Trung Nguyen

So nice to meet you! First off, what’s your name? Tell our readers a bit about yourself—where you’re from originally and where you live now.

My name is Trung Nguyen. I’m from Houston and still based here today.

I’m the founder and creative director of Desque, a design studio focused on web design and development, branding, UI/UX, SEO, and GEO.

My path here was pretty unconventional. I grew up around my family’s restaurant, got into design in high school, started designing flyers in college, became a club promoter, and later opened three hookah lounges in my twenties. Eventually all of those experiences in design, marketing, operations, and business came together into what became Desque.

Outside of work, I’ve spent most of my life involved in martial arts, I train pretty regularly, and I’m generally the type of person who gets interested in something and then goes way too deep trying to understand it.

Tell us one thing you love about where you live now.

Houston has an interesting mix of cultures, industries, people, and food that I don’t think gets enough credit.

You can work with an oil and gas company in the morning, a restaurant in the afternoon, and a completely different type of business the next day. As someone who gets bored doing the same thing over and over, I like that.

There are also a ridiculous number of good small businesses here, which makes Houston a great city to build a company like Desque.

Tell us a little more about what your company does and how it started. How does it help your customers?

Desque is a Houston-based design studio. We primarily work in web design and development, branding, UI/UX, SEO, and GEO.

The easiest way I describe what we do is that we help good businesses look as good as they actually are.

A lot of our clients already have good companies. They have good people, years of experience, and a strong product or service, but their website or brand hasn’t kept up with the company they’ve become.

Desque really grew out of everything I had done before it. I had been designing since high school and college, but I had also spent years promoting events and operating my own businesses. So I had seen branding and marketing from both sides.

I understood the design side, but I also understood what it felt like to be the owner spending the money and wondering whether any of this was actually going to help the business.

That still shapes how we work today. We care a lot about the details and how something looks, but something being pretty isn’t enough. There has to be a reason behind it.

If someone wants to start a business, what advice would you give them?

Learn the skills around the thing you’re good at, especially sales and marketing.

A lot of people start businesses because they’re really good at something. They’re a great designer, chef, photographer, mechanic, whatever. Then they find out that being good at the thing and being good at running a business are completely different skill sets.

You have to know how to sell what you do, but you also need to understand how people are going to find you in the first place. That means learning some marketing, positioning, messaging, customer acquisition, and how to explain why someone should choose you instead of the other ten companies that do something similar.

Then there’s everything behind that: pricing, cash flow, operations, management, follow-up, customer service, and eventually hiring and delegation.

You don’t have to become an expert at every one of those things. You can hire people who are much better than you at them. But I do think you need to understand them well enough to know what good looks like and whether something is actually working.

The quality of your product or service matters, but being talented doesn’t automatically create a business around you. If nobody knows you exist, you can’t sell. If you can’t sell, there isn’t much of a business.

What is one piece of feedback from a happy customer or client that you won't forget?

One that stuck with me came from Alex Bui at Sapa & Co.

When talking about working with us on their brand, he described our approach as giving them a more “realistic and systematic way” to build and design the brand.

I liked that because it wasn’t just, “the logo looks great.”

That’s what I want our work to feel like. Yes, it should look good, but the client should also feel like there was thought behind it and that we helped them make better decisions instead of just handing them something pretty.

Where do you see your company in the future?

I don’t want Desque to become a giant agency just for the sake of becoming a giant agency.

I’d rather build a very strong boutique studio with a great reputation, a highly capable team, and a relatively small group of clients where we can do meaningful work.

Growth matters, but I’m much more interested in growing our capabilities, reputation, systems, and quality than simply adding headcount.

The long-term goal is for Desque to be a company that doesn’t require me to touch every single thing for it to maintain the same standard. I still want to be involved because I enjoy the work. I just want that involvement to be a choice rather than a requirement.

What is the biggest misconception about your industry?

That design is mostly about making things look good.

Making something attractive is part of the job, but that’s the obvious part.

Good design has to understand what the business is trying to accomplish, who the customer is, what information matters, what action you want someone to take, and what perception you’re trying to create.

People will sometimes debate design like it’s purely subjective: “I like blue, you like red.”

That misses the point.

I might personally love something and still recommend against it because the design isn’t for me. It has a job to do.

What has been one of your biggest struggles building your business, and how did you deal with it?

Sales.

For a long time, I was much more comfortable solving a problem than selling someone on why they should hire me to solve it.

I think a lot of people in creative industries fall into that trap. You assume good work will speak for itself. Sometimes it does. Usually it needs some help.

I eventually had to stop treating sales like some personality trait that you either have or you don’t and start treating it like another skill.

That meant getting better at discovery calls, asking better questions, explaining our value in normal language, following up, qualifying opportunities, talking about money, and being okay when the answer is no.

I’m still improving at it. I just don’t avoid it anymore.

Who was your favorite music artist and athlete growing up?

I don’t know if I ever had one favorite music artist. I was really into old-school techno and trance from the early 2000s. DJ Sammy’s “Heaven,” Darude, Alice Deejay, that whole era still hits for me.

On the athlete side, I’ve never really followed traditional sports closely. Being a martial artist myself, the people I looked up to were guys like Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Michael Jai White, and Tony Jaa.

I don’t know if everyone would put them in the traditional “athlete” category, but those were the people I watched. The combination of martial arts ability, athleticism, movement, discipline, and what they were capable of physically was much more interesting to me than following a particular sports team.

Any shoutouts you want to make?

Definitely my team and the people who have helped build Desque with me.

Fredy, Kevin, and Angelica have all played important roles in helping us grow. Joseph at Valiant Haus and Cara at Motion Giraffx have also been longtime collaborators and people I trust when projects need expertise outside of what we handle internally.

And obviously our clients. A creative company doesn't really get to build a portfolio or reputation without someone trusting you with their business first. A lot of the opportunities we've gotten have come through relationships, referrals, and people willing to put our name in a room when we weren't there.

Where can our readers learn more about you and your company?

The best place is thedesque.com, where you can see more about Desque, our work, and the way we approach design.

You can also find us on Instagram at @thedesque or my personal Instagram at @trungnguyening.