Customer Spotlight: Awasu Design

Craig Peters, CEO of San Francisco-based Awasu Design, discusses user experience, data security and how Hightail helps support his company’s brand.

Our name embodies the Japanese philosophy of “awasu”.
It’s about “combining forces”, like how we come together with our clients to create innovative digital experiences that set them apart.

We first used Hightail to work with a major bank.

They had regulations preventing them from sharing documents as email attachments, so we needed to find an alternative way to send them our design ideas, presentations and final work. Personally, I’d used a variety of file sharing services in the past and given our client’s focus on data protection, I knew that Hightail had an awesome security reputation that they would trust.

I take security very seriously.

Whether it’s online data encryption or knowing exactly who cleans our office every night, I’m very thorough and check every angle. I have friends who know a lot about digital security whose opinions I trust and they told me that Hightail was a top-notch file sharing solution.

Everything we do has to be professional and easy.

That’s the brand expectation we’ve set for Awasu. It’s not just the experiences we design that should be user-friendly. Working with us will also be a smooth process and that’s how we evaluate any tool or service we use. Hightail is an elegant and simple way to do what we needed to do, so it helps us maintain our high standards when sharing information with clients.

It’s the little things that make a difference.

We often get each other to review an email we’re sending to a client, just to make sure it’s as comprehensible and straightforward as it could possibly be. Even something as simple as an email contributes to your client’s user-experience.

Hightail provided great side benefits.

One of our clients had a small storage cap on emails, so the work we shared via Hightail wasn’t clogging up their system. I also like that I can see who has accessed files, so I have an idea of who’s up to speed with the latest material before starting a conversation.