Strategy is a decision, not a document
If the strategy did not rule anything out, nothing was decided. We write down what you are choosing not to do, and we hold you to it through the design.
The studio
Twenty-two people, three cities, one argument.
Makeready is an independent studio. We are owned by the people who work here, we take on roughly fourteen projects a year, and we would rather do fewer things properly than more things quickly.
We started in 2016 as three people doing identity work for cultural institutions who could not afford the studios they wanted. That constraint shaped us: we learned to make systems that survive being handed to someone else, because our clients could never afford to call us back for every poster.
Ten years later the clients are larger and the principle has not moved. The work is finished when your team can carry it without us — not when the presentation ends.
22
People
14
Projects a year, by choice
3
Studios
100%
Employee owned
The people
Who you would actually work with.
Júlia Ferreira
Founding partner, creative direction
Identity and campaign work. Spends more time at press checks than at her desk, which she maintains is the job.
Owen Mbeki
Founding partner, strategy
Writes the strategy documents. Believes most research budgets are spent re-learning what the sales team already knows.
Nadia Brandt
Strategy director
Positioning and messaging. Runs the interrogation phase, which clients enjoy less than the name suggests.
Hana Okada
Design director
Systems and typography. Responsible for the 14mm frame that sixteen guest designers have not broken.
Teo Marchetti
Technology director
Creative technology and build. Designs the fallback before the feature, every time, without being asked.
Priya Raman
Product design lead
Field research and interface design. Has ridden with more technicians than most technicians.
Sam Okonjo
Senior designer
Identity and packaging. Keeps the studio's pigment library and is protective of it.
Petra Lindqvist
Production director
Print and production. The reason ideas arrive on paper looking like they did on screen.
History
Ten years, slowly.
2016
Founded in Amsterdam by Júlia Ferreira and Owen Mbeki, working with cultural institutions.
2018
First full identity-and-product engagement; the studio stops describing itself as a design agency.
2020
Lisbon studio opens. The practice becomes genuinely multidisciplinary rather than aspirationally so.
2022
Employee ownership completed. Fourteen projects a year becomes a deliberate ceiling.
2024
Verge Institute system ships; the frame-not-picture approach becomes the studio's default for institutions.
2026
Twenty-two people across Amsterdam, Lisbon and New York.
What we believe
Six positions we keep defending.
Design for the handover
Every system we make will eventually be used by someone who was not in the room. Documentation, templates and rule sets are scope from day one, not a file we email at the end.
Go where the work is used
Vans, shop floors, wet bathrooms, ice buckets, direct sunlight. Three weeks of observation has resolved more arguments for us than three months of workshops.
The overlap is the idea
Our best work sits between disciplines — a packaging decision that solves a retail problem, a type hierarchy that is actually a campaign strategy. We staff projects to make that overlap likely rather than accidental.
Constraint before expression
We set the container first and then push hard inside it. Freedom without a frame produces work that cannot be repeated, and repetition is what builds a brand.
Ship the fallback first
On anything interactive we design the degraded version before the ambitious one, so there is always a floor we would be happy to launch.
Head office
Amsterdam
Prinsenstraat 141015 DB AmsterdamNetherlandsStudio
Lisbon
Rua da Boavista 821200-068 LisboaPortugalPartnerships
New York
55 Washington StreetBrooklyn, NY 11201United StatesStart a project
Tell us what you are trying to make.
A 45-minute call with the people who would do the work. If we are not right for it, we will say so and suggest who is.