Three markets, and the honest difference between them.
Most of the studios I work with are moving between markets rather than sitting in one. This is where I actually am, what that means in each place, and which parts of a marketing programme travel with you and which have to be rebuilt.
A London practice opening in Dubai. A Dubai studio taking a room at a Dallas show house. A furniture brand stocked in Mayfair and Manhattan. The pattern is common enough in this industry that it barely gets remarked on, and it causes the same problem every time.
The marketing does not travel. The feed that worked at home reads as slightly off in the new market, and nobody can say precisely why. The press list is useless. The calendar is wrong. The studio ends up either hiring a second agency who do not know the brand, or carrying on as before and quietly underperforming in the market they just spent money entering.
That gap is the thing I am actually for, and it is why I work across three markets rather than claiming to be local to all of them.
Base and principal market
Home, and where most of the client list still sits. On the ground and in person: studio visits, capture days, Frieze, PAD, Decorex and London Design Festival covered first-hand every year.
On the ground, and relocating
Client work running now in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, with a move to the region planned. On site for Dubai Design Week, Downtown Design, Alserkal and the Saadiyat openings, not flying in for a week and calling it coverage.
Managed, and visited
Established client work in New York and Dallas. This one is different and it is worth being straight about it: the strategy, the planning, the direction and the reporting sit with me, and the shooting is handled locally by people I brief. I visit, I do not live there.
What travels, and what has to be rebuilt
This is the part worth knowing before you spend anything on a second market, and it is the same answer whichever direction you are going.
Keep these. They are the brand.
- The voice. How the studio writes about its own work should be identical in Dubai and in Dallas. A brand that sounds different in each market does not sound like a brand.
- The standard. What is good enough to publish, how projects are credited, what never gets said. Portable without modification.
- The system. The planning cycle, the approval chain, the shot list, the reporting. Build it once.
- Search and AI visibility. Being described accurately by an assistant is one job, not three. The practice has one record, and it is read from everywhere.
Rebuild these, or do not bother.
- The calendar. London peaks in September. The Gulf peaks in November and again in the spring. The US runs to a different rhythm again. A schedule repurposed from home will consistently mistime the moments that matter.
- The press list. The design beat in each market is a handful of people and almost none of them overlap. The relationships are the work, and they are not transferable.
- The platform mix. What LinkedIn does for a London practice is not what it does in the Gulf, and Pinterest behaves differently again depending on where the buyer sits.
- The language, sometimes. In the Gulf a bilingual presence is often the difference between being read and being scrolled past, and that needs a native speaker rather than a translation.
- What can be published at all. Institutional and government work in the Gulf frequently cannot be shown when it is made. A content plan that assumes otherwise falls apart in month three.
Why one person rather than three agencies
The usual alternative is a local agency in each market. It is a reasonable choice and for a large brand it is often the right one. For a studio of ten to sixty people it tends to produce three versions of the brand, three invoices, three reporting formats and nobody who can see the whole picture.
The version I offer is narrower and, I think, more honest: one person who owns the voice, the standard and the record across all three, bringing in local specialists where local knowledge is genuinely required. An Arabic writer. A photographer in New York. A stylist in Dallas. Briefed by me, so the work still arrives sounding like the brand rather than like a supplier.