UK design agencies take root in LA – but is it a ‘gold rush’?

How&How is a branding and identity-focused design agency that, until very recently, had a studio in Lisbon, Portugal and another in London, UK. How and her husband and business partner Roger How have made the decision to close the Lisbon office and refocus as a London and LA business.

As we investigated further, it became clear that a combination of economic push-pull factors, access to design talent, and sector-specific business opportunities were driving some design businesses to take an interest in LA, but each agency we spoke to had a very different blend of these.

For How, the economics of the last four years really began to distill her decision to overhaul the regional dynamics of the business, which was started in 2020. Despite being located in Lisbon herself, “there weren’t any business opportunities there, so the office has been wound down, with staff given the option of being relocated to London or LA,” she says.

Given that most How&How clients are UK, northern European and US-based, “we were kind of living in a parallel universe,” says How, adding, “we were loving the weather but it made no business sense for us to stay.” With several clients already in LA leading to lots of late-night calls, being based there started to make sense for How.

Knowing when to reorganize your business

The decision was made against a turbulent economic backdrop which has affected all agencies, but interestingly the whole course of How&How over the last four years. In particular, she notes that off the back of the Covid years, there was a resurgent 2022 and challenging 2023 before a rather tepid 2024.

“We all thought 2024 was going to be great and it hasn’t been bad but a general trend that other agency owners who I’ve spoken to have noticed has been that things are just taking ages. There is work but it’s taking a really long time to materialize as clients want more for less and they’re taking a long time to make decisions,” she says.

In the run-up to the UK elections she put some of this down to a wait-and-see attitude or a “reluctance to commit, as businesses hate uncertainty”, but that there’s also the looming specter of Brexit: “England’s just seen as less of a viable option for a lot of people now,” she adds.

That said, she is keen to point out, “I still believe London is the best place to have a studio. Our art schools are the best and against all odds, we still produce the best designers.”

The practical appeal of US clients is that they’re making quicker decisions on spending, which for How is a real boon. Although she’s “sector agnostic” she’s finding a lot of work in the climate tech and conservation sectors which are booming in LA and across California.

“There’s a huge amount of innovation happening there, like incubators for startups in those sectors and it’s the sort of work that makes us happy,” says How. Attached to this, there are “a lot of good ideas floating around, the networking scene is huge, and it creates a lot of potential,” she adds.

Nevertheless, How has heard from US business leaders who have felt the squeeze, with one citing pre-election nerves. LA was also not insulated from its own economic dip in 2023 when high inflation and rising interest rates were an issue. If anything it was the epicenter of some of the issues felt by small agencies thousands of miles away.

“The Silicon Valley bank crashed, there were tech layoffs and a lot of tech brands were relying on venture capital money. Anyone working with tech companies felt that. Marketing budgets are always the first to be cut when there’s a squeeze and as a creative agency you feel that,” says How.

While she is aware of other UK-based design agencies expanding into LA, she’s also witnessed a lot of UK-based designers taking up roles there. How can rattle off a number of designers who have left “big global studios” to take up jobs in the city, some of whom have gone to Open AI, including a design director identity specialist from a leading London studio. “These companies have the money and the industries and location are attractive,” she says.

From east to west coast

How’s experience is very different from Wolff Olins chief exec, Sairah Ashman, whose long-established agency was founded in London in the 1960s. “We’ve also been firmly planted in New York until about 10 years ago when we set up in San Francisco to be close to where all the exciting stuff was happening in tech,” says Ashman.

The agency’s presence in San Francisco was its gateway to LA as it followed a well-worn trail. Ashman makes the point that with the infrastructure of tech campuses growing outside of San Francisco, the city became both a talent magnet and an appealing place to live for those who didn’t want to move to an isolated campus. Inevitably, this started to price people out of San Francisco, and more recently design talent began to disperse, a trend that was heightened by Covid.

“What we’ve experienced since is tech companies spreading geographically, with Google turning up more in New York for example. Talent has migrated too and LA is that place right now. We follow clients and we follow talent. It doesn’t get simpler than that really; we’re where our clients want us to be and we’re a talent-led business. There’s less of an economic drive for us and more of a client and talent drive,” Ashman says.

The Wolff Olins LA outpost officially opened in October 2023 and with a catchment for work that includes San Francisco and also San Diago “that gives us a really nice spread across the west coast and is a nice complement to our situation in New York,” she says. A mix of seven strategists and designers currently staff the LA studio and there are plans to grow.

The economic merry-go-round

Like How&How – and many other businesses – Ashman felt the brief “post-Covid boom” in London but also feels that global markets have shifted significantly over the last few years, although she warns that this is not anything to gawp at, saying, “I’ve been at Wolff Olins for 30 years so I know it’s quite a cyclical industry.”

Now, as “pent-up demand falls away, post-boom we’re returning to more normal times,” says Ashman, who notes the impact of it being an election year and clients exercizing caution.

“We’re fortunate, being so well known as we’ve always had a good stable of clients and a pipeline of launches coming up, but we pitch for business like everyone else does and pitches are not as plentiful as they were and that’s been the case for the last year now,” she says.

The most notable change in London could be that “the types of briefs we’ve been working on have been changing,” says Ashman, adding, “They’re getting into things like brand architecture, the mechanics of how a business is set up, what’s driving growth, and so at some point, I’d expect that work to lead into more of the brand identity side of things and activation.”

Although she’s reticent to generalize, when both the UK and US elections are out of the way, she says, “I would expect the marketing and advertising activity to pick up again, but currently businesses have gone back to basics in terms of making sure they’re structured in a way that makes sense for their customers in the light of inevitable tech advancements.

“Then there are some companies which are still trying to grow and figure out how to capitalize in the current market.”

Although Ashman keeps a close eye on the fluid situation of global economics and how that’s affecting the type of work that’s out there, as she is at pains to point out, it’s the work itself and the design talent that Wolff Olins follows, with global and local teams built around them.

With this in mind, the agency has been led to LA “but I don’t think it’s a gold rush” says Ashman, who adds, “I don’t think that just by being there it will make the difference. You can’t assume that because you’ve made it work in one city, you understand another”.

Geographical understanding of LA for example, is essential, as different industries are “compartmentalized”, which makes it challenging to know where to set up if you want to work across sectors, “but there are definitely growth opportunities there,” she reasons. Ashman will be looking to grow sustainably around the agency’s clients and by the end of the year expects to have grown the LA team to more than 10.

Like How, Ashman cites the networking opportunities and says that in LA the agency has found work in entertainment, healthcare, tech and cultural institutions. The city is also attracting “a strong contingent of designers,” she says.

While Wolff Olins launched its LA studio to some fanfare last year with an opening party, London-founded Accept and Proceed (A+P) has also been quietly working from an LA satellite office for several months after hiring collective venture partner Jo Rocca in January 2024. (Incidentally Rocca’s husband is JKR executive creative director North America Jason Little. JKR is another studio founded in London. It opened its LA outpost back in 2018).

Most of A+P’s clients are based in the US, so it was a logical decision for the agency’s managing director Sally Oldfield, who plans to grow the LA studio to less than 10 staff over the next 12 months, working across design and strategy.

Going in under the radar

The messaging around the LA studio – A+P’s first overseas – is so under the radar that its site only refers to regional capacity in the continents of US, Europe and Asia. “The LA studio was never really meant to be announced. The people that need to know, know, so there was never a big PR announcement,” Rocca says.

The way that Oldfield talks about the LA studio suggests there was an inevitability for her. “The majority of our clients are in the US, mainly on the west coast, and we don’t do any business in the UK, but we do in Asia, particularly in Korea, so pre-pandemic we wanted to do this anyway. It’s a natural step to want to be closer to clients,” she says.

Recruitment is the other draw for her: “There’s such an incredible talent pool, which has shifted more to LA recently where before it might have just been concentrated in San Francisco,” says Oldfield.

Rocca, who is on the ground, confirms that post-pandemic reorganizations and layoffs from in-house teams have created a pool of talented individuals “wanting to align themselves with work from a values perspective, which for us is really important.”

“Now we need to think about which clients we serve from London and where we set up new pools of local talent,” says Oldfield, who believes being able to come out to LA for those in the London office is also appealing to existing staff who get to do so while retaining the agency culture that they’re used to.

A+P is very upfront with its culture and as a B-Corp doing a lot of work in climate tech and the environment, it’s easy to see why this is a good fit for the agency.

Despite the gravitational pull of LA, Oldfield is measured in her view of London, where she lives and works. “There are incredible successes if you’re working with health, finance, legal or corporate clients but the major global brands who are significant design investors are in the States, they are not here [in London] and we just have such an established set of relationships in the US.”

Although A+P is doing a lot of work in climate tech, Nike is a longstanding client and when senior staff there have left to go to other businesses “they’ve taken those design standards with them, so our portfolio has grown around that,” says Oldfield.

With climate tech in particular, “the progressive views of the state and the impact of investments” help to nurture the sector, which again aligns with A+P’s values, according to Rocca.

Oldfield’s take on the sector in the region is that it’s been buoyed by California’s Inflation Reduction Act, venture capital and startup money, plus it’s “a great marriage of people from academic and tech backgrounds.”

A+Ps portfolio also skews towards other types of tech, wellness, sustainability and apparel, which are all found abundantly in the region.

According to Oldfield, a lot of new business comes from working “peer-to-peer” alongside other agencies for larger clients. She says, “We really nurture those peer partnerships.” She is keen to stress that this is how business materializes rather than being “an upstart on the scene.”

The Mecca of storytelling

While the agency is interested in California as a state, it’s honed in on LA, partly because of the city’s understanding of storytelling for brands, and according to Rocca, this is down to the influence of Hollywood. “It’s the mecca of storytelling and there’s a lot of intersection with brands as the city just knows what great storytelling is,” she says.

As we don’t want The Drum to be responsible for design studios marauding aimlessly through the Hollywood Hills, it is worth cautioning that there are challenges to being in LA and most of the people we spoke to noted those.

Anyone in the UK who has tried to schedule a phone call with west coast US will know that the time difference is an obvious hurdle, which shouldn’t be underestimated. This came up a lot.

A+P tackled some further hurdles, with Rocca addressing that the “culture of a A+P is predominantly English, and therefore adjusting to the American way of working is always going to be a learning curve.”

Different staff expectations in LA

It’s mainly all upside for the agency but Oldfield does point out that the cost of doing business is high, so you will need a solid investment plan to support a move, but she also draws attention to a cultural nuance that any UK agencies working in LA may not have considered. “In LA there’s a high expectation from staff about how they should be nurtured and coached. It’s not a downside but it’s a big adjustment and takes some getting used to.”

This extends even to entry-level staff, and within a “feedback culture” all staff have high expectations of themselves and their managers. “They’re educated to expect more from work,” says Oldfield.

So, if you’re gazing out of the window of your UK studio dreaming about a life of sun-kissed prosperity in LA, it looks like you’re probably going to need someone on the ground to line-up clients, having already developed a tacit understanding of what local workers and clients want, and where industries are based across the city. If you’re willing to put the time in, it seems the rewards are there.