DesignStudio is relaunching today as Further, as a “signal to the world” that it’s evolving into a different kind of agency.
The rebrand comes after the 16-year-old studio, which has offices in London, New York and Sydney, bought two new companies to extend the services it offers clients, from campaigns to events.
“It’s our bet on the future based on a belief in human creativity,” said DesignStudio CEO Paul Stafford.
Stafford says the studio’s leadership started thinking about the future of the business “just after Covid.”
DesignStudio built its reputation creating new identities for clients like Eurostar, the Premier League, and perhaps most notably, Airbnb. But Stafford says they wanted to move beyond “the bombastic moments of businesses pivoting and rebranding,” to work on more of their clients’ commercial strategy.
Stafford and his team started looking at ways they could “level up” DesignStudio’s capability to deliver these broader offerings, and decided the best approach was to, “go out and buy the best in market, and bring them to the table.”
Last year they bought motion design studio Analog and immersive experience agency Pixel Artworks, and united the three business as the Further Group. Further acquisitions will follow.
The new collective is backed by Waterland Private Equity, and Stafford says that in both the creative and financial partnerships, the studio was determined to ensure “cultural alignment.”
“You can do all the scientific due diligence, digging into past work and asking the right questions,” Stafford says. “But in this field, we’re all experts at selling ourselves. So a lot of it comes down to sitting in pubs together, so people let their guard down a bit, and you can understand what’s important to them.”
The new Further identity
He says that when it came to choosing the right investors, it was vital the financiers appreciated how creative businesses are different.
“We don’t have 12 months’ visibility on our pipeline, and I guarantee that is the same for every design company,” he says. “So we needed people who understood our industry, and who have an appreciation that we don’t necessarily run things in the way that big corporates do.
“We’re more about showing the team a flag, and giving them something to charge at, rather than building really detailed one-pagers on how our values and goals are going to trickle down.”
Stafford explains that Further will still work on rebrands, but these will form part of the studio’s wider services, alongside campaigns, product launches, events and digital projects.
“We’re going to work on what we consider a client’s landmark moments,” he explains. “Yes, they’ve got to be consistent, and roll out all these things in different versions, and languages, and territories.
“But they need to keep seeding these landmark moments, where communities gather, where fandoms are born, and where people start building this love and affinity for the brand.”
In part, Stafford sees the agency’s new focus as rising above the “crappy campaign work” he predicts AI is going to hoover up.
“We need to play in the high impact, high value moments,” he says. “That’s where creativity is really needed, where the world needs to see something that hasn’t been seen before, where genius minds come together to create and curate.”
To reflect this new direction, Stafford says it was important to change the name from DesignStudio.
“It had to happen, because we are entering a new era of what agencies need to do, and we have a completely new offer,” he explains. “The name DesignStudio, and the brand DesignStudio, didn’t capture that any more.
“It’s a risk,” he accepts. “But I think the risks of not changing the name way outweigh the risks of changing the name,” he says.
“It signals to the world that this is a significant shift. And I think the fact that we’re willing to drop the name, because we believe in this new agency, signals to the rest of the business that they should believe in it too.”
In fact, Stafford says he and co-founder Ben Wright always thought DesignStudio was “the shittiest name possible.”
“We struggled to come up with a name, and said, ‘My God, let’s just call it DesignStudio.’ There was always a discussion about whether it was genius or idiocy.”
And the agency’s subsequent success convinced Stafford that in the end, a studio name is far less important than its work.
“The name doesn’t really matter,” he says. “It’s what you create that becomes representative of who you are.”
The name Further, he says, is “a lot more considered than DesignStudio was at the time.” It reflects both the enhanced and expanded work the new studio wants to do, as well as the internal drive to push creativity beyond the tried and tested.
“This name marries our intent, our desire, and our vision of where the business is going,” he says.
To accompany the new name, Further also has a new visual brand, overseen by design director Lorenzo Di Cola.
“We set out to build an identity for an agency that didn’t yet exist,” Di Cola says. “It had to flex across brand, content, experience and motion. It had to showcase wildly different kinds of work. And most importantly, it had to reflect the collaborative spirit and creative energy of the new business we’re building.”
Stafford admits that working on an agency’s own brand is always “a painful experience” and the team had to balance and channel the wide range of input they received. “Everyone in our business is a brand expert, so everyone has an opinion,” he laughs.
There is a new crafted wordmark, with striking 3D motion expressions, while the type family includes Grotesk’s Mono, Peta, Giga and Mega.
“We’ve always believed, from the days of Airbnb, that you need to build something so compelling that it draws people towards it,” Stafford says. “That’s how you build community, and fandom, and advocacy – from the inside out.
“So our new brand is built around the idea of magnetism – such a force that it pulls things towards it.”
Stafford also wanted a brand that would feel “provocative” and make “some people uncomfortable.” This, he believes, will resonate with and attract clients who want to be pushed out of their comfort zone, while filtering out those who would prefer to play it safe.
“We’ve always gone into pitches against businesses like the Omnicoms and WPPs,” Stafford says. “And I wanted us to feel like the antithesis of them. We want to be the agency that, win or lose, people remember us because we scared them a bit.”
Stafford says pivoting the business in this way has thrown up challenges, but his biggest learning has been to remain present and available to listen to people’s concerns.
He thinks this communication matters less in the formal moments – like all-hands meetings and company emails – than in the informal ones.
“I think it’s about turning up at an event in the pub with the team,” he says. “When someone’s three pints in, and is confident enough to ask the boss, ‘What’s going on?’ Where you connect with people, on a real level, is really important.”
But despite these challenges, Stafford is ready to embrace start this new chapter. “I feed off moments like this,” he says. “It gets me energised.
“I feel like there is an opportunity right now, to figure out what is the role of a design business in the future. And I feel like we’re in a good position to do that. It’s nerve-wracking, but it’s exciting.”
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