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We rented the back room of a print shop because it came with a phone line and nobody else wanted it. The first months were identity work for people who knew someone who knew us, invoiced in round numbers and paid late. The scanner was borrowed and had to go back every Friday.
Eleven weeks for a regional bakery who let us delete their logo and start again from the typeface. It was the first job where we wrote the rationale before drawing anything, and the first that came back for a second phase. The press check ran until four in the morning; we have been insufferable about paper stock ever since.
Six of us signed a lease on the floor above a locksmith and finally agreed what to call ourselves, two years after clients had started calling us it anyway. A sign went up, painted by whoever had the steadiest hand that morning. We stopped taking work that arrived by word of mouth alone and wrote a rate card.
The floor above the locksmith ran out at nine people, so we took a warehouse bay and grew into it inside a year. That was when the studio stopped being a room and started being a schedule: producers, a traffic board, and the first handover between people who had never met the client.
Fourteen markets, nine languages, and a set of rules strict enough that nobody had to phone us to apply them. We built the first real system: grids, tone, a type licence that survived legal review, and artwork a print supervisor in another timezone could open without a call. It shipped six weeks late and taught us most of what we now charge for.
Motion had been a favour asked of whoever owned After Effects. Making it a department meant hiring people who think in seconds rather than pages, and giving them a grade room instead of a corner. Within a year every identity we shipped had a moving cut in the core delivery rather than bolted on at the end.
We tore up the way we worked and published the rebuild as it happened: the tokens, the decisions, the arguments and the reversals. Clients could read the reasoning for a change before the invoice for it arrived, which was uncomfortable for about a quarter and then simply how we worked.
Twenty-one years of unused routes, killed campaigns and work nobody ever paid for, finally allowed out of the drawer. Scanning it took two people most of a summer and turned up three ideas we quietly reused. It remains the most-read thing we have ever published, which says something we try not to dwell on.
We gave up the warehouse and kept the calendar. Four cities, one shared week, and a rule that nothing leaves the building unreviewed even when there is no building. It cost us the corridor conversation and bought back the better part of a day each, a trade we would make again and still argue about.
Twenty-eight years in, the work splits between long identity programmes and short things that live for a week. We hire slower and finish earlier than we did at half the size. The chronology has no closing frame, which is rather the point of building it on a rail.