After almost 14 years, the name Balkan Brothers is retired. I wanted to say something honest about what it was.
Late 2012. A room on the side of our house in Krk that we called an office. Two computers, around $30 between my brother Matej and me, a family startup that had just failed. One winter it got cold enough that I typed with gloves on, fingers cut out so I could reach the keys. We had no design education, no prospects, no real plan. Matej’s idea was simple: we’d learned web design building the startup, so we’d put it on 99designs. If it didn’t work, we’d get normal jobs and move on.
A month in, we won our first contest. $940. A full month’s salary in Croatia at the time. We kept going.
Marino came in shortly after, driving us around in his beat-up Volkswagen Polo, a different color panel on every side. We’d grab cheap lunch from the Konzum cafeteria and work until there was nothing left. Then do it again the next day.
In late 2013 we got a Dribbble invite. That changed everything. The world could see the work, and clients we never could have reached from a Croatian island started finding us. We built all of it without leaving. Krk is home, and if you’ve never lived somewhere like it, that’s hard to explain. A coastal town of a few thousand people, quiet, simple, and sunny. Working for enterprise clients in the US while living that kind of life, I never got tired of that contradiction.
Two people became fifty. We added departments, built structure, hired people we believed in. Some of that went right the first time. A lot of it didn’t. We made the kind of mistakes that only make sense in retrospect, and a few that still don’t. Post-covid hit hard. Budgets froze, the market contracted, AI started reshaping what clients expected almost overnight. Matej, Marino, and I took minimal wages for two years and burned through everything we’d saved to hold it together. The company shrank. Some good people left. Then it started growing back, built on everything the hard years taught us.
The name carried real weight in the design community, especially across the Balkans. Everyone knew Balkan Brothers. Almost nobody knew who was actually behind it. There was something we liked about that.
But a name that once felt like an identity started to feel like a ceiling. We’d outgrown it. So we changed it.
What I want to say about BB, the thing that matters most: it was a small company that started from nothing, built by people who knew nothing, in a place nobody was paying attention to. It never tried to fit the standard agency mould. It went its own way, every time, often against better judgment. Built by people who cared more than was probably sensible and worked harder than was healthy.
And it meant something. To the design community, to the people who worked here, to the clients who trusted us.
I’m proud of what it was.
To Matej and Marino: for jumping without knowing where we’d land, and for still being here.
To Vicente, Adrian, and Katarina: for carrying this into the next chapter.
To everyone who worked here, every client who came and went, and the ones still with us: thank you. For the great moments and the genuinely bad ones. For the people who gave everything they had, and the ones who taught us what we didn’t want to be. It wasn’t clean. None of it was. I wouldn’t give any of it back.
BB had a good run. Better than anyone expected from two brothers in a cold room on a small island.
Onwards.
