Demo Studio turns five this month

In May 2020, during the first lockdown of the pandemic, we incorporated. It was a strange time to start a studio. We did it anyway, on the theory that companies that had been deferring their brand investments for years would eventually start spending again — and that, when they did, there would be demand for a studio that worked differently than the established players.

The theory was approximately right, though the timing was off by about fourteen months.

The five-year version

Sixty-plus clients across twelve countries. Brand sprints, content engines, web projects, retainers. Work we're proud of and a few projects we'd rather not revisit.

The team is six people now. That's deliberately small. We've had opportunities to grow faster and have declined them. A studio of six, where everyone knows what everyone else is working on and the quality is visible across every engagement, is a better version of this business than a studio of twenty where the work varies by which team you get.

What surprised us

The biggest surprise: how much of the work is diagnostic, not executional. Clients come to us with a brief. The brief is usually a symptom. The actual problem is usually upstream — a positioning question, a target customer disagreement, an internal stakeholder misalignment that will undermine any executional work until it's addressed.

Learning to slow down and surface that problem — rather than taking the brief at face value and producing something technically excellent that doesn't solve the right thing — took us about eighteen months to get consistently good at.

What we'd do differently

Start the handoff documentation earlier. On every engagement, there's a moment where we hand over the work to the client's team. How prepared that team is determines how long the work keeps performing. We now start the handoff documentation in week two, not week five.

What comes next

We're building a small research practice — original work on brand strategy for founders, published quarterly. More on that soon.

Thank you for five years of interesting problems.