Building an AR/VR agency from zero

The opportunity: making emerging technology useful

Here’s what we noticed. Businesses were curious about AR and VR. Very curious. But almost nobody knew how to turn that curiosity into something a customer would actually value.

The tech could do a lot. The path from a cool demo to a real product? Much less clear.

Clients needed more than someone who could build it. They needed help finding the right problem, understanding their users, testing the idea and making the business case before spending real money on immersive anything.

So that’s the agency we built. One that connects those pieces.

Strategy, design and technology, together from day one. We weren’t selling AR and VR as the point. We were helping clients work out when it made sense, what it should do, and how to ship it.

My job was to turn the opportunity into a service the business could actually deliver.

Positioning. How we ran client engagements. The design process. Taking an open-ended “we do immersive tech” and turning it into something a client could buy with a straight face.

The first project: earning trust before we had a track record

Our first paying project was our chance to prove we were more than a tech demo.

Big ambitious brief. Tight budget, tight timeline, young technology, and a client with expectations. And the hard part wasn’t what we could build. It was agreeing on what was worth building at all.

So before we poured time into a solution, we got everyone on the same page about the problem.

I structured the work as a simple sequence. Understand the context. Find the user need. Prototype the one interaction that mattered most. Test the assumptions. Let what we learned steer the build.

The client got something real to react to early. Our team got a way to handle the uncertainty without betting everything on one direction.

The lesson stuck with me: a prototype isn’t a design artefact. It’s a tool for making decisions.

It shaped every project after. Make the assumptions visible. Bring the client into the process. Agree what success looks like before the expensive work starts.

Growing to 15: building the conditions for good design

Growing the agency changed my relationship with design. Completely.

At the start, I touched everything. The brief, the sketch, the prototype, the details. Fun. Also a bottleneck, once there were 15 of us.

The job stopped being “do good design.” It became “build the conditions where other people do good design, every time.”

So I got deliberate about how we worked. How we framed opportunities. How we ran discovery. How we facilitated workshops, judged concepts, worked with developers and explained decisions to clients.

Enough structure to make quality repeatable. Not so much that the creative work turned into a form to fill in.

Clearer responsibilities. Better handovers. Shared methods. More ownership for the people doing the work. And a lot of learning about when to step in, when to coach, and when to let the team find their own answer.

My contribution kept moving upstream. Away from individual deliverables, towards the systems behind them: the service proposition, the engagement model, the quality of the brief, the team dynamic, the decisions that shaped the work.

I went from being responsible for the design to being responsible for the environment the design happened in.

What we made: turning the capability into real experiences

The best work proved one thing: immersive tech could solve a real problem, not just turn heads.

01 — Spatial product experience

An interactive AR or VR experience that let people understand a product, explore its features, or try it before deciding.

The design challenge: take a technically complex product and make it make sense through spatial interaction.

My contribution: framing the user problem, defining the experience, guiding the prototyping and keeping design decisions tied to what the client needed commercially.

02 — Immersive training and simulation

A VR learning experience where people could practise a task or work through a situation somewhere safe.

The design challenge: translate a real-world process into something intuitive, useful and right for learning.

My contribution: mapping the user journey, spotting the critical interactions, structuring the feedback and working with the team to validate the whole thing.

03 — An interactive spatial environment

An exploratory experience for navigating a digital space, understanding a place, or getting information in context.

The design challenge: deciding what genuinely benefited from spatial interaction, and what was honestly better as a simpler interface.

My contribution: shaping the concept, running the early exploration and helping the team balance big ambitions against usability and the realities of shipping.

What I learned: design is also a business system

Building an agency changed how I understand design leadership.

The quality of the final experience is decided long before anyone draws an interface. It’s decided by the problem we pick, the expectations we set with the client, the people in the room, the calls we make under uncertainty, and how we organise the work.

And good design can’t carry a weak business model, fuzzy ownership or a badly framed engagement forever. I tried.

The service around the design matters just as much. How clients come into the process. How teams work together. How trade-offs get made. How the work creates value after delivery.

That’s the lens I bring to design leadership and service design now. I look past individual touchpoints to the bigger system: the people, incentives, operations and decisions that decide whether an experience actually works.

My biggest takeaway: design leadership isn’t having the answer to every problem. It’s creating clarity, getting people aligned on the right problem, and building the capability to solve it well.

I carry that into every project now.