Studio
Six people, one room, two flights up.
Beamwright has been on the third floor of 92 Weybosset Street since 2019. Rosa and Elliot started it. The four people who joined afterward will each give you a different reason for staying.
The studio
Small, and staying that way
Rosa Tanaka and Elliot Marsh started Beamwright in 2019, after enough years between them of watching good strategy die somewhere in a handover. The fix was not a bigger agency. It was a smaller one, where the person who writes the position also writes the headline and has to live with both.
There are six of us now. We run four engagements at a time, which is the number at which everybody still knows what everybody else is doing, and we would rather tell you about a wait than take a deposit and put you in a queue.
Ask who would be in the room. You get two names and what each of them would be doing, which is a shorter answer than that question usually receives.
- 2019
- the year Rosa and Elliot took the lease
- 6
- people, which is the entire studio
- 41
- brands worked on since the first one
- 8–12 weeks
- the length of a normal engagement
Who you would be working with
Six people work here. Five of them agreed to be photographed.
Rosa Tanaka
Partner, strategy
Rosa runs the first two weeks of every engagement: the interviews, the numbers, and the written point of view they add up to. She spent nine years in-house before this, three of them on the side of the table that has to make a strategy work on a Monday morning.
Elliot Marsh
Partner, creative direction
Elliot decides what the work looks like and holds it steady while five other people have opinions. He was a typographer first, which is why he will rebuild a wordmark over a letter nobody else has noticed, and be right about it.
June Ferreira
Writer, naming and voice
June writes the names, the voice rules and most of the sentences a client ends up repeating for years. She covered city government for a newspaper first, where she learned that a sentence people can repeat beats a sentence that is merely complete.
Theo Bramhall
Designer
Theo builds the things a company actually uses: the invoice, the deck template, the third page of the site. He came from packaging, where a design that cannot be produced is simply wrong rather than merely disappointing.
Nadia Sorrell
Producer
Nadia keeps four engagements from colliding and is the person who points out, correctly, that a week is not free just because nothing is written in it yet. She ran production for a print shop for eight years and has never lost a file.
What they said afterward
In the second week they told us our problem was not the logo, which is not what we had hired them to say, and then they proved it out of our own booking numbers. The crossing is the product now. The summer sailings sold out three weeks earlier than the year before.
I was expecting a presentation. What arrived was a page and a half I could read to the board without translating it first. Two branch managers were using the new language in their own words inside a month, which has never happened here with anything.
We went from selling to people who could watch us make it to selling to buyers who never will. They worked out what had to travel on the box and were ruthless about what did not. I argued about the fourth glaze for a week, and they were right.