PPTmatters: Conversation with Luise Pelle

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  Luise Pelle is a template and presentation designer. She is a partner in PPTmatters, a Danish agency focusing entirely on presentations and PowerPoint. Before starting the business, Luise worked as a presentation designer at McKinsey & Company for 5 years. In her spare time, she enjoys being outdoors in the company of her husband and their three hunting dogs.

Geetesh: Luise, can you introduce PPTmatters and your team? Also, tell us more about what you do?

Luise: PPTmatters is a Danish agency specializing in presentations. We work with large and medium-sized businesses to refine their branding and communication in PowerPoint.

In the corporate world, each presentation and report plays a crucial role in decision-making processes. Therefore, clear communication with stakeholders is paramount – as are the tools to produce professional presentations that are on-brand.

We assist department heads in empowering their teams to engage audiences effectively, convey messages clearly, and facilitate impactful decision-making through workshops on presentation structure and storylining.

For marketing and communication departments, we serve as a liaison between the company’s brand manual and PowerPoint’s capabilities. We design templates that are universally applicable across departments and provide time-saving tools that inspire and help employees create visually clear and appealing slides.

Our services also include optimization of individual presentations and hands-on PowerPoint training with a focus on efficiency, visual appeal, and adherence to brand guidelines.

Geetesh: Can you showcase some of your work, and tell us about your clients? Also, how can a prospective client connect with you?

Luise: Sure thing – the video here is an example from a template and toolbox we developed for a Danish B2B biosolutions company. While our primary focus was to infuse the company’s branding into the template and set it on autopilot for the users, a secondary focus was to create pre-formatted slides that would work for a variety of content across different business units. The video shows a few examples of those slides.

I started PPTmatters, or Online Graphics at the time, back in 2001. I had worked for 5 years as a presentation designer with McKinsey & Company and had just started a new job with another consulting firm, Qvartz (now Bain). As some of the consultants in my network transitioned to C-level jobs in other companies, they would hire me to improve the look and feel of their new organization’s presentations and to train their teams and employees in PowerPoint.

At Qvartz, we created reports and presentations in the client’s PowerPoint templates, and it was a huge productivity blocker when there was something wrong with those templates. So, we started each project by building our own version of the client’s template. It included every little bit of branding from the original template, so from a visual perspective, you couldn’t tell the difference – but under the hood, PowerPoint’s functionality was intact, and the template was optimized for our needs.

During that time, template building became a much-loved part of my work. Especially the release of PowerPoint 2007 with its Ribbon and new capabilities – and glitches – created an opportunity to build new skills and refine my expertise.

In 2010, I left my job at Qvartz, and five years later, in 2015, my colleague and friend Thomas Eckhausen joined PPTmatters. With a shared background at McKinsey & Company, Thomas brought valuable experience from his role as Head of Presentation Services at Danske Bank (Denmark’s largest bank) where he built and managed a PowerPoint production team in India and conducted training on presentation structure and storylining for all of the bank’s employees.

From our combined experience collaborating with large organizations, we have a unique insight into their requirements and processes. This enables us to assist clients in organizing their PowerPoint setup to align with best practices and reinforce their brand identity.

In summary, we offer our clients a 360-degree presentation service tailored to their business needs.