Wiseward Over the Years: See the Bigger Picture

It all started with one man, founder and director, Damian Breen. Damian comes from a polyglot family of linguistic excellence, with a father who studied Chinese and Vietnamese at SOAS University of London and a brother who took Japanese at Cambridge. But before getting into the language learning business, Damian was interested in the aviation industry and spent many years working for British Airways. A wonderful opportunity, this gave Damian the freedom to live and work in amazing countries like Sierra Leone and Morocco and Zambia. As someone who had spent the majority of his life in England, this was a major culture shock for Damian and couldn’t have been a better lesson in human nature and cultural understanding. Being such a socio-economically different landscape, it was eye-opening to see how people lived in these extreme conditions and he gained immense tolerance and respect for such cultures. Accepting people as they are, leading with kindness and being united by our differences was what Damian took away from his experience. From this, he gained a passion for facilitating others to have access to the same cultural awakening.

Back in 2012, Damian set to realise this dream and the beta version of Wiseward was released to the world – very similar to the website you know today, but on a much larger scale. An over-enthusiasm for the massive task of international language teaching meant that Wiseward was trying to be all things to all people. Who wouldn’t want to try and gift as many people with the access to language schools as possible? However, this meant that Wiseward was competing with much larger global agencies who had been in the business for longer and were better known as a brand. The first version of Wiseward lasted for about 7 years before it had to go into redesign.

This wasn’t a sad occasion; in fact, it was a great learning curve for Wiseward in testing the market and scouting out the competition. This trail run allowed us to reconsider what we want our selling point as a company to be and what our main values are, ensuring that customers know what they’re getting and why to choose us over other language agencies. What we believe defines us as a company, is the importance of cultural immersion and lifestyle courses over prioritising general language learning packages. Many agencies foreground their general immersion courses because there’s such a large audience for them, but we wanted to think outside of the box. We believe that language learning is more than simple vocab and grammar – it is learning about other cultures, other customs and values and allowing this to give you a better understanding of the world.

As a result, Wiseward went back to the drawing board for about 12 months over Covid to work in partnership with Club Studio in order to streamline our webpage and rebrand Wiseward. In its pervious iteration, trying to provide so much, the website wasn’t easy to navigate and people often got lost. When providing language teaching, you’re dealing with people of different skill levels who all want to learn different languages and who all might be looking at different foreign schools. Therefore, we needed our website to be efficient and streamlined so that customers were confident in choosing Wiseward – Scott Wakefield from Club Studio was a massive help with this. We put our best foot forward with our lifestyle courses and we relaunched Wiseward at the end of 2023.

What made it different this time was that we are now working with a brilliant organisation known as the IALC (International Association of Language Centres) who align perfectly with out company values. IALC is essentially an elite club that only lets certain high-standard schools become members, in particular schools that are independent of a large chain or corporate group. These kinds of schools are run by incredibly passionate and dedicated staff who can provide teaching on a much more intimate level because they are smaller scale and consequently take in less students. Because of this, we wanted most of our schools to be IALC accredited so that we know we’re sending our language learners to high-quality, trustworthy and, most importantly, enthusiastic schools.

Over its first few months, Wiseward acquired brilliant social media marketing partners, Dalia Katie and Ellen, who keep all of Wiseward’s social media platforms up-to-date and buzzing with information. Dalia has been expertly making our long-form videos to go on our YouTube, Katie likes writing long articles for the Facebook and blog, and Ellen is a genius at making visually stunning videos for our Instagram and TikTok. Hopefully one of these very passionate managers and their social media posts have been the reason why you booked your next trip with Wiseward!

And that’s how Wiseward came from being one person to a whole team. While we are still very much in the small business stage, we are still so proud of the progress we have made over the years and are very excited for where the journey might take us. As long as we have connected people and inspired better global citizens, we have accomplished our mission.

Damian Breen: ‘Because I think one way and you think another way, those things need to be celebrated. To me, that’s really really important. Learning and understanding how people in places like Zambia, where I lived, which is an amazing country, but very very poor and where a large percentage of the population have almost nothing, was inspiring. Even more amazing is seeing how happy people can be and seeing how free-spirited and kind they are. It costs nothing to be kind. You know what? It helps us all become better global citizens, evermore important in this turbulent world'