital service design consultancy, neatly marrying our system thinking and technical expertise with user centred design. We’ve since continued to grow and now have a team of 20 people, supported by a network of associates, and a large modern office space in central London.
Clients and awards
We’ve been incredibly lucky to work with a wide range of clients over the years, including commercial, government, non-profit, and healthcare organisations. Our clients have included ITV, HMRC and Queen’s Awards for Enterprise, among others.
Whenever possible, we like to contribute to social good, and we’ve been able to take part in several projects that are improving society. In our work with community interest company SXT, we created a digital service to help reduce the transmission of STIs. And in collaboration with Trussell Trust, we improved on their existing service to help people get emergency access to food without delays.
More recently, we’ve begun assisting the digital transformation of Bridges Self Management, a social enterprise that helps improve the lives of people with long-term health conditions.
We’re proud to have won gold in iF Design awards for Service Design/UX, as well as a London Design award and a W3 award. We were also shortlisted for IxDA and HSJ Value
Activities and events
We’ve also contributed to a number of technology and business events over the years; more recently this included sponsoring the UK Health Camp and UKGov camp, and mentoring at the Startup Weekend Health London.
Speaking at events is always a great way to contribute to the community, and we’ve been fortunate to do so on numerous occasions. Most notably, as a result of creating the exemplar digital service for Queen’s Awards for Enterprise, we were invited to share our approach with the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy at their annual Digital Fortnight event.
A big thanks to our clients, suppliers and teammates
We couldn’t have done any of this without the great people we’ve worked with over the years. We’d like to thank every single Bit Zesty client, employee and supplier for being part of our journey.
Here’s to the next 10 years!
