Industry Agnostic by Design

One of the first questions prospective clients ask us is some version of, "Do you have experience in our industry?"

The answer is usually yes. We've worked with higher education institutions, government agencies, nonprofits, manufacturers, enterprise tech, healthcare organizations, and media companies, among many others.

But the follow up question we want to ask is: “Does it matter?”

We are industry agnostic by design. Not by accident, not because we couldn't pick a specialty, and not because we're trying to be everything to everyone. We've made a deliberate choice to work across industries because it makes our work better and more useful to our clients, no matter what space they operate in.

Consumer Expectations Don't Stay in One Lane

We often say, "The last best experience that anyone has anywhere becomes the minimum expectation for the experience they want everywhere." It's a concept we unfortunately can't take credit for because  it came from IBM's Bridget van Kralingen.

The version of you that orders groceries through a same-day delivery app is the same person who logs in to a benefits portal at work, renews a professional license on a state agency website, and submits a request to a vendor's customer service team. The bar set by Spotify, Amazon, Google Maps, and Netflix doesn't reset when you switch contexts. If anything, friction in a business or government interaction feels more glaring right after a frictionless consumer one.

No industry is immune to this. We've heard plenty of versions of "but our users are different." Sophisticated professionals. Technical buyers. Internal staff. Public sector employees. That framing of "different" can quietly become an excuse for "we don't have to try as hard."

We don't buy it. Users are users.

They bring their full set of expectations with them everywhere they go.

Good Ideas Don't Have a Home Industry

When we audit the landscape around a project, we don't only look at the obvious comparables. Looking exclusively at the competition tends to produce work that fits in rather than work that stands out.

For a manufacturing client publishing video, mixed media articles, and a podcast, we might study how Netflix structures browsing, how The New York Times layers multimedia into a story, or how Spotify handles personalization. For a state agency rethinking how to present a complex set of services, we might look at how a retailer organizes a sprawling catalog or how a fintech app explains a confusing concept in plain language.

This cross-pollination works in both directions. Lessons we learn building a higher ed website inform how we approach a healthcare project. Patterns that succeed on a government site sometimes show up in a B2B redesign. The more industries we work across, the bigger our library of "we tried something like this once, and here's what we learned" becomes.

When Everyone Copies Their Neighbor, They All Get the Same Grade

There is real value in deep industry expertise, and plenty of agencies have built thoughtful, focused practices around a single vertical. We've learned from many of them and we respect the work they do.

But specializing in one industry comes with a quiet trade-off. When an agency works only in higher ed, or only in healthcare, or only in financial services, the reference set narrows. Competitive analysis becomes recursive. The same patterns get reinforced, the same conventions get repeated, and over time the work across an entire industry starts to converge.

You can see this if you spend an afternoon clicking through ten sites in almost any given sector. The navigation patterns look the same. The hero treatments feel familiar. The same stock-photography energy shows up again and again. It isn't bad work. It's just everyone studying everyone else.

Working across industries gives us a wider reference set and a built-in incentive to question the conventions of any one space. When a client tells us, "this is just how things are done in our industry," we have the perspective to ask whether that's a meaningful constraint or an inherited habit.

What This Means for Our Work

Being industry agnostic isn't about avoiding expertise. It's about insisting on a different kind of it: expertise in strategy, design, technology, and marketing that we sharpen across a wide variety of problems, and a closed-loop way of working that connects what we learn in one part of the customer journey to every other part.

The clients we work with don't need us to be the most well-versed agency in their specific corner of the world. The people inside their organizations already know that corner intimately. What they need is a partner who can bring an outside perspective, a wider reference set, and a healthy skepticism toward "the way it's always been done."

That's what we bring, by design.