Hello, reader!
Have you had a chance to visit our Facebook page yet? Not yet? You don't know what you're missing! Every Wednesday we publish a new post about the adventures and history of SKILL & CHILL. One day, it might even become a Netflix series 😃
Visit us on Facebook → SKILL & CHILL. From now on you can keep up with S&C posts. In the meantime, we've prepared a recap of several recent episodes from our “History of SKILL & CHILL” series. Enjoy!
It all started about ten years ago with a chance meeting between Artur Pęcak and Łukasz Andrykowski. Łukasz joined a company as a Project Manager, while Artur led the implementation team and supported software development across project groups. At first they did not have many opportunities to work closely together. Artur was in constant demand because the success of programming and implementation work depended heavily on him, while Łukasz was still a newcomer who could count on support mainly in critical situations. Over time, their cooperation deepened and expanded into Kofax applications. Artur introduced Łukasz to ECM projects — scanning and capturing data from documents — which they later delivered together. Some time later Artur changed jobs, joined a new company and soon invited Łukasz to join his new team as a Project Manager.
Alongside their commercial work, the market increasingly asked them to support Kofax projects. Eventually they began to wonder whether it was worth doing this on a larger scale 💡
The idea of starting a company emerged in 2013. Their professional and rational approach was to first develop a complete concept and strategy for the business they wanted to build. Six months later they put the plan into action and officially launched SKILL & CHILL. Before that happened, however, they went through the adventure of choosing the right name for an IT company. It took a whole month to make the final decision.
Why did it take so long? The company name had to meet a lot of expectations: it needed to be catchy, memorable and create the right associations for future clients. The concept was to combine commitment, motivation and skills with something that communicates calm, fun and relaxation.
Eventually Łukasz came up with the idea 📛 of calling the company SKILL & CHILL — combining skill with chill.
Once the name had been selected, it was time to register the company with the relevant authorities and court. Before doing that, Artur and Łukasz still had to decide who would become president of the company: Artur, with more experience, or Łukasz, who was more mobile? 🤷♂️
Łukasz had previously owned a company and still had one thing left from it: a company stamp. That stamp ultimately tipped the balance. They chose Łukasz, although the formalities did not go as planned and the president's details were not immediately entered in the National Court Register. For a while the company had no officially registered president and Artur was the only board member. Clients, friends and potential investors kept asking the same question: “Wait — you don't have a president?” 😲
Eventually the situation was resolved, the records were completed and Łukasz officially became President of SKILL & CHILL.
With that settled, the next step was to create a distinctive visual identity and start promoting the S&C brand.
There was one challenge: Łukasz and Artur had completely different tastes in color, and rather than argue about the palette, logo and website, they decided to organize a competition for the best SKILL & CHILL logo 🎯
The competition was announced on the GRAFFIKA forum and received a surprisingly large number of proposals.
No specific logo color had been required. The winning designer independently proposed mint as a breath of freshness 🌊
As you know, mint has stayed with us ever since and remains a key part of S&C's website and social-media identity.
With the name and signature color chosen, Artur and Łukasz faced the next challenge: designing the website.
They already had a wide range of skills and many completed IT projects behind them. The challenge was how to communicate online that S&C had a strong approach to building custom systems — solutions tailored precisely to the client's needs while maintaining efficient delivery and high quality.
They did pretty well! The website launched, and some elements of its visual design even survived into the current version.
What next? Promotion among potential clients 👌
Artur and Łukasz started with newsletters. And here's the surprise: automation has been part of SKILL & CHILL from the very beginning! 😱 They prepared the newsletters themselves, but naturally they also came up with a way to automate sending them. That is how the first version of a SKILL & CHILL robot was born 🤖
Promotion mattered because Artur and Łukasz had always dreamed of interesting, large-scale projects. They wanted to work with the biggest corporate players in Poland, where projects are technologically advanced and complex.
SKILL & CHILL took part in tender after tender. They did not give up and kept believing they could win. Along the way came new business contacts, interesting conversations and plenty of motivation.
During one conversation, the CEO of a major pharmaceutical company said he had not seen such a well-made website in a long time. He also explained that entering their organization as an IT supplier would be extremely difficult because they worked almost exclusively with large corporations. Artur and Łukasz knew the beginning would not be easy, but the fact that people appreciated what they were doing gave them extra motivation 💪
Today SKILL & CHILL has built a strong reputation through commitment and the heart we put into our projects 🎉 Clients value the cooperation, gain the “chill” they expect, and recommend us to other companies.
But it was not always that way 😱
In the beginning, Artur and Łukasz had to find contacts and clients themselves in order to build the reputation that now brings us new adventures and project challenges.
One of SKILL & CHILL's early successes was simply getting large companies with thousands of employees to talk to a very young business.
Ceramika Paradyż is a good example. Its tender was one of the first Artur and Łukasz entered. The process lasted an incredibly long time, and they learned that they had won only after a year and a half 😱
You may wonder: why did Ceramika Paradyż choose SKILL & CHILL? 🤔
They did not judge suppliers by headcount or how long the company had existed. They wanted to work with people who had deep knowledge and who would be fully committed to the project. They were looking for high quality and easy, direct communication 💪
Motivation and enthusiasm are never in short supply at SKILL & CHILL — and that is exactly why we won the Ceramika Paradyż contract.
That was how Łukasz and Artur started their first major project. It was a huge moment for them! 🎉
The cooperation with Ceramika Paradyż looked promising from the start because both sides were highly engaged. The project involved building several applications using Kofax solutions.
Ceramika Paradyż needed data from its Kofax system to be saved in a very specific way in its electronic archive.
They delivered the required solution.
What's more, they helped save Ceramika's cooperation with one of its key clients. That was a very good sign for the relationship ✌️
And we were right: Ceramika Paradyż still works with us today, and we are sure there are many more IT solutions we will create together 😃
This is only the beginning of the SKILL & CHILL story. Follow us on Facebook to keep up with all the episodes → SKILL & CHILL
