Two people. Six projects a year. One ridiculously high standard.
A short story of how Betty Studio came to be, what we believe, and why we're never going to grow.
Betty Cho started this studio in 2019, after eight years art-directing at two of Toronto's biggest agencies. The brief she kept giving herself was the same brief she'd been giving juniors for years: do less work, do it better, and don't put your name on anything you wouldn't show your mum.
For the first year it was just Betty and a six-month waitlist. In 2021 she partnered with Andre Kowalski, a developer with twelve years building marketing sites for tech companies. Today the studio is the two of them, an extended family of trusted collaborators, and a deliberate decision to stay exactly that small.
What we believe
One client at a time
Most studios run three or four projects in parallel. We run one. It means clients get our full attention; it also means we can plan our year on a single calendar and hit every deadline we set.
Six weeks, fixed
Every brand engagement runs six weeks. Every website runs six to eight. The price is fixed before we start. If we're not done in time we work for free until we are. (We've never had to.)
The work matters more than the deck
We don't make 80-slide presentations to justify three logo concepts. We make one good thing, in person, with the people who'll have to live with it. Decks add hours. They don't add craft.
Plain HTML beats a framework on a marketing site
This very site is hand-coded HTML, CSS and a touch of JavaScript. It loads in under a second on a 3G connection. We use the right tool for the job — sometimes that's React, often it isn't.
How to work with us
We take on six projects a year. We're booking for the next quarter. The fastest way to get on the calendar is to send us a short note describing what you're trying to build. If we're a good fit, we'll have a 30-minute call within the week and a written proposal within ten days.
What we don't do
We don't do logo refreshes without a strategy refresh. We don't do "just a quick site". We don't subcontract the work. We don't bid against ten other agencies. Saying no to those things is what lets us say yes to the projects we take on.