We’ve mentioned it many times but you lot have never seen it (unless you’re one of our lovely clients) where is it, what does it look like, what’s in it? All great questions. We plan to answer them all in this very blog post.

As it says in the title we moved in one year ago to this day (May 1st, 2016). When the company first started we didn’t have a studio we just got by, by meeting at each others house’s or in coffee shop’s but that soon became inconvenient due to distractions and lack of space. We then went on to trade work for a very small office on the third floor of a local restaurant, when we say small we mean small (we shared a desk) but at the time it was all we needed and it was really kind of the owner to let us use the space. We had a simple set up; 1 desk to work on 1 desk with the printer and cutting mat, 2 chairs and a set of plastic draws. That was literally it, it was all we needed at the time and all we could fit in there.

Within 8 months we had outgrown the space and needed something a little bigger, the search began. We knew we wanted to stay local and we set ourselves a fairly modest budget. We spoke to loads of people and visited a number of studios ranging from full two story set ups (out of budget, unfortunately) to partitioned warehouses. They were nice but they weren’t for us, as luck would have it when returning from one viewing we noticed a sign in the window of a converted factory, we enquired with the landlord and had a look around the room for let. It was perfect! Large factory windows, bare brickwork, high ceilings and lots of electrical sockets (super important is you’re running the amount of equipment we are). The setting was also perfect, the factory had been converted tastefully with lots of original features remaining. The factory wasn’t just converted into studio space it also has a large function room which is available to hire, check it out here. The best bit about it has to be the name ‘Graphic House’, it looks so good when we use it on our website and marketing material, people always ask us about it as if it’s not real. The building houses a mixture of other businesses including the local radio station Fosse 107.

As you can see we loved the look of the studio and within an hour of viewing it, we rang the landlord to say that we would love to rent the room. Our landlords been absolutely fantastic from day one and gave us the keys straight away which meant we could get started on decorating the room. The pictures below show what the room looked like when we moved in.

There was no discussion needed we both knew that we wanted the room to be white with subtle hints to our brand colour red through accessories within the room. We had quite a few projects going on at the time and didn’t have much time to sort the room out. Lucky the weekend we got the keys was a bank holiday which gave us 3 days (72 hours and believe me we used ever single one of them) to get the room ready to work in. Some serious graft went into that room over those 3 days, we managed to gut and clean the room, paint all the walls, pack up our old office and move all the stuff in, take a trip to Ikea to buy all the furniture you could ever need, construct all that furniture, put up shelves and finally sort it all out to go back to work on the Tuesday. Writing it out reminds us of how much we crammed into those days, here’s a little time lapse of us at work.

We were really happy with what we had managed to achieve in such as short space of time, there were still things that needed doing such as blinds, other fixtures and fittings but the studio was certainly in a workable state.

One year on and the room has had a couple of more transformations, we originally started off with a sofa at one end but as we’ve grown we’ve started to host more and more client meetings. Which were made a little informal by the sofa, therefore, it was sold and replaced with a meeting table. Not as comfortable for us but a lot more professional when clients come to visit. Over the past year family and friends have also brought us some lovely gifts for the studio including a clock, a fridge (in red of course) and filing cabinet (again in red) along with lots of other bits and pieces. Take a look at the latest pictures below.

We’ve hope you’ve enjoyed reading the story of our studio, at some point, we plan to talk about the contents of the studio including all the equipment we use, so stay tuned.

Finally, we would like to thank everyone who have helped us to achieve our dream workspace. We’ve got big plans for the future so we’re sure it won’t be too long before we’re searching for studio number 3.