For most of our history, “local” was part of the pitch. You could drive to us; we knew the area; we’d met half the room before the kickoff. These days our clients are spread across the map and the studio is remote-first, and the worry people raise is always the same: doesn’t going global mean losing the personal touch that made hiring a boutique studio worth it in the first place?
It doesn’t have to. But staying personal at a distance is a discipline, not a default. Here’s how we hold onto it.
Async by default, synchronous on purpose
The mistake remote teams make is recreating the office over video — back-to-back calls, now with worse audio and a five-hour time gap. We flipped it. The bulk of the work happens asynchronously: written updates, recorded screen walkthroughs, shared prototypes a client can click through whenever their day allows. Nobody sits blocked waiting for a meeting in another hemisphere. Then we reserve live calls for the few moments that genuinely benefit from being in the room together — kickoff, key design reviews, launch — and we make those count.
One clear point of contact
Time zones get painful when ownership is fuzzy. If a client doesn’t know who owns their project, every question becomes a game of telephone across a day-long delay. So every engagement has a single person who owns the relationship end to end. A client always knows exactly who they’re talking to, never has to re-explain context to a stranger, and never wonders whether their message landed with anyone at all.
Write everything down
Distance rewards clarity and punishes vagueness. Decisions, scope, rationale, the reason we ruled out option B — all of it lives in writing, in one place a client can actually find. This does more than prevent confusion. It means someone twelve time zones away is never out of the loop, and we’re never relying on one person’s memory of a hallway conversation that the client wasn’t even in. Written-down thinking is also better thinking; the act of explaining a decision is how you find out whether it was a good one.
Overlap is a resource — spend it deliberately
With clients spread across continents, the hours where everyone is awake at once are scarce and valuable. We treat that overlap like a budget. We don’t burn it on status updates that could’ve been a message; we save it for the conversations that need real-time back-and-forth — pushing on a tricky design decision, working through a tension in the brief, the things where typing loses the nuance. Everything else moves async around it.
Set expectations about response time, not availability
“Always on” is a promise no honest studio can keep across time zones, and pretending to creates resentment on both sides. What we promise instead is a clear response rhythm: you’ll hear back within one business day, you’ll get a weekly update whether or not there’s drama, and if something’s on fire there’s a faster path. Predictability turns out to matter far more to clients than instant replies. People can plan around a rhythm; they can’t plan around a coin flip.
The work makes the relationship, not the postcode
Here’s the thing we didn’t expect: working globally has made us better, not more distant. We see more industries, more contexts, more ways of running a business and telling its story — a resort, a risk consultancy, a veterinary practice, a product team — and that range flows straight back into the work. A boutique studio’s edge was never proximity. It was care, taste, and actually paying attention. Those travel just fine.
Personal scales further than people think
The fear that going global means going generic assumes intimacy comes from geography. It doesn’t. It comes from listening hard, remembering what someone told you, and treating their business like it matters — and you can do all of that from anywhere, for anyone, as long as you build the habits that protect it. Thirty years in, we serve clients we’ve never stood in the same room as, and the work is as personal as it’s ever been.