Eight years, forty studios. What we learned.

Enfold Studio is eight years old this quarter. The four of us came from forty studio engagements between us before we started the company. Some were our own studios. Most were as senior designers, art directors, and creative directors at larger places. Here is what we took away that shaped the studio we built.

The agencies were too big

Three of us came from agencies between fifty and two hundred people. The work was often excellent. The conditions for making it were never excellent. By the time a junior designer’s idea reached the client, it had passed through four senior reviews, two account managers, and a creative director’s preference. It was no longer the junior’s idea.

The studios we worked at before that — three to ten people each — produced more direct work. The principal who pitched it made it. The author of the idea defended the idea. There was no committee.

The freelancers were too lonely

One of us spent four years freelancing between studio jobs. The work was the most personal of any period in their career. It was also the most uneven. Every project relied on the freelancer’s mood that week. There was no second person to push back. The work was good when it was good and lifeless when it wasn’t.

A studio with three to seven creatives is the structure that gets the directness of the freelancer with the quality control of the agency. That is what we tried to build.

The thing none of us learned in advance

How much of running a studio is not design. The first two years were a slow lesson in contracts, scope language, payment terms, project management, hiring, performance review, financial planning. The four of us were excellent designers. We were terrible business owners. We bought books, took classes, hired a fractional COO, made expensive mistakes, and slowly got better.

The one piece of advice we wish someone had given us before we started: design your studio operations as carefully as you design your client work. The clarity you bring to brand systems is the same clarity that will keep your studio alive in year five.