The Story Behind OPEN /

OPEN started in Thailand in 2006 as OPEN Advertising.

Back then, much of our work was what you would expect from an advertising and design business: graphic design, print, advertising materials and the occasional website.

Print mattered. Graphic design mattered. Having the right software and knowing how to use it professionally mattered.

The job was largely about helping businesses communicate better.

Over time, however, the balance started to change.

Customers needed fewer printed materials and increasingly needed websites, online marketing, ecommerce and digital services.

The internet was becoming the place where businesses needed to be.

So OPEN changed with it.

By 2016, OPEN Advertising no longer accurately described what we were doing.

We had become a digital business.

So OPEN Advertising evolved into OPEN Design Studio.

Websites became a major part of our work. WordPress, ecommerce, hosting, domains, email, SEO and digital infrastructure increasingly replaced the print work we had started with.

The tools changed enormously, but the basic job was still familiar.

Understand what the customer was trying to achieve, then work out how to deliver it.

Sometimes that meant questioning the original brief.

A customer might ask for a basic website when what the business really needed was ecommerce. Another might think they needed completely new technology when the better answer was to make an existing system work properly.

Over the years, we increasingly found that the most valuable part of a project was not necessarily designing or building it.

It was working out what should be built in the first place.

And now the industry is changing again.

Twenty years after OPEN began, AI is fundamentally changing digital production.

A website that once took weeks to design and develop can now be produced in days or sometimes hours.

AI can write code, create graphics, build applications, analyse data, generate content and connect systems at a speed that would have sounded ridiculous when we started in 2006.

I have spent years working primarily with WordPress and Elementor. They remain excellent tools and are not disappearing tomorrow.

But something has clearly changed.

Tools such as Lovable have shown me that we are moving beyond simply building websites. We can now build business applications and operational systems that previously would have required a development team, considerable time and a substantial budget.

That changes where the real value lies.

Knowing how to build something is becoming easier.

Knowing what should be built, why it should exist, how it should fit into a real business and whether it needs building at all is becoming more important.

That led us to look again at OPEN.

And strangely enough, the answer was already sitting in the name.

In computing, the slash represents the root, the starting point from which different paths can begin. That gave the slash in our identity a purpose.

OPEN /
├── hub
├── studio
└── consult

OPEN / is the root.

From there, different paths represent different parts of what we do.

OPEN / Hub

The business behind OPEN and the practical support around it.

Our official company name is OPEN Business Hub, so /hub is not something invented to make the new structure work. It is part of where we came from.

OPEN / Studio

This is where we create.

Websites, ecommerce, digital platforms, hosting, domains and the digital infrastructure businesses need.

There is still a substantial market for this work, and there will be for years. The tools we use to produce it will simply continue changing.

OPEN / Consult

This is where we investigate before we build.

We look at how a business actually operates, find friction in its processes and determine whether there is a better way.

Sometimes the answer might be automation. Sometimes AI. Sometimes custom software. Sometimes an existing piece of software that already does the job. Sometimes it might simply be changing a process.

And occasionally the best recommendation may be to do nothing at all.

That is important.

We do not want to start with the technology and then go looking for a problem to solve with it.

Advice before software.

I had not really thought about the name this way when we started twenty years ago.

But it fits.

Being OPEN means not becoming attached to a particular technology simply because it is what you already know.

In 2006, the answer might have been print.

In 2016, it was increasingly a website.

In 2026, it could be a website, an application, an integration, automation, AI or something else entirely.

The technology is not the starting point.

The problem is.

Then we stay OPEN about the best way to solve it.

2006

OPEN Advertising

We designed things.

2016

OPEN Design Studio

We built things.

2026

OPEN /

We work out what should be built.

And if this suspicious ten-year pattern continues...

Perhaps:

OPEN /
├── monitor
├── retired
└── closed

OPEN / Monitor. The machines do all the work. We just make sure they behave.

OPEN / Retired. The machines do all the work. We go to the beach.

Or the most worrying evolution of a company called OPEN:

OPEN / Closed. We will see.

Whatever technology comes next, that is rather the point.

Stay OPEN.