Today we’d like to introduce you to Eugene Opperman.
Hi Eugene, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
I grew up in Johannesburg, always making something — doodling, building absurdly large Lego castles, creating electronic music. Graphic design school was the obvious next step, though the real education started the day I graduated. The agencies I worked for taught me craft, but they also taught me the part school skips: how to read a client, how to run the thing. In 2017 I opened my own brand design agency and ran it for seven years, until I moved to the US. Once I’d settled in Virginia, I started Salt and Co. — brand, design, and software for founders who know their business is good and can feel that it isn’t landing that way.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
No — and I’d be suspicious of anyone who says otherwise. The hardest stretch was winding down my South African business from the other side of the world. I’d already moved to Virginia, so I was managing the end of one company across eight time zones while starting from nothing in a country where nobody had heard of me. Seven years of reputation doesn’t cross an ocean. There were nights of handling a problem in Johannesburg late at night and then getting up to work in Virginia that I had no track record to win. I’m grateful for how it turned out. I wouldn’t call it smooth.
We’ve been impressed with Salt & Co. Design Partners, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
We do three things: brand, design, and custom software. Most studios do the first two. The third is what makes us useful — we build the tools that sit underneath a brand, the ones that take the repetitive, draining work off a team’s plate so they can spend their time on the work only they can do.
What I’d want your readers to take from it is the difference between a folder and a foundation. Plenty of agencies hand you a brand as a set of files — logo, colours, a PDF of rules — and then move on. We build the thing around how a business actually operates: the assets you use every day, not the ones that sit on a shelf. That’s why I don’t call the work deliverables. We call them transformations, and I mean it fairly literally — the point isn’t the artifact, it’s the distance between where a business is when it arrives and where it is when we’re done.
The one I’m proudest of is Inkathi, a luxury safari operator. The founder came to us for a website. He had everything that’s genuinely hard to get — decades of relationships across Africa, a real understanding of how to run the operation on the ground — and no way to make any of that legible to a traveller on the other side of the world. So we told him a website wasn’t what he needed first. A site with no brand behind it is just a brochure, and a brochure wasn’t going to carry the weight of what he was actually selling. We built the voice before we built anything visual: considered, unhurried. Africa doesn’t need to shout, and neither did Inkathi. The site came last and was better for waiting. A website would have been a finish line. A brand is a starting point.
The other one I’ll mention is Squall, a WOD and interval timer for iPhone and Apple Watch that we designed and built ourselves. Its whole argument is restraint — nothing on screen that doesn’t need to be there. Building for yourself is the hardest brief there is. There’s no client to hide behind.
In terms of your work and the industry, what are some of the changes you are expecting to see over the next five to ten years?
There’s an enormous AI push right now, and most of what I see is brands using it to produce more — more copy, more images, more of everything, faster. What it’s actually producing is dilution. Every brand in a category starts to sound the same, because they’re all reaching for the same tool and accepting the first thing it gives them.
I don’t think the correction is that people abandon AI. We build AI tools ourselves. But there’s a difference between using it on the work nobody should be doing by hand and using it on the work that is the point — the voice, the judgment, the decision about what to leave out. Automate the first and you free people up. Automate the second and you’ve automated away the only thing that made the brand yours.
So over the next five to ten years I expect a swing back toward human-centred work — not as a rejection of the technology, but because scarcity moves. When anyone can generate a competent-looking brand in an afternoon, competent stops being worth anything. What’s rare is a point of view, and a point of view still has to come from a person.
Pricing:
- Every engagement starts with a free conversation about the business — no pitch, no proposal, and no number until we understand the problem.
- Every engagement starts with a free conversation about the business — no pitch, no proposal, and no number until we understand the problem.
- Most engagements fall into one of three shapes: a brand foundation, a brand plus a site, or an ongoing partnership where we function as the creative and technical team a business doesn’t have in-house.
- Custom software is quoted separately, because it depends entirely on what the work is replacing.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://addsaltandco.com
