How We Got Here
From a three-person branding studio working out of a rented attic to the client workspace thousands of small agencies now run their whole practice inside.
Every client conversation ran through one inbox that all of us shared
We were a branding studio of three. Everyone had a lane — design, copy, accounts — but all of us answered clients from the same address, about every project at once. One mailbox, three people, more open jobs than any of us could hold in our heads. You can picture how that went.
The inbox never emptied. Briefs, invoice questions, new enquiries and a client asking where the logo files had gone, all in the same list. So we did what any small, overrun team does: we coped, badly, for years.
2013
From burnout
to a better plan
Between designing, building and answering clients, there was no time left for the business itself. Hiring felt like something other studios did. Invoicing, bookkeeping and anything resembling planning happened at the last possible minute.
We were worn down, week after week. The particular kind of worn down that makes you consider throwing a keyboard across a room.*
We told ourselves it was sustainable. It was not. The work was good and the clients were happy, but four-day weeks stayed a fantasy and holidays were something we rescheduled twice and then quietly cancelled.
If we wanted the studio to grow — as a team and as a business — something structural had to change. No more midnight invoicing. No more dropping our own work to answer a message that could have waited until Tuesday.
We looked at every tool on the market and none of them fitted the shape of studio work. So we stopped looking and started building the client workspace we actually wanted.
*No keyboards were harmed in the making of Copperpan.
The first version of Copperpan is born
Two things mattered more than anything else: make the day easier for our own team, and make working with us easier for our clients. Handing something over should feel finished, not forwarded.
We pictured every person on the team owning their own thread — sharing progress, sending quotes, collecting approvals and taking payment without a single “quick question” landing in a shared inbox.
In the gaps between client work and client email, we put together the first version and used it ourselves, on live projects, for a year.
Account leads ran the conversation while the rest of us stayed on the work. Designers finally knew whether a client was happy. Clients finally had one person to ask.
It was still a first version, and it showed. Plenty of it needed rethinking.
2015 — 2021
Growing and scaling the studio (at last)
With a real process underneath us we could put our attention back on the business, and the growth we had been chasing finally showed up. Around twenty specialists from our Lomand Field team moved into account roles inside Copperpan, while the network we could draw on passed a hundred designers and developers.
Four-day weeks stopped being a joke. Holidays actually happened.
As our own needs grew, so did the feature list. We kept shipping improvements to make Copperpan a better place to run a studio.
Once Copperpan carried our whole workflow, the team worked better together than it ever had. Which raised an obvious question: if it works this well for us, why would it not work for any studio?
Past the hours it saves, Copperpan changed how our client relationships feel. We stay organised across ten or more live projects at a time. It is the reason we could scale without the wheels coming off.
The best part: it made every one of those things easier, and a few more besides. It can do the same for your studio.
If you want a calmer way to run client communication, tighten up the process you already have, and grow without losing the plot, Copperpan was built for you.
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