Meet Horacio Sotelo of Blast Studio

Today we’d like to introduce you to Horacio Sotelo.

Hi Horacio, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstories with our readers?
Hello!

My name is Horacio Sotelo, founder and creative director of Blast Studio Company, founded in 2011, we started as a small startup dedicated to building brandings, web pages, marketing strategy, and photography for SMEs for 4 years, then a big opportunity knocked our doors.

Around 2015, Suzuki was introducing more car units to Mexico as their previous launch with Swift (car version model) was successful, they decided to bring more of Japon to the country… so they started opening more branches around the country, we were in charge of the whole marketing strategy (traditional and digital) where we implemented a whole new vision to reach better customer service, sales floor, and advertising.

We knew we were on track when we had a new type of customer who requested cars in advance (asking for specific colors and models) via online channels and actually came and bought the unit the very same day, a better customer service by using online tools and sales improving by the day, after few years the client decided to take everything inhouse as they were going to do a bigger investment, they wanted to be more in control and reduce budgets.

This pitched us up on three upcoming major projects, the first one was an editorial project for Cambridge University they had this big report from a mine in Chile and they wanted to be handed out on a beautiful book according to FCH (Chile Foundation) branding, the second one was about launching a political campaign for the youth market because they wanted to reach to younger population which had the right to vote but doesn’t get really involved, so we created a BTL-ATL campaign where we connected with the demographics and ask them for propositions to improve the city so they know our candidate was listening to them.

The third one was the hardest one as we had to implement a strategy to spread Uber around the country as it was the new trendy app, we created the Ambassador Program, which was focused on getting people with a bigger reach on social media and events, the new people they signed up got 2 free trips and the ambassador instead of getting Uber Credit on their account for the referral, they could actually cash out the money on their bank account making it more attractive to influencers and people who live from social media and major events.

After a few years of getting involved in this technological revolution were ads, social media, photography tech like drones, video editing, new concept business models emerged, I had the opportunity to travel to Toronto, Canada where I decided to stay awhile and I noticed the big amounts of cranes around the city, I had never ever seen anything like it not even in New York, but that’s where I realized they were building their New York, because there’s still a lot of land around the city, it doesn’t feel that crowded, only in downtown, of course.

So I got involved in construction companies and we were in changer of all the digital content and channels and traditional/drone photography and videography for their construction sites from 200k to 5M price per unit, so a lot of people were involved in all the daily basis as the approach was to humanize the company to show a new perspective and actually have a captive audience to reduce budgets and not to be a traditional developer where it only shows buildings/homes and ads and it must depend on a budget to get more reach.

We are still digital marketing strategies for several developers in Toronto.

Then COVID was happening, everything went to stand by, and I went back to save some money as everything was transforming into a home office schedule due to the quarantine, after reconnecting with some friends I was offered to be in charge of some online store web design projects of some investors which had business in Arizona and Mexico.

First, we started with their Mexican business as they wanted to test us out after a great launch and sales on their sites, they handed us some political and commercial projects in Arizona which also had a great launch and reached the goals we were expecting, we still have on the run couple commercial and political projects that might get launched on our portfolio by November-December as we are still working on them.

We became from a small start-up studio to a transnational company that develops projects in Toronto Canada, Phoenix Arizona, and Queretaro Mexico, working with more than 30 people around the world.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
We had several struggles along the way because when you start a business you also don’t have the budget to hire every position like a normal company would do, so you need to have several roles and work from day to night until someday the company starts to get on track by itself and starts to get the ability to sustain alone.

So basically, I and a couple of associates had to start working at 8-9 am and finish at 1-2 am for the first years, we had days where we had requests or even meetings around 10-11 pm it was a big sacrifice we all made at the beginning to make this work in a short time because after 11 years I can finally say, despite the pandemic we never stopped.

Projects were never missing and we had a small growth, when most of the businesses had to close, I feel that was the sacrifice we made at the begging so our clients are always giving us referrals and projects, we have commercial relationships that are over 8 years old and we always tend to adapt and look the bright sight.

Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
We are an advertising and media production company, we specialize in branding services, marketing campaigns, photography, videography, drones, digital strategy, social media, online and traditional advertising, business development and we even have printing services.

We basically have everything a business would need like having an in-house marketing department, but they don’t have to deal with employees or suppliers, and they also get a tax advantage as we are a supplier and not an employee.

We offer 24/7 coverage because we know emergencies happen and our graphic quality is beyond the traditional competitor with a fair price.

The crisis has affected us all in different ways. How has it affected you and any important lessons or epiphanies you can share with us?
We learned that adaptability is a must to survive in the market.

Contact Info:

• Email: sales@blast-mx.com
• Website: www.blaststudio.co
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/blaststudio.co/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/blaststudio.co/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/blaststudioco

Image Credits
Blast Studio