Design as a business tool

The sole purpose of great design is to do great things for your business. It’s a tool for moving your business forward – for helping you do what you do best. Our ability to make that happen drives us forward too. We use our skills and experience to help you reach out to more people, more markets and more sales.

What we do

Design is primarily about thinking. Round the table with you or in the quiet of our studio. When we delve into the fundamentals of your brand and your audience, the rest follows naturally. Here’s what we can do for you.

  • We work with you to develop the big picture: what you and your brand stand for, what your customers want, and how the market works. These are the insights from which we chart a course for long-term success together.

  • There’s something special about the way you do things – the big idea at the heart of your brand. Our job is to capture that idea graphically, and to develop a visual toolkit for consistent and engaging storytelling.

  • In a crowded retail world you need a stand-out look with maximum shelf-appeal. From one-offs to full product ranges with hierarchies and sub-brands, we improve visibility and desirability. We get your products moving faster.

  • Print has so much potential for impact and inventiveness. From flyers to mailers to press campaigns to brochures running to several hundred pages, we’ll create the literature that drives your message home.

  • Just about everything digital for more clicks and engagement. We create the look and the content for websites, digital ads, social media campaigns and animations.

  • Bring your brand to life with beautiful photography and telling illustrations. For a consistent look, we can source or manage it all: photographers, stylists, illustrators – in the studio or on location.

How we do it

Every design team has a process. Essentially they’re all the same, even those that apply the gloss of a ™ symbol. But we like to think that our approach is more collaborative and more empathetic. We work with you to create design that fits like a glove.

  • Nothing beats spending time with you and your team to find out what you believe in, how you go about business, and what you want to achieve. We also research your market – how it operates, what it needs, and how you can make more of the opportunities out there.

  • It’s time to build on what we’ve learned. We refine your brand or product proposition, talk to stakeholders, and look afresh at the market and the competition in the context of what we now know. We gather the data and insights we need to generate a clear creative brief.

  • All the preparatory work comes together as we develop creative concepts that bring the big idea to life. Each one is supported by a rationale rooted in the research and insights from our earlier work, together with examples of how each concept works in the real world.

  • Next we refine your preferred concept in line with your feedback and, if relevant, feedback from the market. This is the opportunity to really craft things and resolve the details through discussion and collaboration. Design that feels right to you has to be a shared process.

  • Crafting and refinement is complete and we’ve arrived at something that’s absolutely right. So now comes the practical bit: developing artwork and guidelines whilst liaising with printers or developers to achieve the quality you expect. The world is about to experience your brand afresh.

Who we are

We’re a small business that puts people and values first, a husband-and-wife team who swapped city life and London’s most creative agencies for more meaningful business relationships from our studio in Dorset.

We enjoy working with SMEs and start-ups because we get to speak to the people who own and care about their brands. We find out what you really want and how far you’d like to go. By collaborating with you face-to-face, often over a mug of tea at the kitchen table, we create design that works for you.

We won’t blind you with marketing-speak or try to make our mark in other grandiose ways. They’re distractions from the job of giving you great design that feels absolutely right. This is about business sustainability, ours and yours, and the power of relationships to build brands that last.

Alongside us we have a network of like-minded collaborators; photographers, illustrators, copywriters, strategists and developers, that we can call upon at any time. The result is work that you’ll love, design that speaks from the heart of your business.