Why We Built OCCO: Complexity, Burnout, and Evidence-Based Design

We met on a Sunday, on Bumble. Then Tuesday. Then Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Seven years on, we run a company together, and the thing that got us here started with neither of us able to admit we weren't coping.

Before OCCO, we were both working in high-output creative roles in London — the kind of projects millions of people would eventually see, on tight deadlines, with a finish line that kept moving. Clare in experiential design, building physical spaces and brand experiences that had to work first time, in front of a live audience, with no second take. Ollie in West End theatre, where the show goes up whether you're ready or not and "good enough" isn't a phrase anyone uses.

We burnt out around the same time. Neither of us clocked it in the other — we were too deep in our own version of it to see it clearly in someone else. The pace wasn't a season we could push through. It was constant, and projects didn't finish so much as get released, reluctantly, before the next one started. That's a specific kind of exhaustion: not tired from one hard week, but worn down by a job that structurally never lets you call something done.

What we did next is probably the most on-brand thing about us. We're problem solvers by trade. So in the middle of the burnt-out phase, we turned that instinct on ourselves.

That meant proper professional support — therapy, counselling, coaching — not a weekend off and a bath. Through that process we kept encountering tools and techniques that actually moved the needle: specific exercises for getting a chaotic head onto paper, ways of separating what mattered today from what only felt urgent, structures for planning that didn't rely on willpower we didn't have. Individually, none of them were revolutionary. Together, applied consistently, they were the difference between functioning and not.

We started printing them off. A4, kept in a stack on the side, grabbed when we needed them. And that's where the first version of OCCO actually lived — not in a business plan, but in a pile of paper we kept because loose printouts genuinely helped and we didn't want to lose them.

The problem was obvious fast: printed A4 sheets are not a system. They curl, they go missing, you can't carry them anywhere that matters, and there's nothing about them that makes you want to pick them up on the day you least want to. If the tool itself feels like admin, you stop using it exactly when you need it most.

That's the point where this stopped being personal maintenance and started being a product question. Friends who saw the sheets on the side started asking for their own copies. We gave them out. They came back saying the same tools that had helped us were helping them — which told us two things: the underlying techniques weren't just useful to two burnt-out creatives, and the format was the weak link, not the method.

This is where the theatre and experiential design background stopped being incidental and became the actual design brief. In theatre, you don't get to say "it mostly works" — an audience either has the experience or it breaks. In experiential design, the physical object and the physical space carry the meaning; if the material feels cheap, the whole experience reads as cheap, no matter how good the idea underneath it is.

We brought that standard to something that had, until then, been living as scrap paper. If a tool is going to hold someone's worst Tuesday, it has to be well made enough that picking it up doesn't feel like one more chore. That's not decoration. It's the same principle that makes a stage set convincing or an installation land — the craft is load-bearing, not optional.

So the worksheets became products, built properly: the same evidence-based structures we'd been using, resolved into something designed with the same rigour we'd have applied to a client brief, because that's what we know how to do.

We use OCCO's own products less than we used to — which is, honestly, the outcome we were hoping for. But burnout isn't a phase you graduate from permanently. It comes back, in smaller doses, when work gets loud again. And when it does — when everything's in your head at once and none of it feels like it's moving — having something physical that's specifically built to get it out and make it feel manageable again is still the thing that works.

That's the whole basis for OCCO: not a wellness aesthetic, but tools built by two people who needed them first, made to a standard that respects what they're actually for.

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