Well, where do we start?

It’s always productive to start with a brief, but honestly, we’ll learn more diagnosing your challenge in an actual conversation.

We read every enquiry within 1 business day and come back with either a request for a first call or a referral if we’re not the right fit.

The first call runs around 45 minutes typically. We’ll cover what you’re actually trying to change in the business, what would make this engagement a good or bad outcome for you, and whether budget shape and timing make sense on both sides.

Yeah, of course, and it doesn’t cost anything.

Scoping a brand engagement off a form submission is obviously a worse process than scoping it after a proper conversation, so we’d rather just have the conversation. The calls that don’t end up scoping are still calls where people walk away with a bit more of an idea of what they should do next.

Yep. We’ll sign yours or send ours before the first call.

Most engagements involve information you wouldn’t put on an open enquiry form anyway, such as internal restructures, M&A activity, board-level brand calls, market entry plans, the thing you can’t tell the rest of your team yet. Send what you can on the form, hold what you can’t, and we’ll cover the rest under NDA before anything sensitive gets aired.

More than you think, less than you fear.

No.

There’s a polite version of this answer which is that spec pitches are bad for everyone, that they reward the agency willing to do the most free work rather than the one best suited to the brief, that they encourage agencies to under-invest in the thinking and over-invest in the show, and that the work produced under those conditions is almost never the work the client ends up needing. All of which is true.

The less polite version: agencies who do unpaid spec work do it because they don’t have a sustainable pipeline of paying clients, and we’d rather be the kind of studio you choose for the work than the kind you choose because we worked hardest on the pitch.

If your procurement process requires speculative creative or strategic work to evaluate suppliers, we’re probably the wrong fit for that procurement process. We’ve done paid scoping sprints (1–2 weeks, scoped exercises that test approach without working for free) when the engagement warrants it. Happy to talk about that on the first call.

Typically we take reservations with 8-12 weeks notice for strategy, branding and web work. For video, photography and design engagements, where there are plenty of briefs that come in with more urgent needs, we can be more fast and furious, but if we’re booked out for the next few months we’ll let you know. Some flexibility exists for the right project.

If timing is critical, say so on the first call and we’ll be honest about whether we can shift things.

You do. Standard hand-over: on final payment, all final files. We retain the right to feature the work in our portfolio, case studies and award submissions.

We don’t hold IP, license visuals back to you, or rent you our own work. Some agencies do; we think it’s a weird relationship to be in. The work belongs to the brand that paid for it.

Who isn’t? We’ll use any force multiplier we can find to make the work as competitive as possible in the market. What we actually use AI for: tasks that scale linearly with effort and don’t reward craft, the boring half of creative production, basically.

Here’s where we draw the line. We have far higher standards than the AI baseline, and we’re competing on original ideas. AI is helpful, but it also democratises everything it touches, and the second-order consequence is that whoever relies on it most ends up on the same flat playing field as everyone else. Playing-field parity doesn’t produce differentiated, competitive brands. We won’t substitute strategic thinking for AI pseudo-strategy, original ideas for averaged outputs, or creative direction for generative work that looks like everyone else’s.

That covers what we do. The interesting question, and the one our industry doesn’t seem particularly focused on, is what AI is doing to the rest of the picture. The efficiency angle gets talked about plenty. There are going to be plenty of people producing “good enough” work who won’t engage agencies anymore, and that’s a real story. The more interesting impact is the second and third order consequences.

There are already too many businesses. AI is going to produce more entrepreneurs, more competition, and more commodity brands entering the vast majority of sectors. Entrepreneurship is becoming democratised, and the cost of getting a business to market is going to drop. The irony is that sectors controlled by monopolies rarely need brand agencies, companies in competitive markets are the ones that do, and AI is about to make every market more competitive. So the very technology people assume will replace brand strategy is creating the conditions that make it more necessary.

On the strategy side specifically: AI is helping business leaders make more informed decisions at a faster pace, which is useful. But the space we play in is one-way door decisions for companies with a lot more at stake. The work is designed for situations where the cost of getting it wrong runs into the millions, the consequences play out over years, and you can’t just roll it back and try again. Outsourcing that to a model trained on the average of everything doesn’t make sense when the whole point of positioning is to not be average.

The same mechanic applies to creative. As the visual field floods with AI-generated assets (and it will) distinctive work made by great creatives is the competitive edge the great brands of the future are going to need. Brands trying to stand out in categories that are about to get noisier need creative that doesn’t look like everything else, which is the opposite of what generative AI is engineered to produce.

Yeah. That’s basically what you’re paying us for.

We’ll push back when we think you’re solving for the wrong problem, anchoring on the wrong reference, optimising for the loudest voice in your stakeholder set rather than the actual audience, or proposing a creative direction that’s going to limit you in 18 months. We won’t push back on taste (taste is yours, but we’ll try to ratchet that up even more with you), and we’ll happily build variations if you can’t decide between two. But on the structural calls (positioning, audience priority, the central creative idea) we’ll have an opinion and we’ll defend it.

If “yes-and” agency dynamics are what you need from the engagement, we’re probably not the right company for you.

We offer both, and the choice is yours.

The default: we deliver the engagement, hand over everything (final files, templates, training materials, brand and creative assets), and you run it from there. We’re available for questions and ad-hoc work but there’s no ongoing fee. Most clients run that way.

The other model is a brand or creative guardianship retainer, regular check-ins, on-call strategic counsel, ongoing creative reviews, content audits, and the kind of stewardship a brand needs in years two and three when your internal team is making 200 small decisions a month that either compound the brand or erode it.

Tiered from light-touch advisory through to embedded ongoing partnership. We’ll sketch out the right shape based on what the engagement actually needs.

A few.

We don’t work with tobacco. We don’t work with predatory financial products like payday lenders or BNPL operators targeting young or vulnerable customers. We don’t work with crypto projects that look like rugpulls, which is most of them.

We’re not ideologues and we’d rather stay politically neutral. We won’t work with organisations with extreme views. Past that, we work in pretty much any sector. Government, FMCG, hospitality, technology, healthcare, education, financial services, music, sport, happy to look at it.

Sometimes. Depends what “small” means.

If someone wants to start with “just a logo” or “tell me what colours to use”, you’re probably not looking at a brand or creative agency in the first place.

If by starting “small” you mean kicking things off with just a specific engagement on the strategy, or even just a small creative campaign, that’s fine by us.

Worth flagging the intent on the first call. We’ll tell you whether the staged approach makes sense or whether it just delays the inevitable.

Honestly, this is one of the harder questions in the industry, and most of the agency answers you’ll see are KPIs pretending to look like outcomes. The actual answer depends on what the work was for.

For strategy-led work: repositioning, brand architecture, moving a business upmarket, the measure is whether the business does the thing it set out to do. Are you charging more without losing volume? Are you keeping the customers you were losing to a particular competitor? Are you closing more of the right kind of leads, or attracting talent who wouldn’t have applied a year ago?

Those are the measures that count, and they take 12-18 months to come to fruition.

For creative or campaign-led work, the measures are faster and more visible. We’re big believers that good creative should always ladder back to the business strategy. A CEO signing off on this work always wants to see a defensible argument for why this work exists.

Because hourly billing is structurally broken.

The longer the work takes, the more an agency on hourly earns. You’re paying for the outcome.

We charge by scope. The cost is locked at the start of the engagement. The risk of the work taking longer than expected sits with us, not you. If we underestimate something, that’s our problem to solve.

The exception is open-ended retainer work, brand guardianship, ongoing creative consulting, which we price as monthly fees because the commitment is to availability, not to deliverables.

There are no boring categories. There are boring brands sitting in them, waiting for a competitor to figure out that the category’s blandness is the opportunity.

If you’re in a category that thinks of itself as unsexy, that’s usually less of a problem than you think. The problem is being in a sexy category where everyone’s already trying to be distinctive.