William Sawalich
brent feldman
Title: CEO * Co-Founder
Industry: Digital Marketing/Web Design & Development
Website: www.MatchboxDesignGroup.com
What is your mission?
To make the web better — more accessible, better looking and easier to use. I’ve spent most of my life building things for the web, and I still believe there’s a tremendous amount we can do to make digital experiences work better for everyone.
What led you to your industry?
It started really young. I was making logos for my band in Photoshop when I was about 12, playing around with Visual Basic not long after that and building sites on GeoCities around 14. At 16, I built the website for my motorsports parts business.
When I went to Webster, I studied advertising and marketing, minored in business management and earned a certificate in web design and development. That combination — creative, marketing, business and technology — is essentially what I still do today. At the time I didn’t realize how valuable or relatively unusual that combination would become.
What was the smartest thing your company did in the past year?
Expanding our use of AI. It’s given us superpowers — not in the sense that it replaces what our people do, but that it dramatically expands what we’re capable of doing. It’s changed how we research, solve problems, create, collaborate and share knowledge across the company.
The most exciting part has probably been the collective enthusiasm around it. Instead of AI being something happening to our industry, our team is excited about figuring out what we can do with it.
How do you try to differentiate your business from others in your industry?
We try to be genuinely multidisciplinary. Matchbox sits at the intersection of strategy, design, technology and marketing, and we’ve intentionally built a team that can move across those disciplines rather than staying in narrow lanes.
I think my own background reflects that. I studied advertising and marketing, business management and web development, and I’ve always been equally interested in why something works, how it looks and how it’s actually built.
We also try not to become complacent. After 20 years, I’m proud that we’re still curious enough to experiment with things like AI and AIO rather than protecting the way we’ve always done things. Experience should make you better at adapting, not better at resisting change.
What’s the hottest trend in your industry, and are you going to jump on board?
AIO — optimizing for how brands are discovered and represented in AI-driven search. We’ve been investing heavily in it, including on our own behalf, and the results have been pretty remarkable. Matchbox surfaces extremely well in AI results for the areas where we want to be known.
That’s particularly valuable because when we’re talking with a prospective client about AIO, we don’t just have to tell them it works. We can show them our own results as proof of the value.
What best advice would you share with new entrepreneurs?
Be patient. It’s incredibly easy as an entrepreneur to put enormous pressure on yourself for no real reason. Everything feels urgent, and it’s easy to look at where someone else is and think you should already be there.
Building something worthwhile takes time. Give yourself permission to let it take time.
What’s your favorite place in St. Louis?
The St. Louis Art Museum. It’s one of those places that reminds me how much St. Louis has to offer. I can go back over and over, find something I haven’t really noticed before, and leave feeling creatively recharged.