The studio turned nine this month, which means it has now been a studio for longer than either of us has lived in any single flat. The Heidelberg press in the back has been with us for seven of those years. The meeting table — a door on two trestles we bought the first week and have never replaced — has been with us for all nine.
We marked the occasion the way we mark most occasions: by getting slightly better coffee than usual, and by not saying very much about it. But we thought we would write something down here, because the question we get asked more than any other is why we have not grown, and the answer is worth saying out loud.
We are not small because we failed to grow. We are small because we decided to, every year, on purpose.
The question
The question usually arrives in the same form: "You must be turning work away — why not hire?" The premise is that turning work away is a problem to be solved, and that solving it is what growing means. We do turn work away — about four out of every five enquiries — and we are aware that, looked at one way, we are leaving money on the table.
But the premise contains an assumption we do not share, which is that bigger is the natural shape a successful studio takes. We do not think it is. We think a studio has a natural size, the way a tool has a natural size, and that exceeding it makes the tool worse at the thing it was made for.
What growing would cost us
The thing we would lose by growing is the thing that makes the work worth doing: that the people who pitch the project are the people who do the work. There is no B-team at Tentra. When a client meets us in the first meeting, they are meeting the designers who will be in the file at midnight. The moment we add a layer between those two things — the moment a senior designer pitches and a junior designer executes — the work changes. Not necessarily for the worse, in absolute terms. But into something other than the thing we set out to make.
Seven is the number at which everyone still touches every project. We have tried, in our heads, to imagine an eighth, and every version of it ends with someone not touching the work. So seven it stays.
What we have gained by not growing
The freedom to say no, mostly. A studio that depends on a large payroll cannot afford to turn down four out of five enquiries; it has to feed itself. A studio of seven, with low overhead and a short client list, can afford to take only the work it wants to take. That freedom is the single most important condition for making good work, and it is the one we would give up last.
It has also given us time. The journal you are reading exists because we are small enough to write it. Specimen exists because we are small enough to publish it. None of these are revenue, and all of them are the parts of the practice we are proudest of. They are the dividend of staying small.
The freedom to say no is the single most important condition for making good work, and we would give it up last.
The next nine
We do not have a five-year plan. We have a practice, which is to take the work that interests us, do it as well as we can, and turn down the rest. If we are still seven in nine more years, and still arguing about grids at the door-on-trestles table, that will be the version of success we were aiming for.
Thank you, as ever, for reading.