What Fen & Marble Actually Use to Pitch New Clients
By Tom James
There is no deck. There is a notebook, a set of pencils, and a single sheet of A4 with the brief written on it in the client's own words.
Process stories are easy to romanticise. The studios worth listening to describe theirs in terms of what it costs them, not what it saves.
Rae Okonjo, who runs new business at the studio, has been close to it from the start.
The decision
The first meeting lasts ninety minutes and produces one page. The studio writes it, the client edits it, and nothing is designed until both sides sign the same sentence.
It took three attempts. The first was abandoned at the end of the first month, the second survived until costing, and the third is the one standing.
The method loses them work, and they can tell you exactly how much.
A picture in the first meeting is a promise you have not costed yet.
Okonjo
In practice
They stopped presenting visual work at pitch stage in 2023, after tracking that four of five projects that began with images ended in a rewritten brief.
None of this scales cleanly. Ask any of them to run it across forty people and they go quiet.
It has been well received by the audience it was made for and largely ignored by everyone else, which the team says is the outcome they wanted.
Asked what they would change, the team answers with process rather than product: earlier conversations, fewer assumptions carried over from the last job, and a willingness to lose an argument in the first week rather than the last.
What comes next
Of the eleven pitches they ran last year on the one-page brief, they won seven, and none was rescoped after signature.
