Format-3

A digital product studio, co-built from a blank page to UK Start-Up of the Year.

Product, design and client strategy for a distributed team across Nashville, London, Europe and South America. Home to Pendragon Cycle, Paradigm Health and Bentkey.

Format-3 ran on one bet: remove the seam between strategy and making. A partner who could run the client strategy and still be hands-on in the work, so nothing got diluted between the pitch and the pixels.

One capability became a real lever. I was the only person on the team who could do the film-plus-generative mix, and it sold roughly 20% more creative work to existing clients. For a studio this size that is a revenue driver.

That mix, strategy owned by a partner who still did the work, is how a two-person-founded, fully distributed studio won recognition against agencies many times its size.

My co-founder and I had spent years together at Fantasy, and we kept seeing the same trade across the industry. Agencies that could do real craft were small and hard to scale. Agencies that could scale were templated, and craft was the first casualty. Clients paid a premium either way.

In March 2023, with the agency market heading into a downturn, that gap looked sharper. We started Format-3 from zero, betting that a studio run by people who could sit in the strategy conversation and still do the work themselves would not have to make that trade.

Being a partner at a small studio is a different job from being a senior designer at a big one. The craft does not get easier. It arrives bundled with everything that used to be someone else's job: winning and keeping clients, strategy sessions at C-level, the portfolio, and a team spread across Nashville, London, Europe and South America. Most people who are excellent at one side of that are mediocre at the other, and a studio this size cannot afford mediocre at either.

Growth had to come from being better than the alternative, because the market was shrinking.

Partner and CPO, March 2023 to October 2025, based between Nashville and London, remote. Player-coach throughout, which is how I have run every leadership seat I have held: hands-on in the work while leading the people around it.

At Format-3 that meant product design, client strategy at C-level and presenting the work and the reasoning behind it to the people signing off on it, the portfolio, client acquisition and retention, creating and directing motion and video, and building the talent pipeline as the studio grew. Leading the designers meant reviewing their work every day and holding one standard across every engagement, whatever the client. I never handed the craft off entirely to someone else.

Three of the studio's engagements have their own case studies on this site. Pendragon Cycle, creative and design direction for a fantasy franchise's cinematic brand experience, a Webby People's Voice winner. Paradigm Health, product, UX and strategy direction for a boutique practice's national-scale vision. Bentkey, product and design direction for a kids' streaming platform, #1 at launch. Each one carries its own honest account of who did what.

The rest of the portfolio ran just as wide. April Knit Studio's editorial, photography-led brand and site. Push That Button, a UK drop-commerce app redesign built on a full brand-strategy workshop. CareHive, a health-tech care-navigation platform where the redesign cut the patient journey from 14 steps to 4 and reached MVP in two months, built in code alongside CareHive's head of engineering. And Logater, an end-to-end two-sided freight-dispatch product for admins and drivers alike.

One credit goes the other way. TripleKey, a code-security platform later acquired at the pre-seed stage, is one of the studio's own featured case studies. My part in it was advisory, on client relations.