Case Studies

ACT came to us at a moment of reorientation. After years of independent operation in London, the studio’s output had matured, yet its commercial logic remained tethered to the founder’s immediate horizon, prompting a rebrand and repositioning. The ambition was not merely to refine the foundations, but to construct a durable institution with cultural weight and an economic apparatus capable of sustaining a multi-talent practice.

We led an engagement shaped to ACT’s realities, not adapted from an off-the-shelf process. Through clinical assessment across vision, client focus, and operating model, we rendered long-held ideas into a definitive structure. We reframed growth around sustainable services, pricing logic, and team evolution. Alongside this, we refined ACT’s positioning to support a more commercial client base without diluting its cultural and editorial core.

The result was a crystallised mission, a sharper market stance, and a direction fit to carry the rebrand with genuine authority. ACT left with a stable framework for strategic decisions, pricing, partnerships, and intellectual succession, allowing the studio to grow deliberately, build a community around its work, and secure a legacy.

Following the vision workshop, East JR returned with what appeared to be a marketing brief. On closer examination, the constraint was structural: unclear ownership, undefined roles, and a disconnect between creative output and commercial activity were creating friction across the team. What presented as a marketing challenge was, in practice, a need for greater operational clarity within the commercial function.

We delivered a targeted intervention focused on the marketing layer of the business. Through diagnostics, workflow mapping, and role definition, we designed a blueprint connecting creative, marketing, and sales, tightening collaboration points and aligning activity to commercial priorities. The output was an executable marketing roadmap with defined ownership, channel priorities, and a phased action plan the team could run without pulling leadership back into day-to-day decisions.

Within a month of completion, execution was underway. The work also brought the next problem into focus: the website no longer reflected the studio accurately, and the team needed a copywriter with a clear brief. East JR returned for brand bible to support that hire.

East JR, a bespoke joinery and interior design studio, had reached a turning point: well established, with a growing body of work, but without a clear framework for the decisions that come with scale. The brief was to bring structure to the thinking that was already there.

Through an intensive vision workshop, we worked with the founder to define the studio's core philosophy, clarify its mission, and establish a growth framework grounded in how East JR actually wanted to operate.

The immediate outcome was clarity. The more durable result was a working relationship: the founder returned for a marketing roadmap and brand guidelines, each engagement building on the last.

Dream in a Cup, an Istanbul-based ceramics brand preparing for international expansion, needed commercial groundwork before entering UK retail and wholesale markets. The brief was specific: clear segmentation, pricing logic, and a sales framework that could support export partnerships without pulling the brand away from its design-led identity.

Over two months, we built the full commercial foundation for their UK market entry, covering prospect mapping, structured outreach, and account qualification. The work identified the market segment with the strongest fit for the brand and established a repeatable system the founder could deploy independently.

The strategic direction was confirmed and the commercial infrastructure was in place. The work stands as a foundation the brand can build from as it moves toward market.

As one of London’s most respected specialty coffee roasteries, Climpson & Sons has been at the forefront of the craft coffee movement for years. With a well-established market presence, they sought to elevate their wholesale division, focusing on improving sales efficiency, increasing lead conversion, and strengthening market penetration.

We implemented a targeted wholesale growth strategy, integrating a KPI-driven sales framework designed to optimise client acquisition and retention. By refining account qualification processes and enhancing customer engagement, the business generated over £200k in wholesale revenue across 18 months, won accounts increased by 17%, new account quality improved by 20%, and a joint marketing campaign delivered 885% ROAS within the first 12 months, with conversion ratio up 22% on the previous sales team’s results.

Founded by Alan Yau, the creator of Wagamama and Hakkasan, The Duck and Rice is known for its fusion of modern Chinese cuisine and British pub culture. Ready to extend the brand beyond the restaurant experience, they needed a product development partner who understood both the cultural logic of the brand and how to turn ideas into manufacturable goods.

We developed a retail product suite rooted in the cultural territory The Duck and Rice already occupies: the collision of Chinese and British material culture, reinterpreted through the brand’s sensibility. The work covered concept development across food, objects, games and collaborations, alongside supplier identification and production routes for each. The team selected products from the range to take into production.