Freepik Company, a technological company specializing in graphic resources, has just been awarded by El Cercle d’Economia, a civic association that seeks to contribute to improving the quality of public debate by issuing an independent opinion on the main challenges that condition progress , with the José Manuel Lara award for ambition and business purpose. Its CEO, Joaquín Cuenca, tells us about the function and objectives of Freepik Company.
What is Freepik Company?
A digital content technology company. We create digital images (photographs, icons, illustrations, presentations…) and make them available to everyone. By producing some of our content ourselves, we can give it away on unbeatable terms, often even for free. We highly adapt each of our websites to the content they host, avoiding a single website model that works badly for everything. Thus we have the world’s leading websites in icons (Flaticon), illustrations (Freepik) and presentations (Slidesgo).
Freepik Company is the first producer of free graphic content in the world. How has this growth been possible?
Exploiting the combination of technology and content. By having our own distribution platform we are much closer to the user than a normal production company. We know perfectly well in real time what users from all countries are looking for, what content works well and what doesn’t, what themes gain and lose relevance. This allows us to produce exactly what is going to be consumed, increasing the profitability of the content produced and giving us more room than the competition to continue growing.
What does the award to José Manuel Lara mean for Freepik Company?
First of all, a recognition of our work in recent years. I think something that stands out for us is having created a technology company with local talent in an environment where it was not common, and to have done it without any external funding. The jury rewards a social commitment and an ambition for growth. We have contributed our grain of sand to demonstrate that other types of companies can be made in Andalusia and promote technological progress that benefits everyone.
One year ago the Swedish fund EQT acquired part of Freepik Company. What changes has this movement meant for the company?
The entry of EQT as a partner is a great help. First, it increases our visibility and credibility, and above all it pushes us to strengthen the company’s direction and establish industry best practices. We are working together for Freepik Company to take a qualitative leap as a company.
How is Freepik Company different from the competition?
We are one of the few European companies in the sector and we have entered with great ingenuity and with a slightly different point of view. All the companies in the sector have a very important focus on photography while we come from a vectorial world, which has made us make other decisions. We have tried from the beginning to make quality design accessible, and that has allowed us to penetrate developing countries where our competition had never reached.
How important is digitization at Freepik Company?
We have always been born a digital company and the founders only have experience with digital. In our case we have not had to adapt to digital, since we have never known anything else.
How have you experienced the effects of the pandemic?
On a professional level, it was in the middle of the partial sale process and it was not clear how the process was going to work without being able to see each other face to face. In the end the process was very smooth. For some of our managers, the beginning of the pandemic was stressful, it caused the barrier between the personal and the professional to blur a lot, but after a few weeks we increased productivity. On a personal level, stress was more difficult to solve since many of us did not have an adapted space at home to work or we had small children to take care of. When school returned we were able to breathe a little better.
Do you collaborate in any way with platforms like Pinterest? How?
With Pinterest we have tremendous synergies, since it is, together with Instagram, the social network for images par excellence. At Pinterest we advertise our content using the platform’s trends to reach the most interested users, and Pinterest benefits from all the content we upload to the platform and that helps us be closer to the users who follow us from there.
What are your objectives in the medium-long term?
We have a very strong presence in Latin America, Europe, North Africa and Southeast Asia. Our objectives are to increase our presence in the US and in Japan and Korea, and to grow the type and quantity and quality of resources on our platform. Until now Freepik has been a product for design professionals, and with Slidesgo and Wepik we aim to reach less professional users so that more people can enjoy our designs.
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