Verified Expert Brand Designer: Studio Rodrigo

Ritik Dholakia worked as a startup product manager before he co-founded Studio Rodrigo, a branding and product design agency based in NYC. Unlike traditional branding firms, Studio Rodrigo is proud of its product design chops, especially when it comes to helping early-stage startups build version one of their product. It’s not an easy balancing act since most companies eventually want to bring their product design talent in-house, but it turns out, Studio Rodrigo can help with that too. Learn more about the studio in our Q&A with founder Ritik Dholakia.

Studio Rodrigo’s unique approach:

“Studio Rodrigo listened to all of our goals and dreams, concerns and uncertainties, and created a brand identity, website, and marketing materials that were true to our vision but better than anything we could have imagined.” Tze Chun, NYC, Founder, Uprise Art

“Basically, we’re a full-stack product design team. We have people who can do brand identity from a pure graphic design and visual communications standpoint, and who can also connect the dots between design and technology, business, and customer needs. We don’t have a traditional agency model with a project and account management overhead. You work directly with our designers.”

On Studio Rodrigo’s ideal client:

“We like working with clients that are solving big, meaty, challenging problems. We’ve got a smart team that likes to wrap their heads around the kinds of technologies that are pushing industries forward. For us, that’s currently technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence.”

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Below, you’ll find the rest of the founder reviews, the full interview, and more details like pricing and fee structures. This profile is part of our ongoing series covering startup brand designers and agencies with whom founders love to work, based on this survey and our own research. The survey is open indefinitely, so please fill it out if you haven’t already. 


Interview with Studio Rodrigo Co-founder Ritik Dholakia

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Yvonne Leow: First things first, how did you get into brand design and product development?

Ritik Dholakia: I’ve been in digital design and product development for about 20 years now. I actually started my career as a product manager at a startup. I worked for two venture-backed startups as the first product manager. I was part of the Series A team, managing product development, acquiring initial customers, and building market traction.

The first startup was an enterprise software platform for customers doing triple bottom line reporting. The second one was one of the earliest social networking platforms, pre-Facebook, and around the same time as Friendster, LinkedIn, and Spoke.

About seven years ago, I started Studio Rodrigo with my creative director and co-founder. Our goal is to help companies launch version one of their product. That’s our lens on the world. We really like helping companies make new things and bring value to their customers.

We take this approach where it’s not just brand building in terms of core identity: What do I look like? Who am I? What do I stand for? For us, the rubber hits the road when it comes to digital experiences and how those embody and reflect the brand.

Yvonne Leow: Very cool. How is Studio Rodrigo structured? 

Ritik Dholakia: We have a 15 person design team. We also have a couple of sister companies that do software development and industrial design. Basically, we’re a full-stack product design team. We have people who can do brand identity from a pure graphic design and visual communications standpoint, and who can also connect the dots between design and technology, business, and customer needs. We don’t have a traditional agency model with a project and account management overhead. You work directly with our designers.

Yvonne Leow: Awesome. What’s your advice to early-stage entrepreneurs when they’re looking to either develop V1 of their product or are thinking about their brand identity?

Ritik Dholakia: One of the biggest challenges we find is that early-stage entrepreneurs have limited runway to make really smart design decisions for their company. We try to think about brand design in three critical stages. The first stage is establishing your brand in the context of both who you are, where do you want to stand for in the market, and how you want to differentiate yourself. As a founder, you need people who can really help you achieve that clarity quickly.

The second piece is translating that brand across digital channels. This includes your digital product, social media, and other forms of digital marketing. So translating classic branding elements, i.e. logo, message, etc., and creating a design system that allows you to be flexible for three to nine months as you learn how to put your business into practice.

The third stage is for when you start gaining traction, begin scaling, raising more money, and growing your team. How do you work with an external team or freelancers in a way that helps you eventually build your own teams? Founders should eventually own their brand and design destiny. You want to have people in-house as you grow.

We operate with the model where we’re effectively your small team of designers, and eventually, you can hire up and make us obsolete. I think having that flexibility is the reality of being a startup and how they need to grow and scale.

Yvonne Leow: Who makes an ideal client for your studio? How do you decide who to work with?

Ritik Dholakia: We like working with clients that are solving big, meaty, challenging problems. We’ve got a smart team that likes to wrap their heads around the kinds of technologies that are pushing industries forward. For us, that’s currently technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence. We recently worked with Open Space on the west coast that’s basically using computer vision and machine learning to build transformative tools for the construction industry. We helped Spell here in New York to market their cloud-based machine learning infrastructure platform. We’re working with crypto and blockchain applications solving real-world problems, like UMA Project. There’s also a lot of interesting stuff happening in finance and healthcare. Those are the kind of meaty problems that we like to work on.

For founders, we like sitting across the table for people who feel like they’ve got a design partner who can not only think about UX, UI and branding, but can also think about their software, technology and industry.

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Yvonne Leow: When you look at the design industry, what are some challenges do you foresee for your studio?

Ritik Dholakia: This is true even when we started, but a lot of the really compelling work is being done by internal teams, and it makes sense. There’s just the fundamental challenge of working in this hybrid model where we’re a service provider, but we also want to feel like we’re integrated into the company.

Yvonne Leow: Why do you think most branding agencies don’t offer product design services?

Ritik Dholakia: I think there are two reasons. First, not all designers are necessarily good at it. I think there are a lot of amazing graphic designers who can create branding from an identity communication standpoint, but don’t have the skills to work with technologists. It’s just a different kind of work. The other part is that agencies don’t get hired to do it. Companies often say “Okay, we need a logo, so we’re going to hire a brand designer.” But when it’s time to develop their product, they need someone 24/7 sitting with their technology teams and driving that process. Often times, founders will take that in-house.

Yvonne Leow: If I’m a founder and we’ve decided to work together, what are our next steps? What’s the process like? 

Ritik Dholakia: It starts with a very quick conversation to help us figure out the founder’s vision, where they want to go and what they need. When people walk into our studio, we like to roll up our sleeves and get down and dirty. After an intro meeting, we’ll move to the whiteboard to learn about what’s driving your business and what your needs are. We’ll put together a proposal based on that conversation, which will include the two to three designers you’ll be working with, and our rates and costs.

One of the things we often find with startups is that after we do an initial round of work they’re at a point where they need to start hiring. We’ll actually help them hire. It can be everything from writing job descriptions, doing interviews, vetting candidates, and helping founders find their first full-time designer. A lot of our best startup relationships have gone through that life cycle with us.

Yvonne Leow: Very cool. What is your payment structure, especially for startups?

Ritik Dholakia: We work on an hourly or weekly basis, with rates ranging from $100-200/hr. So that’s standard New York rates, and if we do eight weeks with two designers, that’ll be $60K. For some start-ups, they realize that is standard rates, if you hire a freelancer, and working with a trusted team is clearly worth it. That said, we know start-ups are cash-conscious – so it’s always an open conversation. Sometimes a start-up might only have $30K budgeted, and then we can discuss and just figure it out.

We’re able to be smart and flexible and sometimes that might include taking equity or having tokens be part of the compensation structure. Sometimes the project is just interesting enough that we really want to be a part of it. For us, being entrepreneurs ourselves, we need to have that flexibility. We don’t want to get bogged down hashing out a bunch of contractual details when you’ve got to make progress in the next quarter for your business.


Founder Recommendations

“They are a design agency that is approachable to smaller start-ups, not arrogant, and they give-a-shit about us (the client). I’ve worked with them on two projects for two different companies: a complete product redesign for an app (Openfolio), and a branding/website (UMA). We got senior-level attention, keenly interested designers, and great work.” – Hart Lambur, NYC, Co-Founder, UMA and Risk Labs

“They have a unique ability to understand a complex business, cluster that information and come up with amazing narratives, both from a marketing perspective and from a UX perspective. There’s a genuine level of care and attention to detail (as opposed to trying to force down a design down your throat). Just wonderful to work with them.”Keyvan Firouzi, NYC, CEO, Preferred Return

“Studio Rodrigo listened to all of our goals and dreams, concerns and uncertainties, and created a brand identity, website, and marketing materials that were true to our vision but better than anything we could have imagined. 

We’re an online art gallery, and presenting thousands of vastly different works of art on a single website has its challenges. Studio Rodrigo created an online experience that our collectors enjoy, that our artists love, and that we as a company are proud of.  

Their team was incredible to work with. The designers at Studio Rodrigo are a tight-knit group who respect each other and love working there. That 100% translates into their relationship with clients. We looked forward to our weekly design meetings at their office, always felt that our ideas were heard, and had a ton of fun getting to know them along the way.” – Tze Chun, NYC, Founder, Uprise Art

“Studio Rodrigo led our entire brand redesign, including a revisioning of our website as well as our brand identity. They delivered a beautiful evolution of our brand that stayed true to our core while refreshing visuals and language, and worked hand in hand with our dev team to translate that design into a fully rebuilt website. By the end of the project, they were more like a seamless extension of our team than an external agency.” – Brenna Fleener, NYC, Marketing Director & Head of Corporate, Context Travel

“The Rodrigo team are top tier designers and they really get how to work with start-ups. They got our business goals, they move quickly (i.e., contracts are easy), they are super flexible + can iterate with us, and they also take the long view on relationships, so each cycle with them only gets faster. They’re my go-to team for any design needs, without question.” – Payom Dousti, SF, Cofounder, Rare Bits

“Studio Rodrigo handled the entire launch of our website, as we emerged from stealth to live. They also created a number of other marketing and brand assets for us – everything was insanely well done.” – Jeevan Kalanithi, SF, CEO, OpenSpace