Everyone says they collaborate. It's on the website, in the pitch, in the introductory email. And mostly what it means is: we'll send you three options and you'll pick one.

That's not co-creation. That's a menu.

What we actually do is harder to explain, and a bit harder to do.

When we start a project, we don't disappear for six weeks and come back with answers. We work in sprints. Short, iterative, with the client in the room. We show work that isn't finished. We share thinking that hasn't landed yet. We ask questions we don't have the answers to. And then we figure it out together.

This makes some clients nervous at first. They're used to a process where the studio is the expert and they're the approver. Someone shows up with a polished deck, there's a round of feedback, a round of amends, and eventually everyone agrees on something that's probably fine.

We don't do rounds of amends. We don't present finished work for approval. We build it together, which means the client is never sitting across the table from something they've never seen before. They've been part of making it. By the time we're refining, they already know it's right. Not because we told them, but because they were there when it became right.

The trust this builds is different from the trust you get at the end of a traditional process.

It's not the trust of: we delivered what we promised. It's the trust of: we figured something out together that neither of us could have found alone. That's the version worth working for.

It also means the work is better. Not because we're talented (hopefully that too), but because the client knows things we don't. They know their business, their audience, their constraints, the conversations that have been happening internally for years. When they're genuinely part of the process, that knowledge shapes the work. When they're approvers at the end of a process, it shows up as a comment on a PDF.

Co-creation asks something of clients too, and it's worth being honest about that.

It asks for time. It asks for openness to seeing things that aren't finished. It asks for the confidence to say what you actually think rather than what you think a client is supposed to say. Not everyone is ready for that, and that's fine. But for the ones who are, the process feels less like commissioning a studio and more like building something together. Which, if you're going to spend months working closely with people, is a much better way to spend the time.

We're two years in. Still learning what this looks like at different scales, with different kinds of clients, on different kinds of projects. But the thing we keep coming back to is this: the best work we've made hasn't come from us presenting the right answer. It's come from being in the room long enough that the right answer emerged.

That's what we mean by co-creation. It's less glamorous than the word suggests. And a lot more interesting.

Natasha Szczerb, Co-founder and Managing Director, BADBERRIES