"When Graeme told us about this great new idea for 'tailoring' solutions to fit business needs, we immediately researched bespoke tailoring," said Richard Philips, ECD at 34. "Pushing aside all the obvious ideas, we discovered that bespoke tailors, wanting to leave their master tailor and spread their wings beyond Savile Row, would travel, village to village, meeting the tailoring needs of clients who couldn't afford the high prices of Savile Row and wanted the convenience of quality goods and services on their doorstep. During their travels, these tailors would often be exposed to new ideas and practical designs which they incorporated into their work. The end result was a quality tailor-made garment, delivered quickly and conveniently. This practice was coined as 'Whipping the Cat'."
"We knew we'd found the perfect analogy, brimming with rich creative material, and luckily Graeme recognised the need to really push the boundaries if this new company was genuinely going to trailblaze a brave new space in the law sector."
"Every business requires high-quality legal advice from time to time, but unless you have an open-ended legal budget - which few businesses do - the sound of a traditional law firm's fee clock notching up billable hours can be daunting," says Whipping the Cat founder and CEO, Graeme Wilson.
"We needed to find a smart agency partner that was not part of the traditional SA brandscape and could really think out of the box if we were going to do something completely different in this space. And when we finally met up with 34 we knew it was a perfect match. They challenged me and pushed me hard and held me accountable to the brave approach I had tasked them with. 34's solution terrified me at first, but after living with the work and the reasons why for some time now, I love this infant brand and the jolt it's going to give the legal sector that has changed little in centuries."
Whipping the Cat differentiates itself from the traditional law industry's hourly billing model by quoting for its services upfront and billing on a fixed fee basis. This enables clients to budget for their annual legal spend - a first for the South African commercial law sector, where legal advisory outsourcing and a fixed-fee business model are virtually unheard of.
