On saying no to redesigns

Around two-thirds of the inbound briefs that arrive in our contact form get a polite written no. We track this; the number has been stable for the last three years. The breakdown is consistent year over year: about half of the declines are scope problems (the budget does not match the brief), about a quarter are fit problems (we are not the right studio for the work), and the remainder are diagnosis problems (the client is convinced they need a redesign and we believe they need something else).

The diagnosis-problem decline is the most useful one to talk about. A common version: a company arrives convinced they need a full marketing-site redesign. They send us their current site. We use the product. We read the page they think is broken. We notice that the page is, structurally, fine. The conversion problem is somewhere else — usually in the product itself, in the pricing model, in the onboarding flow, in something the marketing site cannot fix. A redesign of the marketing site, in that situation, will move the conversion-rate needle by a tenth of a percent and consume eight weeks of the team's focus. We decline, and we tell the client what we believe the actual problem is.

About a fifth of those declined briefs come back to us within twelve months. Sometimes the company has gone away, fixed the underlying problem, and now actually does need a marketing-site redesign. Sometimes the company has gone away, decided we were right about the diagnosis but wrong about the priority, and come back for a different engagement. Either is a good outcome. The worst outcome — and we have learned this slowly, over years — is to take a brief we suspect is the wrong intervention, run it competently for two months, and watch the client get exactly the design they paid for and none of the business impact they were actually after.

Saying no in writing within two working days, with the actual diagnosis spelled out, is the cheapest way we know to protect both sides of that table. The client gets a more useful answer than a six-week project would have given them. The studio gets to spend those six weeks on work where the design is the right intervention. The decline rate is not a sign of arrogance or scarcity; it is a sign that the studio is honest about what design can and cannot fix.