Why we stay small.

Every growing studio reaches the same fork. The work is good, the pipeline is full, and the obvious move is to hire — to turn the thing that works at three people into a thing that works at thirty. We have stood at that fork more than once. Each time, we have chosen not to.

This is not modesty, and it is not a lack of ambition. It is the opposite. Staying small is how we protect the work.

What scale costs

When a studio grows, the person who wins the work stops being the person who does it. A layer of account management appears. The senior people move into oversight, and the actual making falls to whoever is junior and available. The studio gets better at selling and worse at building, and nobody decides this on purpose — it is simply what scale does.

We are not a small studio that wants to be a big one. We are small because that is how the best work gets made.

At our size, the person who pitches you designs your brand, writes your site, and answers your email two years later. There is no handoff because there is no one to hand off to. The seams don't show because there are no seams.

The trade we make

Staying small means saying no — to most of the work that comes our way, and to the version of the studio that would take all of it. We take a few clients at a time. We charge fairly for the attention that buys. And we get to do work we are still proud of in five years, which, it turns out, is the only kind worth doing.