We Met in a Bar

I spent most of my early career in other people's brands before I ever designed anything for one.

Creative production for an events arm of a beauty PR company in London. Brand ambassador work for Four Pillars, explaining the same gin to strangers for twelve hours at a stretch, boots on the ground, every day. Marketing for a restaurant and bar in Hoxton I'm still a little bit in love with. Years of photoshoots, styling, production schedules, and being the person responsible for how it all showed up on the day. Not a lot of design software in use at the time, but a hell of a lot of watching.

What I noticed, from the inside, is that most brand problems aren't design problems. They're thinking problems. Nobody asked what the brand was actually trying to do, or who it was talking to, or whether the strategy had been thought through before anyone opened Illustrator. A designer got briefed. A developer got briefed differently. A photographer showed up to shoot something neither of them had seen. Each person did their job. Nobody connected the dots.

The result is a brand that looks almost like itself. All the components are there. It just has that slight uncanny valley feeling… Something's off, but you can't quite name it. I'd argue your audience feels it too, even if they can't articulate why.

Miri and I met working in a bar in Sydney over a decade ago. She's a designer whose background spans textiles, illustration, and brand identity. She came up through Melbourne's creative scene, spent years at Myer, and has since moved back to Byron Bay where she's building her practice and raising Emilia, Studio Beau's favourite little lady. I called her when I landed a project too big to carry alone. We knew within about two weeks that we should be doing this properly.

Together we handle the full scope; identity, website, content, and the same thinking runs through all of it. On a recent project for a fine jewellery brand, the campaign shoot happened before we touched the website. The photography informed the type. The type informed the layout. That kind of through-line doesn't survive a handoff.

We tend to work with businesses at a turning point. Founders who know something isn't landing but can't name it yet. We're not the studio that drops off a logo and disappears.

— Lily