You should find clients like I do. But how?

There is a version of this essay that would be easy to write. It would have a list. Research the brand, personalise the email, follow up twice, track everything in a spreadsheet. It would be useful in the way a recipe is useful, and it would leave out the only part that actually matters, which is why you were in the kitchen in the first place.

I don't approach every brand with the same pitch. I'm not sure I approach brands with a pitch at all. What I do is closer to paying attention for longer than is strictly efficient.

Interest first

It starts with brands that genuinely interest me. Not brands that look like good clients on paper, but ones where something catches: a product made with more care than it is being sold with, a founder whose taste is clearly ahead of their marketing, a brand that seems to have a following without having asked for one.

Interest is not a soft criterion. It is the only one that survives a long project. Every engagement has a stretch in the middle where the excitement of the first meeting has worn off and the results haven't arrived yet. What carries you through that stretch is having believed in the brand before anyone was paying you to.

Then I try to understand where they are commercially. Not the story they tell on their About page, but the one their decisions tell. Where they sell and where they don't. Which markets they ship to and which they seem to be circling. Whether the prices hold or the sale banner has become permanent. Whether the brand looks like it is growing into its ambitions or straining against its own limits.

From there, the question becomes: what are they trying to achieve? Sometimes it's visible, a new market, a launch, a store. Often it isn't, and the best you can do is form a hypothesis and hold it loosely. And only then the last question, the one that decides whether there is anything to say at all: where, specifically, could we contribute?

Looking is not enough

Curiosity is where it starts, but for me it doesn't stop at looking. I want to experience the brands I'm interested in: buy the thing, wear it, use it for a few weeks, stand in the shop, open the parcel, read the care card, write to customer service with a real question. A brand's website tells me what it wants me to think. The experience tells me what it is.

There is a reason this matters more than it sounds, and economists named it decades ago. In 1970 Phillip Nelson drew a line between search goods and experience goods: products whose quality you can judge before buying, and products whose quality you only discover by using them. Almost everything the brands I care about sell sits on the second side of that line. You cannot know how a jacket wears in rain, how a ring feels after a month, or whether a brand answers an email kindly, from a product page. You find out by living with it.

The psychology of curiosity explains why the pull is so strong. George Loewenstein's well-known information-gap theory describes curiosity as the discomfort of noticing a gap between what you know and what you want to know. Looking at a brand from the outside opens that gap. Experiencing it is the only thing that closes it. Anything less leaves you with an impression, and impressions are exactly what brands are best at designing.

And experience changes the quality of what you can say afterwards. Opinions formed from the outside are about the surface: the photography, the logo, the tone of the captions. Opinions formed from the inside are about the moments that decide whether customers come back, which are usually small, unglamorous and invisible from a feed. When I eventually write to a brand, I want to be writing from inside it.

The early adopter's advantage

I think of myself as an early adopter. I'm usually among the first to try a new product, a new platform or a new place, and I'm comfortable with things that are not finished yet.

The term comes from Everett Rogers' Diffusion of Innovations, first published in 1962, which describes how new ideas spread through a population: from a small group of innovators, to early adopters, then to the early and late majority, and finally to the laggards. What makes early adopters interesting in Rogers' model is not that they are first. It is that they are listened to. They are close enough to the mainstream to be trusted by it, and open enough to try things before the mainstream has decided they are safe. They are the bridge.

That matters in two directions. For finding clients, it means I tend to meet brands at the moment they most need someone who understands them: early, before the story has settled, while there is still something to shape. For the brands themselves, it raises a practical question that comes up in almost every conversation we have. How do you reach early adopters?

Not with reach. Early adopters are rarely found through broad advertising, because they aren't waiting to be told about things. They go looking. Seen from the inside, as one of them, what works feels more like an invitation than a campaign.

Be where new things appear: launch platforms, pre-order lists, small events, the specialist newsletter with four thousand readers, the community that forms around a category before anyone calls it a category. Offer access rather than discounts, because being first and being close to the making matters to us far more than paying less. A waitlist, a preview, twenty minutes with the founder. Ask for our opinion and then visibly use it; we'll tell you what's unfinished, which is the whole reason to have us. And give us something worth passing on, accurately, because what early adopters say travels further than what brands say about themselves.

(It's also why The Lab has a role specifically for early adopters: people who test products before they're everywhere and tell brands what they think.)

A contact email is not a reason

Finding someone's email address takes a few minutes. Having a reason to write to them can take weeks, and sometimes the honest outcome of that work is that there isn't one yet.

A reason is not a compliment, and it isn't a service list. It is an observation about the brand's situation that is specific enough to be wrong. You seem to be selling in three European markets but only telling your story in one. Your product photography is doing the work your positioning isn't. An observation like that invites a conversation, because it shows you've already been thinking about their problem rather than your pipeline.

The difference is felt immediately on the other side. A pitch asks for attention. A reason offers something in exchange for it.

The tension nobody likes to admit

Here is the uncomfortable part, and it is the part most advice about client acquisition skips. You want your business to grow. Growth needs clients. And yet the most important skill in finding clients is being selective about them.

Those two things pull against each other all the time. Every brand you decide not to approach is revenue you've chosen not to chase. Every "not quite right" is a small act of faith that something better is coming, and faith does not pay salaries.

I don't think the tension resolves. I think you hold it, consciously, every time. What helps is being precise about what selectivity actually means, because it's easy to confuse it with taste.

Not every beautiful brand is a suitable client. Some of the most beautiful brands are beautifully finished. Their problem, if they have one, isn't one we're built to solve, and admiring them is not a business case. And not every potential client needs what you're selling. A brand can be growing, well funded, enthusiastic about working with you, and still need something else entirely: a distributor, a better product, six months of patience. Selling them your services anyway is not ambition. It's a slow way of damaging both of you.

So selectivity, for me, is not about prestige. It's about the overlap between three things: a brand I'm curious about, a moment when they need to change something, and a contribution we can actually make. Curiosity, commercial awareness and knowing when you can make a difference. When all three are present, the conversation starts itself. When one is missing, the most respectful thing is usually to wait.

What curiosity is for

People sometimes treat curiosity as a personality trait, something you either have or don't. In this work it's closer to a discipline. It is the willingness to keep asking about a brand after you've formed your first opinion of it, because first opinions are usually about how a brand looks, and the useful questions are about how it works.

Commercial awareness is what keeps curiosity honest. Without it you end up fascinated by brands you can't help. With it, you can see the gap between what a brand is and what it is selling, and that gap is where a studio like ours belongs. We came from the growth side first, and it shapes how I look: I notice the brand, but I'm also always asking what would have to be true for it to sell more, in more places, to the right people. (It's also why so much of our work involves taking brands into new markets and the rooms where partnerships start.)

On no

You will hear no far more than yes. You will also hear nothing at all, which is the most common answer of the lot, and the least informative.

A no is rarely a verdict on you. It is information about timing. The brand may have just hired someone. The budget may be committed until the spring. The founder may agree with every word you wrote and still not be ready to act on it. The observation that made you write might be exactly right and simply early.

That's why I don't think a no closes anything. It's a statement about now. Brands move: they launch, they expand, they hit the ceiling of what they can do alone. The relationship that was wrong in one season can be right in the next, and whether it gets the chance depends almost entirely on how you received the first answer. If you took it graciously, kept paying attention, and didn't turn their no into a campaign of reminders, you're still someone they'd be glad to hear from.

There is also a no that is worth listening to more carefully: the one that tells you your reason was wrong. Maybe you misread their situation. Maybe what you thought they needed is something they've already solved. That kind of no is uncomfortable and useful in equal measure, because it makes your next reason better.

And sometimes, if we're honest, the no is right. Part of being selective is accepting that the other side is selective too.

So, how?

Find brands that genuinely interest you, and experience them rather than just looking. Understand where they are commercially, and what they might be trying to do next. Work out, specifically, where you could contribute, and be honest when the answer is nowhere. Write to people with a reason rather than a request. Treat no as a statement about timing, and leave every conversation in a state you'd be happy to return to.

None of that fits into a template, which is rather the point. The pitch you send everyone is the one nobody remembers. The one you only could have written to them is the start of a relationship, sometimes now and sometimes a year from now.

If you're a brand reading this and wondering whether your moment has arrived, tell us what you're working on. If it hasn't, we'll say so.