Self-initiated project — 2024–ongoing
Studio Up is a side project I started to address a gap I kept seeing — small businesses being handed templates when they deserve real design thinking. A restaurant, a wedding photographer, a trades business: they all have just as much riding on their website as any major brand.
The problem
Most independent businesses — restaurants, photographers, tradespeople — end up with a template, minimal thinking, and no real strategy. The work reflects the budget, not the ambition.
After a decade designing at scale for De Beers, Soho House, and Ahold, I wanted to test a hypothesis: that the same rigour applied to global brands, brought into a smaller context, could create outsized impact for businesses that genuinely need it.
Studio Up is that experiment — and it's still running.
Who it's for
Impact so far
Editorial & Blog
A newsletter with a cult readership that needed a proper home. I applied the same information architecture and editorial thinking I'd use on a major media brand — sized for a one-person operation.
Home Services
A trades business relying entirely on word of mouth, with no digital presence. The brief was simple: get them a site that converts. Same conversion thinking I'd apply to any e-commerce platform.
How I structured it
A kick-off process I designed specifically for small business owners — focused on their goals, their customers, and what a successful website actually means for their revenue.
Full visual design in Figma, reviewed together before build. The same design process I'd run at an agency — adapted for a client who's never worked with a designer before.
A fast, clean build with SEO foundations baked in — plus a handover guide so the client owns their site rather than depending on me to maintain it.
What running it taught me
Working directly with small business owners — without a product manager, a research team, or a 12-week discovery phase — has made me faster and sharper. Every conversation is a discovery session. Every constraint is real and immediate.
It's also been a useful reminder of what good design is actually for: not systems, not handoff docs, not stakeholder alignment — but people getting more out of something they've built.
Skills applied