Against the studio.

§I A word we retired.

For the first decade of our existence, we described ourselves as a studio. It was accurate to the work we were doing and congruent with how the category talked about firms at our size. Between 2022 and 2024 we quietly stopped. We now describe ourselves as a firm. This essay is the argument for the change, and an invitation to the rest of the category to make the same move.

The word studio did two things we no longer wanted. It compressed our scope to the visual and tactile layer of brand work, which the consumer category then priced as a craft deliverable rather than as the strategic work it increasingly was. And it invited a particular client-side posture: that we were an aesthetic supplier, slotted into a procurement process, scored against similar suppliers, awarded on the basis of portfolio fit. We were not fighting the posture effectively from within a word that reinforced it.

§II What firm does.

The word firm carries an institutional weight that studio does not. It implies that there is a body of practice, a set of standing commitments, an operating cadence, a roster of partners with defined responsibilities, and a publication. It invites the client-side posture that the category is actually now giving us: strategic engagement, priced as such, scoped as such, terminated as such. The word does operational work the brand could not do in the background.

There is a cost to the change. Some corners of the design press treat us now as having grown out of something. Some founders assume we have become formal in a way that the creative work will not support. The second concern is addressable; the first is fine. We are not here to be press-darlings of a particular vintage. We are here to operate at the scale the brand work now justifies.

§III The category naming problem.

There is a larger problem the category has not solved: it does not have a good word for firms like ours. The word agency is taken by the advertising industry and carries a set of assumptions that do not describe us. The word consultancy is taken by the management consulting industry and carries a different set of assumptions that do not describe us. The word studio is too small. The word practice is borrowed from law and medicine and feels overreaching.

What we actually are, descriptively: a firm that runs three practices — brand, retail, social — and a publication, with a multi-year operating cadence and a strategy-led engagement model. The category does not yet have a word for that, and the usual move of assembling two words with a hyphen (‘brand consultancy’, ‘consumer consultancy’) is only partly right. We will keep using firm until a better word arrives, and we will notice when one does.

In the meantime we would like to invite every other house of our scale and ambition to stop calling itself a studio. The word is holding the category back. It is pricing the category out of its own strategic possibilities. Retire it.

A studio implies a workbench. A firm implies a practice. The work we now do is practice work. The word should match. — Jackson Morice

§IV What the switch implies internally.

Calling yourself a firm is not a vocabulary decision. It is an operational one. It implies that you have partners with defined responsibilities. It implies that you have standing practices. It implies that you have a cadence that survives any one client. It implies that you publish. It implies that your hiring, your pricing, and your engagement standards are at a level the word can bear. If these implications are not honoured, the word is marketing.

We made the switch in 2022 with the intention of honouring the implications over a three-year build. We are currently 80% through that build. A small number of items remain: the senior partnership structure needs one more partner appointment to sit at the full weight the word implies; our pricing structure needs a final revision to match the comparable category rates at houses of our scope; our publication needs to build out the full four-volume annual cadence, which is the work of Vol I through Vol IV of this publication.

By late 2026 we expect to have completed the build. If the work is right, nothing about the word will feel ambitious; it will feel merely accurate. The intention was never to reach above ourselves. It was to stop reaching below ourselves with a word that had become a cage.