Ongoing · Senior-led
Your creative team, without the team.
A senior creative partner on retainer. Campaigns, content, brand and direction, delivered continuously, for less than the salary of one mid-level hire.
- Commitment3 months, then rolling
- Your timeOne call a fortnight
- Led byThe founder, always
- Notice30 days, any time
Project work makes brands start over.
Every project ends the same way. The identity is delivered, the agency leaves the room, and the brand slowly comes apart: a deck here, a campaign there, each one drifting a little further from the last until nobody can remember what the rules were.
Then twelve months later somebody says the brand feels tired, and the whole thing starts again.
A retainer solves the actual problem: not the identity, but the thousand decisions after it.
Not hours. Output.
We don’t sell days or timesheets. Each month has a plan agreed at the start, and the work lands against it. Most retainers run some version of this.
What the month is for. Campaign angle, content pillars, the one thing that matters most.
Imagery, film, social, decks, web: whatever the plan calls for, made to the same standard as the launch work.
Assets delivered, scheduled and handed over. Then a call: what worked, what next.
Every retainer is scoped to the brief. These are the three shapes most settle into.
- Monthly content system
- Social & campaign assets
- One senior review call a fortnight
- Brand kept consistent as you scale
- Everything in Content
- Campaign concepting & art direction
- Film and photography direction
- Decks, web and launch support
- Everything in Creative Direction
- Owning the brand end to end
- In your leadership conversations
- Team, partners and suppliers managed
Cheaper than the hire. Better than the agency.
A mid-level in-house designer costs £45–55k plus employer costs, holiday, software and management, and gives you one person’s taste, at one level of seniority, on the days they are in.
An agency retainer at this level starts north of £15k a month and puts a junior on the account. This sits in between and does neither.
We take a small number of retainers.
A retainer only works when there is enough to do. If you need one campaign and then nothing for six months, buy the project, we will say so on the call rather than sell you twelve months of something you do not need.
It also does not work if the brand has never been decided. That is what the Audit and the identity work are for. A retainer maintains and extends a brand; it cannot invent one on the side.