Can you share the story behind Kaimakkı Studio. What inspired its creation, and what gap did you hope to fill in Cyprus’ creative and digital landscape? What milestones have you achieved so far (e.g. clients, projects, partnerships, growth, recognition)?
We have a video for that!
The biggest achievement for us is being able to escape our 9-5, work on our own terms and make a living doing something we absolutely love and have meraki for with great people!
Six months after starting Kaimakki, we have 10+ clients we love working with, stable growth and a good income.
How does Kaimakkı Studio operate in practice? Could you walk us through your creative process, from strategy and ideation to filming, editing, and delivery?
We specialise in creating kickass social media videos. We handle video production end-to-end as part of a subscription package.
We start by research and social media content strategy, ideation for video formats and topics, we then work with the client to pick their favourite according to their goals, then preproduction, filming across the island, editing and posting. This way we have creative control and full ownership of all details.
In more practical terms, we both do everything at the moment. We have a single creative lead for each client that currently handles everything from strategy and account management to preproduction and editing. Each of us owns clients whose style aligns with ours. For example Gos loves and in fact is super good at comedic sketches and in general more fun content while myself like more documentary-style and more ‘reserved’ and aesthetics-led content.
You describe your work as “scroll-stopping, emotion-led” content creation. What does this mean in practice, and how do you translate it into brand content?
Emotion-led content is the art of picking the right topics + angles + format. It means we come up with video concepts that are not plain aesthetic or plain promotional. They have to have a concept – a central idea, and that concept has to stir an emotion for them to perform. For example telling stories with a narrative arc, putting real people in front of the camera, invoking memories or relatable feelings.
Scroll-stopping content is the art of picking the right hook. In other words, crafting the first five seconds of the video to make somebody stay. There are countless techniques for this.
This is the bread and butter of what we do and we are proud to say that we do not ship any videos that do not follow these principles just for the sake of posting something.
You participated in the UNDP Zero Food Waste Hackathon with a different project and became finalists. What motivated you to join an innovation challenge outside your main field, and what did you take away from that experience? Did it influence your mindset or the way you approach entrepreneurship and content creation at Kaimakkı Studio?
That was a different time before Kaimakki. Maria, one of the cofounders, has been in tech for a decade and loves building software, businesses and a little bit of competition so hackathons are her kind of fun – thus the participation. We had a fantastic time!
What makes Kaimakkı Studio different from traditional marketing or production agencies?
We unapologetically specialise in short videos optimised for social media. Nothing else. Other players either do all kinds of marketing, video being one or production studios handle production for everything ranging from podcasts to big-production ads. We want to be the best on the island at social media. Period. We do it end-to-end and we want to believe we do everything from the strategy to editing to a very high level and a super reasonable price. Many studios are great at filming but cannot do social media style editing. Others are great at editing but they don’t have the chops to understand what video concepts would work. We do it all. We truly care about what we put out so each of our videos has a piece of our soul in it. We do not think this is the standard. A lot of the work we see come out resemble a marketing factory line more than a creative studio’s content. We are proud for that. We are proud of our Cypriot heritage and try to infuse that in everything we do. At the same time we both lived outside Cyprus so we bring a ‘European’ way of working which is often incompatible with this island but usually people call this being super professional and we like that. Gos and I are Kaimakki, we are involved with every client and do not outsource the work to an employee to do. We truly care and are remain involved all the way.
Can you share a project that felt like a turning point for the studio? Our ascent has been gradual and stable so there has not really been a turning point but a video we recently released got featured in ERT and from there it got picked up by Cypriot medial leading to a series of potential TV appearances. Take a look:
In a world driven by short-form attention, what do you think actually makes content stop the scroll today?
Gosh. That would require a thirty minute masterclass to address because there are so many techniques and opinions. In a nutshell the first five seconds are the most important and extra thought should go in those to make sure they are scroll stopping. Making it interesting and useful in terms of the words used + showing human face & voice + create visual interest in terms of the background video is a good start. We can do a workshop some other time and cover these.
What’s next for Kaimakkı Studio? Are there any new directions, services, or expansions you are currently exploring?
Look we just want to be the best at what we do on the island so consciously we do not want to expand to other services. We only want to expand our client base. We have a list of dream clients we have yet to close which include: outdoors/nature, cafe, restaurant, book-related, vegan-related.
Our goals for this year is to grow the studio -we are hiring for a video editor!- to a team of five and 20k MRR and we want to do it while keeping the quality bar high, prices fair, with integrity and while having fun. As long as our clients are happy, we do work we love with cool people and create a life that feels fulfilling and free from the rat race, we have made it.
And truth be told- if we have survived these first six months, we have no doubts we will see massive growth in the coming months.
Follow Kaimakkı Studio‘s Journey!
Stay updated on Kaimakkı Studio’s progress and exciting developments by visiting their website and connecting with them on social media:
- Website: https://www.kaimakki.com/
- Instagram: @kaimakki.studio
- LinkedIn: Kaimakki Studio
Get in Touch:
For inquiries, reach out at:
- Email: hello@kaimakki.com
We hope you enjoyed reading the Alumni Spotlight Series blog and feel inspired by the journeys of our alumni! Stay tuned for our next series, and see you soon!
