At Athena Parthenos, just like at all other companies, we have an email footer with all our contact information. At the very beginning—to do something cute—we decided to have a picture of our employees next to the website address and phone number. We thought it was a great way to show our customers the people working in the office. After a while, we switched to a new concept. Even though we liked the idea of constantly showing who we are, we wanted something different and a bit more detailed, so we began to upload a different image taken from the internet every day. We developed this idea by putting together different points of view and the company’s beliefs.
First of all, we talked it out together and agreed that emails are very effective but emotionless. Especially when used for work, emails aren’t really original. As a matter of fact, we have been taught in school to maintain a business structure when writing an email. This might be very effective in synthesizing your content and respectfully getting to the point, but it doesn’t differentiate our emails from all the rest that you receive. So we decided to find a way to stand out from everyone else who communicates through emails, and we decided to do it by enhancing a single detail.
The thing about details is that most people overlook them and label them as irrelevant compared to the whole. On the contrary—we love details, and we take pride in how much we obsess over them. To cite a famous quote by Michelangelo on the statue of David, “Details are what differentiate a refined piece of art from an ordinary artistic work.” Similarly, for us, details are what differentiate a well-done translation—so well done you couldn’t tell it was a translation in the first place—from all other translations.
Starting from the idea that emails need to have more character and that details are important to us, what used to be a single interpretation of the value of each employee of Athena later became a strong belief of the company—it’s not just a matter of performing an action with the adequate technique, it is also important to make sure it’s pleasant for the audience.
Considering that we make money by communicating “stuff” to all kinds of people, you can surely understand why it is important for us to make sure that words are not only comprehensible but beautiful too. Taking our philosophy and mission all the way, we decided not to limit our love for details, beauty, and technique to just our product, but to expand it to our entire company image. Hence, we decided to change images every day. By altering a single detail, we not only make sure to differentiate ourselves from the rest of the email senders in the world, but we also try to keep you entertained with a view of Antarctica from space, or with a fluorescent blue crab called a coconut crab.
So yeah, we take details seriously all the way, from taking care of the details in your translations to the images in our emails.
Noemi Clark, CEO of Athena Parthenos srl.