Loading
Loading
The studio
Attention is not won by being louder. It is won by having a position specific enough that it could be wrong. Most of the work we are brought in to fix is well made and says nothing in particular — a company describing itself the way its category describes itself, hoping craft will make up the difference. It does not. We start by settling what is true and defensible about a business, and only then decide what to make.
01What we hold to
If a competitor could put their name on your strategy without changing a word, you do not have one yet. We would rather send you away with something narrow and contested than something broad and comfortable.
Campaigns compound. We plan for the second and third year of an idea before we present the first, and we will argue against work that cannot survive being repeated.
Not in the presentation. On a wet phone screen, on the wrong paper stock, at the bottom of a shelf. If it does not hold up there, it does not hold up.
Where a result is not attributable, we say so. Where an idea is a bet, we say that too. A studio that has never been uncertain in front of a client has been managing them rather than working for them.
02How we got here
Marguerite Okonjo-Vale started Lumaire with two people and a client list drawn entirely from publishing and the arts.
Tobias Renn joined to build positioning as a standalone practice, after three consecutive projects where the creative brief turned out to be the wrong argument.
The studio stopped selling content by the piece and started building publishing models clients could run themselves.
A second studio for production, editorial and digital, opened to work across European time zones without asking anyone to relocate.
Lumaire remains independent and has no plans to be otherwise. Roughly two thirds of a year’s work comes from clients already in the building.
03Partners and practice leads
Lumaire has no freelance bench standing in for the names below. If one of them is in your first meeting, they are on your project.
Founder and Executive Creative Director · London
Marguerite started Lumaire in 2014 after eleven years art-directing for publishers and cultural institutions, on the theory that most brand problems are editorial problems wearing a different coat. She leads the studio’s creative standard, chairs the quarterly review of every piece of work leaving the building, and still personally art-directs two projects a year.
Partner, Strategy · London
Tobias runs the positioning practice and has spent most of his career in categories where the buyer is technical and the audience is not — infrastructure, instruments, spirits with long production cycles. He is the person in the room most likely to ask what evidence would change your mind, and he means it as a working question rather than a rhetorical one.
Creative Director · London
Sena leads brand and campaign creative across the studio’s consumer work. She came to Lumaire from packaging and retail design, which shows in her insistence that an idea has to survive being printed small, badly, on the wrong stock, in a shop nobody chose the lighting for.
Editorial Director · Lisbon
Nadia built and ran a long-form desk at a European business title before joining Lumaire to lead the editorial practice. She designs publishing models that outlive the enthusiasm that started them, and she edits client subject-matter experts rather than replacing them, which is slower and produces work people actually believe.
Campaign Director · London
Colm owns how campaigns are phased, bought and measured. He spent seven years on the media side before moving to the studio, and treats the media plan as a creative constraint to be designed with rather than a spreadsheet to be handed over once the work is finished.
Head of Digital Experience · Lisbon
Rafael leads the studio’s digital practice and works embedded with client engineering teams rather than at arm’s length from them. He holds Lumaire’s accessibility and performance standards, and has a standing rule that nothing ships until it works on a five-year-old phone on a bad connection.
We are sector-agnostic in principle and not in practice. These are the categories we have worked in most, and where we can be useful in the first week rather than the third.
Lumaire is a fictional company. Every person, client, campaign, address, telephone number and figure on this website was invented to demonstrate a website architecture, and none of it refers to a real organisation or a real person.
This site is a HubZero Blueprint demonstration of the Marketing architecture in the Expressive design language. Nothing on it is connected to a backend: the contact page opens your own email client rather than submitting a form, and no information about your visit is collected or stored.
Next step
We take on roughly eight new engagements a year and would rather start the conversation early than be briefed late.