Still a future for Designer's Republic, says founder Ian
THE founder of the Designer's Republic, Ian Anderson, insists that there is still a future for the influential Sheffield graphic design studio, which went out of business last month after 23 years.
He has bought back the name of the brand and intends to continue design work on a small scale with a young designer who was one of the nine staff made redundant when tDR ceased trading.
Anderson identifies a major cause of the Workstation-based company's downfall as the fact that it had grown out of proportion to how it had started.
"Five years ago we were not far away from what has happened now and in some ways a lot closer," he says. "It's largely a matter of scale as to what we owed and what was owed to us. Before I could put in a bit of cash but when a client owes you 120,000, you can't cover that."
It was around five years ago that tDR reached a crossroads where there was a choice between stripping it back or expanding.
"We said we are going to have to make it a more efficient business but just as that happened we were offered high profile and very interesting projects from Coca-Cola who were rebranding in the United States," says Anderson. "They were high earners but also high volume and needed more staff."
Some of the new arrivals came from a background in larger agencies and in his view that created a tension between the need to bring in a volume of work and the desire to pursue the more creative and challenging projects which had established tDR's name.
"It was looking to be something that really it wasn't," he argues. "It had always been creative-led and delivered great work and was as confident with global brands such as working with Coke in Atlanta as designing the next Jarvis Cocker album. Truly successful companies operate in the image of their creator."
He concedes that Steve McKevitt, a long associate of tDR who took over as acting managing director in recent months, was probably right in his frequent assertion that Designer's Republic was "a great brand but a rubbish business" (although he didn't use the word rubbish).
Anderson formed the company in 1986 to design flyers for bands, later expanding into sleeves and album covers, but he says that changes in the music business over the past four or five years were a major contributory factor in tDR's decline. Even the major labels were becoming cautious about the amount of money they were prepared to spend on design so that the rewards for the kind of big concepts the company were used to were not cost-effective.
"The music industry became a no-go area," concludes Anderson.
So what is the future? "Moving forward, there are two things really," he ventures. "For me personally what I would like to do is carry on some of my consultancy work and also to write a book. Although I was commissed three years ago, and managed to talk myself into doing two books, I didn't manage to get one done.
"That's important but I will also want to get tDR going along the same lines it was when we started. I am not trying to recapture the past but looking at the model which suited the way I work and to take it forward.
The work we have done in recent years has been appreciated but I don't think people will look at that and say it was amazing or inspired me and that's what I want to deliver for myself and my clients."
Steve McKevitt, along with Rob Brearley, former creative director of tDR, have set up a new graphic design studio called Golden.
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