Why the name “Shtudio”?

We often get asked where the name “Shtudio” came from. Is it just your accent? Yeah, in a way many of us do have accents, saying studio may in fact sound a little more like shtudio. Not something we can (or want) to explain quickly each time, we decided to write up a little story about it, whether you care or not 🙂

As some of you may remember, Shtudio was not always called Shtudio. It started off with “Shh… something”. Yep, that was the actual name. Shh… something.

Why Shh? Because the two original founders had their names starting with letters “Sh”. And hey, studio shtudio, that’s a pretty suitable name for two young shmucks that are trying to make something of themselves. The year was 2008 and “Shh… something” was publishing short stories and spreading them around the world (we literally travelled the world, leaving copies of the short stories in random places).

Paris, France. Left the book in a random bicycle parked near the Eiffel tower.

Venice, Italy. Left the book in a random yard for someone to sit down and have a pleasant read.

The stories and drawings in them were unique (and somewhat rated 18+) and so we wanted to keep things quiet for a while, thus the name “shh…”, as in — no noise. And let’s not forget to mention, both founders were a bit of shlimazels when it came to trying to get anything done together. The second part of the name, “something”, was there because we actually did not know what to call it and what was going to be its’ future.

Meanwhile, we were designing logos, websites and making films. People were coming back to us for more and the word about our “studio” began to spread. Plus we were working from an art studio. It then only made sense to rename ourselves to “Shh… studio”. More on this in Shtudio V1 post.

We also designed our first website that was both mobile friendly and perfect for scrolling on things such as phones and tablets. One issue is that we were a little ahead of our time, as there was no such thing as smartphones or responsive design at the time. We also had something that has become a trend today — a one-page website. There was no menu, no pages to navigate through. Everything was on that one page — the info about the company, contact details and our portfolio. More on that is also in Shtudio V1 post.

One of the unofficial mottos of Shtudio is: “uncomplicate things”. So, eventually “Shh… studio” was simplified into what we see today — Shtudio.

Some may associate this name with the word “shit”. Correct, there is a lot of shit we aren’t good at. For example, running:

We are shit at sailing, shit at gardening and shit at accounting. But we are great at design! And at the end of the day, that’s really what matters.

Now let’s get back to About Us.