Home Our Poder A Conversation With Asian American Creative Liz Yam About Diversity and Creativity

A Conversation With Asian American Creative Liz Yam About Diversity and Creativity

Creative Liz Yam Creativity BELatina Latinx
Image courtesy of BELatina.

The last couple of years jump-started changing how companies conduct businesses. In almost a blink of an eye, pivoting has become everyone’s daily bread. This proves true for most companies, from the food industry to creative agencies.

Keithcity Group, a digital creative agency, absorbed the changes created by the ongoing pandemic. Though they are a design agency at their core, they’ve adopted a more holistic approach to building accessible, engaging, and innovative strategies that ultimately benefit their clients. Their distinctive method gives them the necessary skills to produce impressionable content. 

We spoke before with one of the masterminds behind this agency, Alejandro Corpus, and recently we had the pleasure to talk to its other co-founder, Liz Yam. 

Yam is an Asian-American creative. She once was Corpus’ boss and head of digital products at the agency where she and her co-founder first became acquainted. Fast forward to a few years later, and they are signing on different clients due to their bold strategies. 

BELatina News recently spoke with Yam about her experience in slightly rerouting Keithcity’s vision to match the market’s needs and how being a woman in these spaces is groundbreaking. 

What do you think is one of your greatest strengths, and how does it help your work at Keithcity Group?

I believe that empathy is something that I’m proud to have and just being able to understand things from different perspectives. This helps a lot in our client’s sensibility in solving a project. It also helps manage our team and our resources better. Aside from that, I’m very organized, which helps with a lot of the project management side of things. 

What has been advantageous to Keithcity’s growth?

I think actually we were kind of lucky. Not that the pandemic was a good thing, but we got kind of lucky in how people were viewing hiring and working in a different sense. Before [the pandemic], people felt very limited – they had to work with people in their city or within their proximity. And so clients probably weren’t so susceptible to wanting to hire people elsewhere. But having meetings, like on Zoom and not needing to be physically there, helped garner more clients. We also were able to hire people that didn’t live in our immediate area.

What inspires you to move forward?

Right now, a lot of our clients actually inspire us to move forward. They challenge us. I think that we demonstrated a certain caliber and level of skill set. We’re meeting people now who are asking us about, for example, Web3 or Crypto and NFT sort of projects. It’s forcing us to think outside the box or learn other skill sets.

How has being a woman and a creative helped you navigate these spaces and new clients?

There’s room for growth for women in these spaces. Since, right now, for our clients, anything related to Crypto and NFTs and Metaverse is so important, giving them solutions is pivotal. I will say that I’m usually the only woman in the room or at these sorts of meetings. And that leads me to know that there’s definitely an opportunity. 

How would diversifying these spaces benefit people?

I’m looking forward to seeing diversity. Right now, sometimes the feedback we get that’s related to women in Crypto and NFT spaces is based on just their appearance. So, it’ll be comments like, “make her hotter, or she’s not hot enough,” or something like that. Whereas the feedback for the male NFTs is things that are related to their character or their personality traits. 

Right now, I feel a little bit outnumbered to speak up. It sometimes puts me in an uncomfortable situation, but I hope that changes. Luckily, these awkward situations are only 1 percent of our clientele. 

Do you have any advice for women facing challenges in their route to success?

I think that women will always face obstacles, but I would suggest to continue to work hard, and eventually you’ll reap the benefits of your hard work. 

What has been one of your most proud accomplishments?

Well, I had one recently. It was a client who was rebranding, and we were tasked to create a rebrand announcement video to showcase their new brand identity. So, a few of us from our team were invited to join, and we were able to witness people’s reactions to our work – and their excitement, too. And they wanted to watch this video like five more times after we played it the first time. Very rarely do we get to see the tangible or tactile results of our labor, but witnessing it firsthand was a really big boost to our morale and the work that we do.

What’s next for your industry and Keithcity?

We’re really pushing the Metaverse, Crypto, Web3, and NFT space. We see their growth every day. There are new ways of thinking outside the box that people are approaching with Crypto and these spaces. There are just unlimited possibilities at this point. We’re working on some really exciting projects within the tech world, and we’re looking forward to building more. 

Exit mobile version