Building and leading an independent creative company.
Metropolis is the independent design company I built and led. Everything on this site is informed by that experience: what it takes to make creative judgment survive clients, teams, budgets and delivery over years, not weeks.
Building and leading Metropolis gave me operator-level understanding of how strategy, creativity, teams and delivery connect.
The challenge
Independent creative companies usually collapse into one of two shapes. Either they scale into a generic agency and lose the standard that made them worth hiring, or they stay small and never build the muscle to lead work at real scale.
The task was to build a third shape: an organisation with a clear creative point of view, capable of leading complex engagements for global clients, without giving up the standards that made those clients hire us in the first place.
What I did
Founded and led Metropolis as an independent creative company designing products, brands and multi-platform experiences.
Built the operating model, hiring standards and client relationships that made the studio's work possible at scale.
Held the final creative call on every engagement so the standard was consistent across teams, categories and years.
The result
Metropolis continues to design products, brands and experiences for global companies and ambitious challengers. The experience of building and leading it is the foundation for every advisory engagement I now take on.
- 10+
- Global
- 1
Years operating as an independent creative company
Clients across luxury, hospitality, finance and technology
Shared standard held across every engagement
Metropolis is an independent design company designing products, brands and multi-platform experiences for global companies and ambitious challengers. Building and leading that kind of organization gave me practical experience in creative leadership, client advisory, team building and delivery at scale.
About the company
Metropolis
An independent design company designing products, brands and multi-platform experiences for global companies and ambitious challengers. Metropolis is where the ideas on this site were tested against reality, at scale, under real commercial pressure.
- Independent design company
- Founder, creative leadership, client advisory
- Founded 2014, ongoing
- Founder and creative leadership
“Creative judgment only matters if it can survive clients, teams, budgets, timelines and execution.”