When the brief is bigger than a design project
Most of the work we do has a clear shape. A company needs positioning, an identity, a website, a campaign. We scope it, we build it, we hand it over.
Some briefs do not have that shape, and we would rather say so at the beginning than three months in.
The briefs we refer
A group with several operating companies and no coherent relationship between them. The instinct is to redesign each one. The actual question is how they should relate to each other and to the parent, which is a governance decision before it is a design one. That work is brand architecture, and it belongs with a board rather than with a marketing function.
A business preparing for sale or a capital raise. Identity matters here, but it is downstream of a harder question about what a buyer will discount: customer concentration, founder dependency, whether the proposition survives the founder leaving. That is transaction strategy, and it usually starts twelve to twenty four months before anyone talks about design.
A family office or private holding group. These have a different set of constraints: discretion, succession, several entities under one family name, and a board fluent in capital but not in demand. That work is advisory rather than creative, and it is handled by Tavitian, Trần & Partners, an independent firm founded by our own co-founders.
How the two firms work together
Tokyo Design Studio is a design studio. We do brand strategy, identity, digital and campaign work, and we do it to a standard that has been recognised nationally and internationally.
Tavitian, Trần & Partners is an advisory firm. It works with principals and boards on architecture, transactions, family office matters and the systems underneath them. It does not design.
Where an advisory engagement produces work that needs designing, the client chooses who designs it. Sometimes that is us, sometimes it is their existing agency. The two firms are separate, and the referral goes both ways.
If you are not sure which you need
Send us the brief. If it is a design problem we will quote it. If it is a structural problem wearing a design costume, we will say so and point you to the right people, which costs you nothing and saves you a scoping exercise.
