Small by choice with Gabby Lord and Lauren Wong Lee

A joke that became a studio

Gabby and Lauren met at Character, an agency that no longer exists, where they both worked in the New York office. Lauren was on the leadership team and kept a careful line between her work and friendships. Gabby describes herself as the messier of the two and says she admired Lauren's work ethic and boundaries. A day trip to Dia Beacon that everyone else bailed on, Gabby says, showed what the two have in common: they show up.

Their studio itself began with a joke. At a party, a mutual friend asked Gabby when she and Lauren were going to start something together. Gabby, who was looking for any way out of a job that had burned her out, repeated the line to Lauren a couple of weeks later. That night, Lauren texted her at four in the morning to say they needed to talk, because she thought they should do it. Gabby says she's learned not to joke in front of Lauren “because then it happens.”

Reactive from day one

Super Keen's first angle was working with early-stage founders, a natural fit for two people who had spent years doing startup work at an agency. Over time, that shifted. The funding landscape changed, and some of their favourite clients weren't early-stage at all. The work could also be short-lived: Gabby describes pouring months into projects that never launched, including one client whose product was derailed almost overnight by tariffs.

In the early days, Gabby says, they mostly reacted to whatever came in, which is the opposite of how they work for clients. They went nearly two years without a website. In the meantime, Gabby forwarded the studio's domain to a YouTube video of Tom Holland's lip sync battle, which confused some potential clients. Work came in anyway: Lauren says they were “flooded with inquiries from the get go.” Much of that first stretch went to the unexciting stuff: forming an LLC, setting up their accounting and drafting an operating agreement that let them split everything fairly.

Publishing the numbers

Super Keen released its first annual report in year one, written as a conversation between the two of them, and has published one every year since. The idea came from a Brooklyn dev shop that shared its own report and from a studio that was open about what it charged. Talking about money, Lauren says, was one of the best things people gave them at the start. People in their network told them straight what they charged and where their rates were too low, and the reports are a way of returning the favour.

Gabby says being upfront about what she doesn't know is a pattern for her.

“I feel like I've built a career out of telling people I don't know what I'm doing. And as a result, people are like, ‘that girl really knows what she's doing.”

Gabby Lord, Creative Director at Super Keen

The same thing has happened to Super Keen, she says: people assume the two have financials, insurance and 401(k)s figured out because they talk about them. The reports travel further than the studio can see. Lauren says people mention them at dinners and parties, and “it's shocking to us constantly how much reach it has.” Her mom, she adds, was “low-key horrified” when the first one came out.

Small on purpose

Every year, Gabby says, the two check in and ask whether they want to grow, and the answer is always no. Over five years, they've filled 112 client folders on their server, a lot for two people. Gabby has no interest in scaling a design studio. She says the bigger a studio gets, the less hands-on its founders are, and she wants to do the work, not spend her days in meetings. Instead of hiring, they work with a core group of collaborators they come back to again and again.

Staying at two also keeps their setup simple. Everything that comes in goes straight down the middle, no matter who did the work, and they don't track each other's hours. They've written other policies down too, including a parental leave policy they recently published. Lauren says being each other's bosses changes how they treat time off.

“When we're each other's bosses though, we're constantly trying to make sure that the other person is taking time off… And then when we are our own bosses, we're terrible.”

Lauren Wong Lee, Strategy Director at Super Keen

Gabby says she has never had better work-life balance than since starting the studio and calls herself “a very bad employee” who was guaranteed to burn out. Lauren builds her days around time with her young daughter, which sometimes means working late in the evening instead of missing dinner or the playground. Their idea of being rich, Gabby says, is a lifestyle, not a number in the bank.

Learning the expensive way

Asked what she'd tell their year-one self, Gabby didn't hesitate.

“It's okay to fire clients. We should have fired a client and we knew it wasn't good and we didn't listen to our guts and we got burned by that.”

Gabby Lord, Creative Director at Super Keen

Nicola noted how hard that is early on, when every client feels essential. Lauren's lesson was about how much work they can handle. Because there were only two of them, they weren't as concerned about projects coming in. What they got wrong was how many projects they'd want to take on. Going through old records while moving their accounting software, she was shocked by how many projects, clients and invoices those first couple of years held.

“There are so many projects that we took on when we really shouldn't have… there's only so many hours in the day, even with two highly obsessive, productive people.”

Lauren Wong Lee, Strategy Director at Super Keen

A brand with a logical centre

Lauren's favourite case study in brand consistency is Big Ellie, the elephant mascot of the WNBA's New York Liberty, who plays a couple of blocks from her home. Big Ellie, she says, stays the same whether she's at a game, turning up at a concert or wandering around Barclays Center.

“Brands are often trying to be super regimented, which can be really great, but doesn't allow you to kind of feel the person and feel the world… That's what I think a great brand does. It gives you enough of a logical centre that you can start to build a world around it.”

Lauren Wong Lee, Strategy Director at Super Keen

When they get a brand to that point, Lauren says, it feels “so satisfying.”

What success looks like

Five years in, Gabby's definition of success has two parts, and the first ties into this year's DesignThinkers theme, Out of Office.

“Success for me is definitely having work-life balance and being able to pursue interests outside of work… I would also say it's like working on just projects that are with good people and fulfill us.”

Gabby Lord, Creative Director at Super Keen

Lauren says that if they could do just two amazing projects a year, which she admits is funny given they typically do 20 to 35, that would be a win. They're looking at other ways to earn money beyond agency work, which would mean fewer projects and more room to build things of their own. One of those projects is a book. Lauren has written it, about why strategy is essential to design and why so many designers are more strategic than they're given credit for, and Gabby is designing it. Gabby adds that success might also mean closing the studio one day, when she feels she's done everything she wanted to with it. Lauren compares it to the Hacks season finale, which she says was so good because it knew when to end, and says they're “not gonna sit here and die at our desk.” It's definitely not yet, she says, but when they see it, they'll know.

Stupid people start companies all the time

That's also the title of Gabby and Lauren's DesignThinkers Toronto talk on October 20. Gabby says it comes from what the two told themselves when they were starting out.

“We just kept thinking back to, like, stupid people who have started companies in the past… but they still managed to do it. And we were like, we have half a brain cell together. Like, we could probably figure this out.”

Gabby Lord, Creative Director at Super Keen

Gabby says it also takes some blind faith.

“You literally need to have some kind of blind faith. Like we didn't have any clients. We didn't have a website for two years… but we were like, we can figure this out.” — Gabby Lord, Creative Director at Super Keen

In the talk, Lauren says, they plan to share the dumb mistakes they've made, because people who know what's coming can prepare for it. They also want to shout out the founders and clients they've worked with who were “brave and delusional enough” to push their ideas into the world. Register for DesignThinkers 2026 to catch it in person.