Nine people.
Four projects at a time.

Lumen started in 2014 with two people and one client who paid late. The plan, such as it was, involved hiring quickly and taking whatever came through the door. We did that for three years and it nearly finished us.

By 2018 we had sixteen people, a beautiful office and a portfolio we were embarrassed by. The work was competent and forgettable, because nobody had enough time on anything to make it better than competent.

What we changed

We shrank. Deliberately, over eighteen months, down to nine. We capped the studio at four live projects and we started turning work away — including work we wanted, from clients we liked, because the calendar was full.

The constraint is the product. Four projects means every project gets people who are actually thinking about it.

Revenue dropped for one year and has grown every year since. More usefully, the work got better, and better work brought better briefs.

How we work now

Everyone in the studio works on the project, not on a slice of it. There are no account managers, no creative directors who present work they did not make, and no separate strategy team writing documents for a design team to interpret.

We work in the open. You will see things before they are finished, which some clients find uncomfortable for the first fortnight and prefer thereafter. There are no reveal moments, because a reveal is just a surprise you have not been consulted about.