On a standard day in the Jacky Winter Group (JWG) office, New York speaks to London, London speaks to Melbourne and Melbourne speaks to New York. The company manages 120 visual artists around the world and acts like a record label – it finds work for them from anywhere, including from companies like Apple, Google and Meta (formerly Facebook).

“Anywhere you’re seeing visual content that is animated or illustrated, that is what we do,” JWG director Jeremy Wortsman says. Australian artists are unique and “untapped”, and so business is good.

For almost a decade, Wortsman has been using Slack instead of email. It's a collaboration platform that allows them to communicate easily across teams around the world. And when the Covid pandemic hit, JWG was in an ideal situation to continue working with barely an interruption. It made working from home seamless, it saved precious “email subject line” time, and it streamlined global workflows. Here’s how.

The seconds add up

The 17-odd producers and agents that make up the JWG staff team are not writers, but “writing is our artform”, Wortsman says. Their entire organisation requires, well – organisation. And that means fast messages shooting around the world to organise contracts, non-disclosure agreements, quotes, contracts and digital artworks. “Slack is the tool that traffics everything that we do,” he says. “It’s the circulatory system of the business.”

In a year of using email, due to the sheer number of messages sent within the JWG business, Wortsman estimates he would spend hours simply writing subject lines and greetings. “Everything has to have a subject and a preface,” he says. “I get personally offended when I get a really short email.” Not on Slack. Instead, it’s a few words sent instantly without the fluff and bluster of an inbox, signature and subject. “That adds up. For a small business like us, every second matters.”

NYC-LDN-MEL and back again

Take an example artwork for JWG. A big tech firm based in California commissions a piece of work in the late afternoon, their time. “A lot of work happens quickly and overnight,” Wortsman says.

“In Melbourne, we can handball that to our UK office with all the details. The UK office can talk to a UK-based artist when we go home, when they’re starting their day, and they can hand that back to New York who can actually go back with the availability, the quote and everything by the time the client in California has woken up again.

“So for them, nothing’s happened since they sent the email. But behind the scenes, all of these other communications happen and it’s all live in Slack. It allows for that big brain to just operate.”

Work at home was easy

As JWG has been using Slack since 2013, the collaborative, instant messaging culture has become second nature. Even though Melbourne spent large swathes of 2020 and 2021 in lockdown, it barely affected the business at all. “Unlike others, we didn’t suffer too much with the change to working from home,” Wortsman says. “Our 120 artists are freelance and are always working from home, they don’t do things physically.” When everyone else, including global tech companies, were forced to work from home, it added barriers that JWG had already figured out. “We were very fortunate and privileged to have an increase in business,” he says.