Meet Joshua Phillips | Co-Founder, with my wife Giulia Ceccacci, of we made this Paris, a creative agency

We had the good fortune of connecting with Joshua Phillips and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Joshua, what was your thought process behind starting your own business?
Before starting our business my wife and I worked separately – I as a TV writer/director and Giulia as a designer and free-lance art-director. and we needed to sort our billing/admin out. Our accountant advised us to form a company. Coincidentally we soon got a job with Giulia making and me filming cakes for Hermès’ Instagram, and things took off from there. Structuring the business, which is an on-going process, encouraged and enabled us to work together. So our success is due to our accountant. Blessed be he.

What should our readers know about your business?
I have learnt many things, but these are the most important

– 1 in 100 times making stuff comes easy, but most of the time it involves doubt, arguments, catty remarks and all-encompassing panic.
– Microsoft Teams always has tricks up its sleeve
– My wife is right
– A good brief makes a good project.
– Put cats in videos
– Listen
– There’s not always something to change about a project, but there’s always something to say about it
– It’s generally better to avoid stained clothing for business meetings (my wife made me put this one in here)
– The up-keep and maintenance of a website and social-media is vital and important, but soul-destroying. We should do more of it.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
We live and work in the area around Strasbourg Saint Denis in Paris’ 10th arrondissement. It’s dirty, noisy, and crowded, but I love living here. I especially like it in the daytime where the people who work in the offices that have sprouted here mingle with the Kurds/Turks/West Africans and other communities who live here. The places I go to eat are the Kurdish soup place Çorba Salonu on the Faubourg St Denis. The Lentil and Tripe soups are very good. I like to cook and do a lot of grocery shopping at the Epicerie du Faubourg. There’s a really good photo gallery on the rue Chateau d’eau called Galerie Miranda. For wine, my favourite shop is les Caves Bardou, on the Faubourg St Denis.

My recommendation would be to stay here, see the sites in Paris, and then get on a train nearby at the Gare du Nord to Calais Frethun, and spend some time near the beach in the village of Wissant, which is beautiful.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?

We do feed, clothe and educate them, and they can be really annoying, but our kids deserve a lot of credit for putting up with us, not taking vacations because we’re busy, leaving them with various baby-sitters to go off on work-trips, having us ignore them as we obsess over projects, keeping quiet and out of the shot on video calls, acting as our sounding-boards and being good-humoured through it all….

Website: https://www.wemadethis.fr

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/we_made_this_paris/

Other: Vimeo https://vimeo.com/jbsphillips This is a link to a film that we made about our friend, the artist Philippe Fleischmann. It has a cat in it. https://www.instagram.com/p/ChHtqo8v3xe/

Image Credits
(C) Joshua Phillips 2023