About the Author:
Stan Hristov leads Dtail Studio, a Barcelona-based branding and product design studio working with healthcare, AI and enterprise teams including Elli Cares, OXOS, Cinelytic, Evolus, Cubee, and more.
Of the clients we’ve worked with since 2019, 79% have come back with a second project. Some are on their fifth. A few have been with us for ten years, long enough that we’ve started redesigning things we designed the first time around.
Every time we look at why, the answer is almost never “the design was good.”
Good design is the entry fee. Every design studio a client is talking to can show them a beautiful screen, and the screen is almost never what the decision actually comes down to. What keeps people is everything around the work: how you handle a disagreement, how you spend their money, how often you interrupt them, and whether the invoice is ever a topic in the room.
Here’s the client retention strategy we’ve built.
1. We listen before having an opinion.
Fifteen years of building products doesn’t mean we know every business. It means we know how to find out quickly, and how to spot the moment something stops adding up.
The projects that reach us usually started as an idea someone carried around for months, sometimes years. They have already asked the whys and the hows. In the shower, at 2am, in a slightly tense conversation with a co-founder. They know things about their market that we are not going to learn from one discovery call and a competitor audit.
So the first stretch of any project is listening. Then asking. Then asking again.
Once we do understand the business, and not just the brief, we sometimes land somewhere different from the client. That is the moment we say so.
We bring a recommendation with the reasoning attached. Here’s what we’d do. Here’s why. Here’s what we think happens if we go the other way.
It’s still your company and your call, and plenty of times you’ll overrule us. Some of our best work came out of a client pushing back hard on something we were certain about. But nobody hires a studio for a pair of hands that agrees with them. You’re paying for the pattern recognition those years bought, and for our willingness to spend it in the room instead of saving it for the retrospective.
2. We commit to a direction early to protect the budget.
A wrong turn in week two costs a conversation. The same wrong turn in week nine costs a rebuild, and the client pays for it twice.
Our process is front-loaded on purpose. Strategic planning, then fast and wide exploration, then an actual decision before anything moves forward. Not “let’s keep both directions alive and see how everyone feels next week.” A decision, with a date on it.
That’s a budget argument at least as much as a creative one, and one of the simplest ways of avoiding scope creep in design projects.
Very little gets thrown away this way. That isn’t discipline for its own sake. It’s the client’s money staying inside the work instead of quietly leaking into rework nobody planned for.
3. We don’t bill for every Slack message.
The moment a client wonders whether a question is billable is the moment they stop asking. Clients who stop asking end up making decisions with less information than they had available.
Prescheduled weekly meetings. They’re short, they have something in them to decide, and they are not five people taking turns reading out what’s already in the file.
Everything in between happens in Slack. It’s one of our client communication best practices that costs us nothing and saves clients the most time. A quick answer, a second opinion, a sanity check on something that isn’t even ours. These are the small things that otherwise sit in a queue for six days and quietly stall a sprint, and we don’t put a meter on them.
Momentum is a deliverable. Most projects don’t die of bad work. They stall, very politely, while everyone waits for a calendar slot.
4. We settle payment upfront, every time.
Maybe you’re asking, “should design agencies charge upfront?” Taking payment in advance has nothing to do with cashflow nerves and everything to do with what an open invoice does to a project.
While money is unresolved, everything bends slightly around it. Studios start guarding scope. Clients start holding leverage. Somebody is mentally drafting a chase email during a design review. None of it gets said out loud and all of it lands in the work.
Settle it at the start and it disappears. Every conversation for the next three months is about the product, which is the only thing either side wanted to talk about in the first place. It also means both of us have committed to something real, so the relationship opens as two teams with one problem rather than a buyer keeping a vendor honest.
5. We do unbillable work that wasn’t asked for.
It’s terrible business advice, which is exactly why it works. Nobody makes a free thing for a client they don’t care about, and clients can tell the difference immediately.
Designers here draw for fun. There’s no policy and no slide about innovation time. It’s simply what people who like this job do on a Thursday evening, and more often than not the thing they’re pushing belongs to a client’s project, because that’s what has been living in their head all week. A different take on an onboarding flow. An illustration direction nobody asked for. A logo lockup that fixes something we’d all quietly noticed and nobody had raised.
When something good comes out of it, we send it over. No change order, no note about how this would fall outside the current scope. Sometimes it gets a polite no. Fairly often it becomes a thing.
“Half the things we ended up loving most were never in the scope. They just turned up one morning with a note saying we thought you might like this.” – M. Campos, CTO, XRay Analytics
6. We choose projects we’re excited about.
What we’re looking for is a business the team actually wants to think about.
Very often that’s early-stage: founders who turn up with far more conviction than budget, building something with a real chance of becoming special. Those are the projects our designers quietly compete to get on, and who wants to be on a project shapes the outcome more than anything written in the brief.
It’s also where design earns the most. The decisions a company makes in its first year are the ones it has to live inside for the next ten, and getting them right early is worth considerably more than correcting them later with a bigger budget and a worse mood.
We’re much less interested in work nobody in the studio is excited about, whatever number is attached to it. Everyone who has ever hired an agency knows exactly what that looks like when it arrives.
How our long-term design partnerships do the heavy lifting.
- The explaining stops.
Nobody has to explain again why the brand sounds the way it does, or reopen a decision that was settled two years ago. Between us we remember not only what was chosen but what was rejected and why, which is the part that tends to disappear when a company switches agency and quietly ends up somewhere it has already been.
- Feedback gets faster and more honest.
When there’s trust in the room, nobody softens a note into three sentences of diplomacy, and nobody reads a blunt one as an insult. A plain “no, this isn’t it” on a Tuesday can save two weeks.
- The direction holds, too.
Instead of a pile of projects that each look like the year they were made in, the work starts to accumulate. Website, product, deck, campaign, all pulling the same way, because the same people have been carrying the reasoning the whole time.
- And then there’s freedom, which is the part designers care about most.
A client who has watched us be right, watched us be wrong, and seen how we handled both will greenlight the braver option. That isn’t a reward for loyalty. It’s simply what becomes possible once nobody is auditioning any more.
Is your designer the right one for the long-haul?
If you’re compiling questions to ask before hiring a product designer, don’t just check what their last project looked like. Ask what happened the first time they disagreed with a client. Ask what happened when something went wrong. Ask whether anyone from the original team is still on the account.
The answers to those tell you far more about the next twelve months than any portfolio will.
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