PROLOGUE
People often ask me the same question.
“Which project has meant the most to you?”
Most expect the answer to be a famous client.
A large budget.
Or a technically ambitious project.
It never is.
My mind always returns to the same place.
A quiet office.
SV Group.
It took me years to understand why.
Back then, I thought I was designing a website.
I wasn’t.
I was learning how to recognize identity.
For a long time, I wasn’t sure these pages should exist.
This isn’t a portfolio piece.
It isn’t a case study.
It isn’t even a story about design.
It’s simply an attempt to preserve a moment that quietly changed the way I see companies…
and, perhaps, myself.
Looking back now…
I think this may have been where PERETZ truly began.
THE ARCHITECT
Looking for Companies Worth Understanding
Back then, we worked from a small office.
Everyone had their own projects.
Their own deadlines.
Their own routines.
Mine was always the same.
I was searching for companies I genuinely wanted to work with.
Not simply clients.
Companies I wanted to understand.
An architect sat a few desks away.
One afternoon my business partner, Anton, walked back into the office after a meeting.
Something had clearly gone wrong.
I looked up.
“What happened?”
He told me about SV Group.
A difficult project.
Difficult people.
“I don’t think it’s going anywhere,” he said.
At that moment, the architect looked up from his drawings.
“SV Group?”
“They’re the best furniture makers I know.”
“They build the furniture for my projects.”
Then he paused.
“They don’t manufacture furniture.”
“They create it.”
That single word stayed with me.
Create.
I turned back to Anton.
“Mind if I give it a try?”
He smiled.
“Be my guest.”
“If you feel like wasting your time…”
“They’re complicated.”
I still remember my reaction.
Not the words.
The feeling.
Inside, there was only one thought.
Perfect.
Exactly what I was looking for.
Easy projects had never interested me.
I had always been drawn to people who couldn’t be understood after a single conversation.
Looking back…
I think that’s where this story really began.
THE FIRST MEETING
Before the First Meeting
Before every first meeting, I followed the same ritual.
A quiet investigation.
It became a habit that stayed with me throughout my career.
I studied websites.
Social media.
News articles.
Maps.
Factories.
The company’s history.
Its founders.
Anything I could find.
I never wanted to arrive unprepared.
More importantly…
I couldn’t afford to.
I wasn’t going there to introduce myself.
I was going to test a hypothesis.
Was the company I had discovered online the same company I would encounter in person?
That’s why I always preferred meeting clients in their own offices.
Not because it was more convenient.
Because an office tells you things a presentation never will.
How people speak to one another.
Who interrupts.
Who listens.
Who stays quiet.
Whether fear is present.
Whether respect is.
Whether the place feels alive.
None of that can be seen from your own conference room.
And certainly not through Zoom.
That’s also why I almost never arrived empty-handed.
Asking someone to give me several hours of their time without investing any of my own first…
always felt unfair.
So I brought something.
Research.
Thoughts.
Sketches.
Sometimes a prototype.
Not because I wanted to impress anyone.
Because I believed the first step should always be mine.
Maybe that’s why I never carried business cards.
Not as a principle.
It simply seemed obvious.
If someone needed a small piece of cardboard to remember me after our conversation…
then the conversation itself hadn’t been memorable enough.
The conversation should always be the business card.
It never failed me.
The First Meeting
I don’t remember every word.
But I remember exactly how it felt.
SV’s leather jacket.
A Chesterfield sofa.
Sonya.
Katya.
Yura.
And countless engineering details for pieces of furniture that hadn’t even been built yet.
That was the first surprise.
My degree is in engineering.
So instead of looking at finishes or fabrics, I found myself staring at construction details.
Joint after joint.
Connection after connection.
Everything had been thought through with astonishing precision.
That’s when something clicked.
These weren’t furniture makers.
Not in the way most people use the term.
The phrase came to me almost instantly.
Furniture neurosurgeons.
Not because it sounded clever.
Because it felt accurate.
A neurosurgeon doesn’t have the luxury of approximation.
There is no such thing as almost right.
Only responsibility.
That was exactly what I saw in their work.
The same precision.
The same discipline.
The same respect for every decision.
But the drawings weren’t what impressed me most.
The conversation was.
SV rarely spoke about furniture.
He spoke in metaphors.
About responsibility.
About trust.
About people who don’t ask for authority…
but quietly take it.
He kept repeating one idea.
“We don’t make furniture.”
“We create it.”
Slowly, I began to understand something much bigger.
This company wasn’t building products.
It was building its own philosophy.
Then another sentence appeared in my mind.
We are the furniture.
From a copywriter’s perspective…
it’s a terrible tagline.
From a marketer’s perspective…
it explains nothing.
From an SEO perspective…
it’s almost useless.
And yet…
it was perfect.
Because it wasn’t a slogan.
It was an identity.
They weren’t separating themselves from what they created.
They had become part of it.
THE MINI FACTORY
The Prototype I Never Showed
Like almost every first meeting, I didn’t arrive empty-handed.
I’d spent days studying the company.
Rewriting their content.
Researching competitors.
Building a completely new homepage.
By the time I walked into their office, I already had a finished prototype.
Looking back…
it was good.
Modern.
Elegant.
Confident.
The user experience was solid.
The structure made sense.
Everything followed the principles good digital design is supposed to follow.
It was the kind of website that won awards.
The kind that clients usually loved.
The laptop stayed closed for the entire meeting.
At some point, I quietly pushed it farther away.
I already knew.
I wasn’t going to show it.
Not because it was bad.
Because it was wrong.
It told the story of a company that didn’t exist.
Technically…
it was probably one of the strongest concepts I had produced at the time.
But it wasn’t theirs.
It was mine.
There were thoughtful interactions.
A clean architecture.
Strong typography.
A clear user journey.
Everything was there.
Everything…
except the company itself.
Years later, I finally understood what happened that day.
You can build a flawless interface.
You can create a beautiful experience.
You can follow every UX principle ever written.
And still…
completely miss the soul of the company.
That’s exactly what had happened.
I had arrived ready to present a very good website.
Instead…
I left looking for an entirely different one.
LEARNING TO HEAR
The Price Nobody Was Ready to Hear
Oddly enough, I barely remember the day we presented the new concept.
You’d think a moment like that would stay with you forever.
It didn’t.
I don’t remember excitement.
I don’t remember applause.
I don’t even remember anyone saying,
“This is exactly what we were looking for.”
What I do remember happened much later.
SV smiled and said,
“Yevhen… when are we finally going to make this official? We’re almost afraid to hear the price.”
That sentence has stayed with me for years.
Not because the project was expensive.
It wasn’t.
Because by then…
we were no longer talking about a website.
We were talking about trust.
Why I Never Named the Price
People often asked about the price during the very first meeting.
Sometimes within the first ten minutes.
It was a perfectly reasonable question.
My answer was almost always the same.
“I don’t know yet.”
Some people looked surprised.
Others became cautious.
They thought I was avoiding the question.
I wasn’t.
I genuinely didn’t know.
Not because I wanted to charge more later.
For exactly the opposite reason.
It never felt honest to price something that didn’t exist yet.
How can you estimate a house…
before you’ve even decided what you’re building?
So instead of discussing numbers…
we started somewhere else.
Who are you?
Why do your clients choose you?
What should people feel after meeting your company?
What are we actually trying to build?
Only after we answered those questions…
did I open a spreadsheet.
Sometimes that took a week.
Sometimes it took months.
Looking back, I realize something.
I wasn’t selling websites.
I was selling the time it takes to ask the right questions.
Because once the question is right…
the answer usually arrives on its own.
THE SEQUOIAS
Sequoias
About a week after the main idea for the website was born, I left for a road trip across America.
It should have been a break.
A chance to switch off.
Instead…
the project came with me.
I kept thinking about it.
In airports.
On long drives.
While walking through places I had dreamed of seeing for years.
One of those places was a grove of giant sequoias.
I’d never seen anything like them.
The bark.
The texture.
The scale.
The feeling of standing next to something that had quietly watched centuries pass.
I caught myself thinking,
Maybe this is what’s missing.
Maybe the website needed more texture.
More wood.
More nature.
More detail.
The thought came back again…
and again.
Each time, the answer was the same.
No.
The idea was already complete.
Anything I added now…
would only make it weaker.
That was probably the first time I understood something every designer eventually has to learn.
The hardest part of creative work isn’t finding the idea.
It’s knowing when to stop.
THE SHEET OF PAPER
The Silence After the Sketch
I still think about that sheet of paper.
Just an ordinary piece of paper.
A few pencil lines.
No polished presentation.
No beautiful render.
Just an idea.
And then…
something unusual happened.
For the first time in a very long while…
I stopped looking.
I didn’t open Pinterest.
I didn’t browse design galleries.
I didn’t wonder what everyone else was doing.
I didn’t look for inspiration.
There was nothing left to search for.
The idea was already there.
That feeling is incredibly rare.
Usually, the first concept is only the beginning.
Then come the questions.
What if there’s a better solution?
Maybe it needs more detail.
Maybe it’s too simple.
None of that happened.
This time, every new idea made the project worse.
Not technically.
Emotionally.
Every extra detail pulled the website a little farther away from SV Group.
That’s when I learned something I’ve carried with me ever since.
Sometimes a designer’s job isn’t to create.
Sometimes…
it’s simply not to ruin what’s already there.
The Temptation to Improve
Today, seven years later, I can easily list dozens of things I would do differently.
Technology has changed.
Design has changed.
I’ve changed.
The animations would be better.
The interactions would feel smoother.
The experience would be richer.
Technically…
it would be a stronger website.
And yet…
I wouldn’t redesign it.
That still surprises me.
Not because it’s perfect.
It isn’t.
Every designer can look back at old work and see mistakes.
I certainly can.
But I also see something else.
Something more important.
At some point, that website stopped being a project.
It became part of the company’s history.
Like a well-made piece of furniture.
The kind that doesn’t lose value with time.
It gains it.
Not because it’s rare.
Because it remembers.
The people.
The conversations.
The long evenings.
The disagreements.
The trust.
The time.
That’s why I would never replace it with something more modern.
Sometimes things grow older…
more beautifully than they grow newer.
THE CONCRETE CEILING
Looking at It Today
Every now and then, I open the website again.
Not to study the design.
Not to judge the animation.
And certainly not to critique my younger self.
I look at something else.
I see the concrete ceiling.
The architect.
The prototype I never showed.
The Chesterfield sofa.
The engineering drawings.
The road trip across America.
The sequoias.
And then I realize something.
The website was never about furniture.
It was always about people.
Maybe that’s why it still feels alive.
From the Other Side
Years passed.
The project was finished.
SV Group continued building their company.
I continued building mine.
Sometimes our paths crossed.
Sometimes they didn’t.
But one question stayed with me.
What did they remember?
Not about the website.
Not about the design.
About me.
The twenty-seven-year-old who kept showing up at their office almost every day.
So one day I wrote to Sonya.
Not as a former client.
As someone who had lived through that story with me.
I asked her for a strange favor.
“Try to remember me.”
“Not the person I am today.”
“The one I was back then.”
Honestly…
I expected a few kind paragraphs.
“Great project.”
“It was a pleasure working together.”
“Thank you.”
Instead…
she gave me something far more valuable.
She reminded me of a version of myself…
I had almost forgotten.
WHEN A WEBSITE STOPS BEING A WEBSITE
What She Remembered
She barely mentioned the website.
Instead…
she wrote about me.
That was much harder to read.
Before we met, they had spoken with plenty of agencies.
Filled out endless briefs.
Sat through polished presentations.
Received beautifully designed proposals.
She said almost nobody had tried to understand who they were.
Then I showed up.
There was one sentence I must have read ten times.
“You lived it. Anton wanted to sell it.”
I kept coming back to those words.
Because all my life I’d believed I wasn’t very good at sales.
Then someone on the other side of the table described something completely different.
Learning Their Language
Another sentence stayed with me.
She wrote,
“You were learning our language instead of asking us to speak yours.”
Until I read that…
I’d never thought about my work that way.
To me, it seemed obvious.
How could you build the digital face of a company…
without first learning how that company speaks?
Apparently…
it wasn’t obvious to everyone.
The Loneliness I Never Knew Was Visible
Then came something I wasn’t prepared for.
She wrote that one day she and SV had talked about me.
Not the project.
Me.
She said there had always been…
a certain loneliness about me.
I stared at that sentence for a long time.
Because it was true.
Back then, I was surrounded by good people.
Friends.
Partners.
Talented colleagues.
But somehow…
I was always looking for someone who wasn’t looking at me…
but looking in the same direction.
Maybe that’s why complicated companies fascinated me.
Sometimes they became the first place where I felt genuinely understood.
A One-Man Factory
There are things you should never say about yourself.
They sound arrogant.
But when someone else says them…
they become part of the story.
Sonya called me…
“a one-man factory.”
She remembered something their team used to joke about.
If I ever said,
“I’ll do it.”
I simply disappeared…
and came back with the work done.
No speeches.
No excuses.
No waiting for the perfect moment.
Just work.
Reading that made me smile.
Not because it praised me.
Because it reminded me of something I’d forgotten.
Sometimes the qualities we consider ordinary…
are exactly what other people remember.
The Part That Made Me Laugh
There was one paragraph I couldn’t stop smiling about.
Sonya admitted…
she used to feel jealous.
Not in the way people usually imagine.
She was jealous of how quickly SV and I seemed to understand each other.
Then she wrote something that made me laugh out loud.
“Part of me wanted to shout, ‘What about me?’”
I honestly never noticed.
Not once.
And that’s when I realized why other people’s memories matter.
They return pieces of your own life…
that you no longer have.
Memory Is Never Singular
Every project exists in at least two versions.
The one you remember.
And the one remembered by the person sitting across the table.
Sometimes they are almost identical.
Sometimes they’re completely different.
The real story lives somewhere between them.
Maybe that’s why I finally decided to write this.
Not to tell my version.
But to place both versions…
side by side.
Thank You, Sonya
Some people help you create a great project.
Others help you understand who you were while creating it.
Sonya gave me that gift.
Without meaning to.
She helped me see parts of myself I would never have discovered alone.
Sometimes we don’t need another opinion.
We need another memory.
That’s why this chapter exists.
ONE LAST PHOTOGRAPH
Looking Back
People sometimes ask me,
“If you could go back… what would you change?”
I think about that question every time.
The answer has never changed.
Nothing.
Not because everything was perfect.
It wasn’t.
I made mistakes.
Plenty of them.
Today I’d work faster.
I’d build things differently.
Some decisions would be better.
Others would simply come easier.
But the story itself…
had to happen exactly the way it did.
There is only one thought that still visits me.
Sometimes I wonder…
what if the architect had come with me to that first meeting?
Would he have seen the same thing?
Or would the entire idea have taken a different path?
I’ll never know.
Maybe that’s why the question never disappeared.
Listening Isn’t Hearing
If someone asked me for a single lesson from SV Group…
I wouldn’t talk about design.
Or branding.
Or websites.
I’d say something much simpler.
Learn to hear.
Not just listen.
Hear.
The difference is small.
But everything lives inside it.
We spend our lives listening to people.
Very few of us actually hear them.
Sometimes the truth hides inside one casual sentence.
Sometimes…
inside a pause.
Sometimes…
in the way someone sits in a chair.
Sometimes…
in the words they repeat without realizing it.
People often say,
“The devil is in the details.”
Maybe.
But I’ve learned something else.
The truth lives there too.
Since those years…
I’ve become much less interested in presentations.
Much less interested in briefs.
Much more interested…
in people.
The First PERETZ
When I think about those years…
I don’t feel the need to give my younger self advice.
I don’t want to warn him.
Or protect him from mistakes.
Or tell him what will happen next.
If I could say one thing…
it would simply be this.
Enjoy it.
Because back then…
none of us knew what we were building.
We were searching.
Arguing.
Making mistakes.
Starting over.
Every morning felt like another chance to create something real.
Only years later did I realize…
those were the first days of PERETZ.
We didn’t have a manifesto.
We didn’t have philosophy.
We didn’t even have the words.
We just lived that way.
The Second PERETZ
Today…
I feel something strangely familiar.
Almost like déjà vu.
As if everything is beginning again.
Only this time…
with intention.
I’m no longer trying to build another agency.
Or another website.
Or a larger portfolio.
I’m trying to build a place.
A place where conversations begin before contracts.
Where ideas appear before proposals.
Where trust matters more than presentations.
Maybe…
that’s what the second PERETZ will become.
I don’t know yet.
But for the first time in years…
I recognize that feeling again.
The feeling…
of a beginning.
EPILOGUE
The SV Group website is no longer new.
The world has changed.
Technology has changed.
Design has changed.
I have changed.
If I built it today…
it would be different.
More refined.
More interactive.
More ambitious.
There are countless things I could improve.
And still…
I wouldn’t redesign it.
Not because it’s perfect.
Because it became something far more valuable than perfection.
When I look at it today…
I don’t see a website.
I see conversations.
The concrete ceiling.
The marks left by wooden formwork.
A sheet of paper.
The first sketch.
A road through California.
The sequoias.
I see Sonya.
SV.
Yura.
Katya.
Roman.
Ruslan.
I see everyone who unknowingly built something much larger than a digital project.
Together…
we built a memory.
People often believe furniture becomes valuable because it’s rare.
Or expensive.
I don’t think that’s true.
The most valuable pieces are the ones that carry the fingerprints of the people who made them.
I think the same thing happened to that website.
Long ago…
it stopped being digital.
It became another piece created by SV Group.
Only this one wasn’t made of wood.
It was made of ideas.
Trust.
Time.
That’s why…
I would never change its soul.
One Last Photograph
We took that photograph almost by accident.
At the time…
it felt completely ordinary.
Just another evening.
Another meeting.
Another step in a long project.
None of us imagined that years later…
it would become one of the photographs I value most.
I’ve often said I never really saw my clients as clients.
Maybe because I was never interested in that kind of relationship.
I wanted to become part of their story.
Even if only for a little while.
Not to belong.
To understand.
That’s exactly what happened with SV Group.
Very quickly…
walking into their office stopped feeling like visiting a client.
It felt like walking into a place where people already knew my name.
On the left side of that photograph are the owners of the small coffee shop I mentioned earlier.
Every time I came to the office…
they made coffee for us.
Back then…
it felt like a small detail.
Today…
I know that’s exactly how memory works.
It isn’t built from milestones.
It’s built from ordinary moments.
Around that table sat people who all became part of this story.
SV.
Sonya.
Ruslan.
An engineer who cared about precision just as deeply as everyone else in that company.
And somewhere among them…
a twenty-seven-year-old version of me.
Completely unaware that this project would stay with him for the rest of his life.
Today…
I barely think about the website.
I remember the conversations.
The coffee.
The laughter.
The disagreements.
The long Friday evenings.
Somewhere during those evenings…
the project quietly stopped being about a website.
It became about people.
That’s where the best work is born.
Not in meeting rooms.
Not inside presentations.
But in those rare moments when titles disappear.
The client is no longer a client.
The contractor is no longer a contractor.
There is only one shared desire.
To create something honest enough…
that years later…
you can still look at it…
View project on PERETZ.agency → Visit sv-group.com.ua →
and smile.
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