Launching a Values‑Led Design Agency: All Up in Your Business with Cecilia Righini
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Studio Lutalica turns five this October, so for our monthly instalment of All Up in Your Business, who better to celebrate than the person who started it all? We sat down with our founder, Cecilia Righini to reflect on five years of values-led design, hard-won lessons, and what it really takes to build a business that puts people before profit.
Happy fifth birthday to Studio Lutalica! Let’s get straight into the time machine. What’s one thing you believed about running a design studio five years ago that you now know to be completely wrong (or at least, a lot more complicated)?
Thank you! It feels both like five minutes and a lifetime. Five years ago, I believed that if you just did good work for good people, the business side of things would somehow just… work itself out. I had this slightly romantic, activist idea that the mission alone would be enough.
What I know now is that being values-led isn’t a passive state—it’s an active, daily, and often difficult operational practice. It means building robust financial models so that you can be generous. It means creating firm boundaries so that your team can be kind and creative without burning out. The biggest lesson has been that you have to be just as rigorous and strategic about your business operations as you are about your creative output and your social mission. They’re not in conflict—they serve each other.
“Being values-led isn’t a passive state—it’s an active, daily, and often difficult operational practice.”
Running a business is a rollercoaster. When you look back over the last five years, what’s a specific, maybe even quiet, moment that made you feel most proud of what you and the team are building?
It’s funny, it’s never the big award or the flashy project launch. For me, it was a few months ago, on our team Slack. One of our team members shared a thought about how not being misgendered at work meant they could actually focus their energy on the creative problems, rather than on just… existing.
That’s the whole point. Creating a space where brilliant, creative people are so fundamentally supported in who they are that they have the freedom and energy to do their absolute best work. Knowing our internal culture directly fuels our external impact — that’s probably the proudest I’ve felt.
“We start each project with a deep, inherent understanding of the communities our partners are trying to reach, because we are those communities. It means we know which visual cues feel authentic and which feel like corporate rainbow-washing.”
Our mission is built on ‘lived experience,’ which is a phrase that gets used a lot. In practice, how does our team’s lived experience as queer people and women actually change the design process? What does it allow us to do for a client that another studio simply couldn’t?
That’s the whole game, isn’t it? For us, ‘lived experience’ isn’t a box-ticking exercise—it’s our primary research tool. It means we start each project with a deep, inherent understanding of the communities our partners are trying to reach, because we are those communities. It means we know which visual cues feel authentic and which feel like corporate rainbow-washing. It means we know that accessibility isn’t just about alt text—it’s about creating a digital space where a trans person feels safe and seen from that very first click. It shortcuts the entire process of building trust, because we’re starting from a place of genuine, shared understanding. Another studio might (if they have time at all) spend months trying to learn the language. We walk into the room already fluent.
We talk a lot about our big—and very worthwhile mission—but what’s a small, specific, or even slightly silly detail about Studio Lutalica’s culture that brings you joy on a day-to-day basis?
Oh, the sheer, glorious nerdiness of our team? But it goes so much deeper. It’s the passionate, ten-minute debate over the precise hex code for a background colour because it needs to feel more hopeful. It’s the way the team will send screenshots of brilliant, terrible, or hilarious design they spot in the wild. It’s that shared, slightly obsessive love for the craft itself. That, and our frankly world-class deployment of GIFs. (POV: You’re a millennial).
“Learning to say a kind, but firm, ‘no’ to anything that doesn’t fit is the single most important act of self-preservation you can practice.”
You’ve built a successful CIC that champions a four-day work week and a humane pace in an industry known for burnout. For another mission-driven founder reading this who is feeling overwhelmed, what is one piece of advice you’d give them on how to build a business without breaking themselves?
Learn to say ‘no’ not just to the bad projects, but to the ‘good’ ones that aren’t the right ones. When you’re mission-driven, empathy is both your superpower and your kryptonite—you want to help everyone, take on every important project, and fix every problem. Spoiler alert, you can’t. You have to be ruthless in protecting your team’s time and energy. Create a simple, clear rubric for what a HELL YEAH project looks like for you—for us, it’s about values-alignment, creative potential, and, yes, a budget that allows us to do the work without exploiting our team. Learning to say a kind, but firm, ‘no’ to anything that doesn’t fit is the single most important act of self-preservation you can practice. I am still working on this, I’m not always able to do this—this is why it’s so important to have a team on my side who can remind me about the bigger picture, instead of focusing on all the tiny details and trying to help everybody.
“I want us to be in a position where we can proactively go out and find the most vital, underfunded grassroots organisations and say, ‘We see you. We believe in you. Here’s how we can help, without the first question having to be about their budget.”
The studio has recently gone through a big strategic ‘zhuzh’, including the soon-to-be-launched Community Impact Programme. What was the catalyst for that change, and what’s your big, bold vision for the next five years?
The catalyst was honesty. We looked at our ‘pro-bono work’ and realised that by treating it as an informal, ad-hoc thing, we weren’t giving it the respect or strategic weight it deserved. Formalising it as the Studio Lutalica Community Impact Programme was our way of saying: this is not a side-hustle. This is a core, professional, and investable part of our business model. It’s also been something of a ‘full circle’ moment, as when I started Lutalica, the idea was always to have a foundation or programme that sponsors projects for underserved communities.
My big vision for the next five years is to have the Programme fully funded by a robust consortium of value-aligned partners. I want us to be in a position where we can proactively go out and find the most vital, underfunded grassroots organisations and say, ‘We see you. We believe in you. Here’s how we can help, without the first question having to be about their budget. The vision is to make our capacity-building work a consistent, reliable engine for change in our communities.
Okay, final question. For someone reading this who is inspired by our mission and wants to be part of our story, what are the most impactful ways they can get involved or support our work right now?
Great question! Three key things:
1. Work with us: If you’re a mission-driven founder who needs a creative partner, your commercial project will directly fuel our impact work.
2. Partner with us: If you’re a brand that wants to create a real ripple effect of change, get in touch with Dan and talk to us about our Community Impact Programme.
3. Amplify our work: Share our story, tell people what we’re doing. The most powerful thing you can do is help us reach the people who need our services and the partners who can help us provide them. That’s how we build this together.
