For others, starting a studio is more about catching up with an existing reality. Before she was (Studio) Lotta Nieminen, Finnish designer Lotta Nieminen had built nearly a decade of experience designing for agencies and brands and illustrating for children’s books and clients like Bvlgari, Marimekko, Liberty, and Herman Miller. From 2012-2021, she operated as Lotta Nieminen, human being, balancing design and illustration under a name that carried weight across disciplines. By 2021, the work had shifted. Lotta was focused solely on design, and taking on larger, more complex projects. “Even though it was still just me, I was booked out months ahead and taking on larger clients,” she says. The optics hadn’t caught up. “Before I added ‘studio’, I got a lot more inquiries for in-house gigs – which wasn’t something I was looking for, or even able to do, since I was running my own practice full-time,” she says. “I realised I kept having to explain to people: I’m not a freelancer, I’m a studio.” Adding “Studio” made her circumstances legible.
By definition and title, A Present Force and (Studio) Lotta Nieminen are studios. But both Meredith and Lotta are adamant that clients understand what they’re actually getting when they hire them, which is, most of the time: Meredith and Lotta. To wit: even on Linkedin, Meredith describes her role at A Present Force (0-1 employees) as “Independent Design Lead at A Present Force,” not “Studio Founder”. On Meredith’s About page and in introductory calls, she’s slightly more precise, describing the studio as a “collective model” run by one creative director. In practice, this means she works directly and independently with clients, as well with a network of collaborators as needed. Basically, if she can’t make it with her own two hands, she’ll find someone who can, and hire them for you. Lotta is similarly clear about her micro-size, preferring to never use the all-powerful “we” to avoid artificially inflating herself. This kind of transparency is the opposite of the hustle-bro model you see on Linkedin and X where designers brag about a studio headcount that doesn’t exist – the studio as “fake it ’til you make it”. Neither Lotta or Meredith are interested in pretending to be any larger than they are. Still, misunderstandings happen. One recent client of Meredith’s assumed she had a full team of developers on standby from their first intro call, and expected an instant buildout. “I had to cut them off and say, no, no, no – I just started doing this. If we need a developer, I’ll find one. But I need time to price it, resource it… There’s no one on staff waiting in the wings.”