Insights from Miguel Barbot - the other ‘half’ of Barbot Bernardo

This interview was originally published in the GatewayCrafts project blog. You can read it here.

“Being full-time in Saber Fazer/Ofício happened quite naturally: working side-by-side with my wife provides a sort of dream situation where all the professional and personal objectives are perfectly aligned. ”

In January 2023, the GatewayCrafts project was launched, coordinated by Barbot Bernardo (Saber Fazer / Ofício).  We already had the opportunity to meet Alice Bernardo, co-founder of Saber Fazer/Ofício and the GatewayCrafts project. It is now time to get to know another face of this project, the other ‘half’ of Saber Fazer / Oficio - Miguel Barbot.

Miguel has 20 years of experience in consultancy, being an expert in marketing, design, and innovation. He co-founded Oficio in 2013 and is its’ creative director and coordinator, supporting entrepreneurs and companies, especially from the cultural and creative industries, agroecology, and sustainability, in their business processes.

As Saber Fazer / Ofício pedagogical coordinator, Miguel is certified as a trainer and a training manager. He has wide experience in areas such as instructional design, e-learning management, and training/consulting programmes.

The GatewayCrafts team spoke with Miguel to find out more about his career path and Saber Fazer/Oficio’s life story.

GC: Could you share the story behind Saber Fazer/Ofício? What inspired the fusion of these two projects?

MB: “Ofício was born as a response to challenges in the Saber Fazer network, namely craftspeople wanting to create their own businesses. 

After spending 9 years working as an innovation, marketing and business strategy consultant in a bigger company, I was freelancing by the time my wife Alice and I launched Ofício, back in 2013. 

Righ after the pandemic we created a new company, Barbot Bernardo, and moved Ofício from its previous location (Ofício used to share a space with a retail project I carried-on for 10 years) to the recently expanded Saber Fazer premises. Ofício was at the time working mainly in two fronts: business strategy and communication (graphic design, social media, etc) and Saber Fazer was an already mature education, research and retail project. With this move, we created the conditions to grow our team. Everyone in our team of six has a creative background, but we have diverse skill sets, from project management, innovation, strategy and design thinking, retail management, graphic and web design, instructional design, training and education, book publishing, etc. “ 

GC: Was it just a natural necessity of the professional activity you were carrying out at the time or was it something you always wanted and were waiting for the ideal opportunity?

MB: My working experience and education and the platform provided by Saber Fazer led to a situation where the demand was just too high and the new projects too interesting to allow my attention to be divided by different businesses. 

I am privileged to have studied graphic design, marketing and business management. This reflects my professional interests and provides a useful skill set to understand both the creative crowd and the everyday entrepreneur. I also considered myself a sort of a misfit and always felt a bit out of place, but looked at it as a very positive thing:  informal and creative in a traditional consulting / corporate setting, more structured and organized than the usual in creative organizations, which was great to bring a different perspective to our clients.

After quitting my old job in early 2012, I started freelancing immediately, managing and working on a few big projects. At the same time, I founded a tech startup with a former client and opened a retail project in Porto and Lisbon - the first barely lasted 2 years, and the second was sold,  after 10 years in business, to “coopetitors” (a mix of competitors and excellent friends/partners). 

After going freelance and starting these ventures, I was determined to spend the rest of my life working only on things that make me happy. Being full-time in Saber Fazer/Ofício happened quite naturally: working side-by-side with my wife (the most intelligent person I ever met) provides a sort of dream situation where all the professional and personal objectives are perfectly aligned.

GC: How have you witnessed the growth and evolution of Saber Fazer/Ofício over the years?

MB: The first objectives after creating Barbot Bernardo were to certify the company as a Vocational Education and Training, something we achieved in 2023; and to start a new joint strategic area based on cooperation projects (EU and others) focused on our main interests: innovation in education, natural fibres production and sustainability, and innovation in the cultural and creative industries. The main goal of this area is to help us boost our editorial output.

We are an independent book publisher and started a digital learning project: if some of our editorial areas have a strong market and are profitable per se, there are others with huge importance in terms of environmental, economic and social impact that are very costly to produce. European projects are also a great opportunity to fund research and test innovative learning methodologies, such as the social media learning in the GatewayCrafts project and the community learning in our recently approved Erasmus+ project CommunityCloth.

In 2023 we joined two important European networks: ECHN - European Creative Hubs Network and TCBL - Fashion Made Sustainable. It was a year of intense networking that resulted in many exciting things and opportunities in the field of cooperation projects. 

Our graphic design studio also grew into an independent business unit with its own clients and a growing reputation in the Portuguese design ecosystem. It was a parallel process, but it is quite remarkable having such a small team delivering high-quality work for clients, and at the same time, supporting our editorial and publishing activity and helping both Saber Fazer and Ofício with the graphic and brand design (both areas have new identities and websites).

GC: As you said in an article on your website, Saber Fazer and Ofício share a mother, a roof, resources, a team, management, and even a dog, Capitão!  This symbiotic relationship is certainly reflected in the way each brand works. Can you define the positive point of this relationship that has stood out the most recently? 

MB: Until a few years ago, Alice was pretty much the Saber Fazer face, and I was Oficio’s. It is still true in core areas such as the work Saber Fazer does with the “private” clients like the people coming to our shop or attending training events on our premises, or in Ofício’s small consulting and design projects. But this is slowly changing as we work side by side on bigger projects, and the clients relate us more with our individual expertise than with a particular brand. The same happens with our team members, who don’t distinguish between the two areas. 

GC:And what led you to become a certified trainer and what exactly do you need to have that kind of certification?

MB: Being a certified trainer is quite easy. A few weeks long online course, and that’s it. Certifying a company as VET Provider is a whole different thing. We hired an expert to guide us in the process. It is time-consuming, at times very frustrating, requires loads of energy, and consumes lots of important resources of a small company as ours. Alice did all the heavy lifting in the process, and we all had a huge celebration when we got our certificate!

This certification allow us to provide more professional education services, to certify our training and capacity building programmes and was a great opportunity to upgrade our pedagogical practices.”

GC: Now about this amazing project that is the GatewayCrafts project. Alice already told us her side of the story, but what about you, Miguel, what was your motivation behind the GatewayCrafts project?

MB: ”Of course I’m interested in having two new amazing and extremely important courses made and available for free. Linen is a super-fibre, with an extremely low environmental impact - having a beautifully looking course with highly technical, but accessible content can make the difference. But the geek in me is also super excited about the results of our social media learning experiment. I particularly love TikTok, which has an ultra-responsive algorithm that delivers super interesting content (I learn loads of new stuff every day!). 

GC: How does the GatewayCrafts project anticipate positively impacting the cultural and creative industries sector in the long run?

MB: For the CCIs in general, the project is exploring a learning framework using social media that can be replicated to distribute complex knowledge in a more digestible and informal manner. We are preparing two new projects that will use the results of GatewayCrafts: one is in the area of Type Design, and the other aims at building managerial and business development skills for CCIs professionals.

GC: Social Media learning is a significant aspect of the GatewayCrafts platform. How do you envision social media learning enhancing the educational experience?

It is already there. Gen Z’s do most of their search on TikTok. Many of the most successful content creators are actually teaching something: how to properly dress, how to have good manners, how to write a song, how to choose skin care products, how to replace a flat tyre, how to build a table, how to hack a tv show, how to design a logo, how to speak Austrian german as a native wiener, how to bake bread, how to keep a palm tree alive, you name it. 

GC: As a consultant with over 20 years of experience, specialising in marketing, innovation, and strategy, I'm sure you know how difficult it is to start something from scratch, whether it's a project, a brand, or a business of any kind. Do you have any advice for young entrepreneurs who are currently taking their first steps?

MB: Do your homework and be prepared for long hours of hard, mostly underpaid work, to finance your growth. 

If you are not starting a business because you already have clients and need to scale or expand (from freelancer to small studio, from online shop to retail space), be realistic and assess the viability of your idea before moving. Will you be able to find clients? Do you have enough money to invest and feed yourself in the first years? Are there any successful businesses doing the same? How will you make a difference and attract their clients? There are so many more questions to be answered before the big step…

After having a realistic plan, just move and prepare to give everything you have. Owning and managing a business will consume every minute of your life in the first year and probably in the following too.

And remember: in many cases, the energy, skills and work needed to run a business would probably be much better paid working for a bigger company, but the entrepreneur’s reward is not only money, right?

To read more about the symbiotic relationship between Saber Fazer and Ofício

Miguel Barbot