From promising designer to superstar ad creative

Once, I told an aspiring art-director called Emilia Bergmans that I didn't think I could work with her as a team. I didn't realize yet how entangled our lives would become over the next years. Emilia and I were both former board members of the Young Dogs. One night we met up at her house and she showed me her portfolio. It was full of design stuff. Very good work, but I couldn't figure out her concept skills. Besides, I was already talking to a few very good art-directors. So I told her very honestly that I couldn't team up with her based on the work she'd made so far. If you really want to get a career as an art-director, I figured, you'd invest time in making a book stuffed with advertising. And that's exactly what Emilia did: she invested time; two years to be precise. Because one quarter after I went to the Miami Ad School, Emilia followed. We even lived together in one apartment. And when the internships started, we would continue meeting each other. We both did our quarter away in Stockholm, where she worked with Peruvian copywriter Roberto Danino. They proved to be a killer team. Andres Maldonado and I were doing pretty well as a team, but when we saw the quantity and quality of Emilia and Roberto's ideas after they'd been brainstorming, we were shaking in our boots. This was major competition for us, which was good, because it motivated us to make even better work. During a two weeks' internship at Saatchi Stockholm, Emilia and Roberto made a promotion campaign for Doctors Without Borders, which got them their first Cannes Lion a year later. Aside from that, Emilia had already won a huge amount of student awards. After Stockholm I kind of lost track of Emilia. Before she graduated, she started working at Wieden & Kennedy Bejing and after graduation she continued working for them in both China and India. Do I feel stupid now for saying "no" to an art-director who would become so successful? Maybe a little bit. But one thing is for sure: the way we motivated, inspired and helped each other during the Miami Ad School brought us more success than we could ever have achieved as a team in Holland.