Clients want a great experience and high quality work from VFX vendors. They don't want to work with small studios that are expensive and easily overwhelmed.
Small and growing VFX companies often describe themselves as “a boutique”. It’s a term loaded with positive connotations and good intentions. It’s also a bit overused. They’re basically asserting, “we’re a smaller studio — and that’s a good thing.”
The problem with this is that it glosses over important factors clients consider when deciding where to award work.
The Promise of a Boutique
Clients want to be able to sleep well at night knowing a competent team is working on their VFX. They want to feel confident their expectations are going to be met, and their shots are going to look good.
With this in mind, there are some things clients like about the idea of working with a boutique, and others they perceive as potential liabilities.
In retail, boutiques promise a unique, tailored product or service. Every creative studio, large or small, does this. Macy’s isn’t going to hem those pants to fit you better, but VFX deliverables are all one-offs. Even the biggest VFX studios address client creative notes all day long.
The analogy also breaks down with pricing. Retail boutiques are generally expensive, whereas VFX clients expect smaller VFX studios to be less expensive than their larger counterparts. Small VFX studios might use the term “boutique” to indicate they’re not doing simple, low quality work for cheap. But they’ll need more than just that to actually commandeer premium pricing.
When small VFX studios refer to themselves as “boutiques”, they’re really promising excellent attention to the needs of each client, and high quality work in line with the scale at which they operate. In other words, they’re promising better customer service than a big company can offer. And if they can deliver that, maybe they do stand a better chance of retaining clients and protecting their margin.
Much of this is about watertight communication. Clients don’t have time to repeat themselves to different people (or the same person, for that matter). They want to give notes once, and see them addressed correctly in the next version presented. They want deliveries to happen when they’ve been led to expect them. The bigger the VFX studio and the project, the more opportunity there is for communication to break down. This is where smaller studios like to think they have the edge.
Signaling Your Liabilities
On the other hand, there’s plenty to make clients feel less confident about awarding work to a boutique.
Sleeping well at night means having confidence your team will be able to roll with the punches. Smaller VFX studios have less bandwidth and less redundancy to handle unexpected changes. If the shot count doubles close to the deadline, will a boutique still be able to deliver on time? If the boutique’s owner ever manages to take a vacation, can their team operate effectively without them? A VFX studio calling itself a boutique very likely has less ability to scale. If they’re doing great work, and demand for their services increases, they’re probably lacking the systems and people to meet that demand without spoiling what makes clients like them in the first place.
The term “boutique” signals the limits of what a creative studio can deliver every bit as much as its advantages. Clients may feel very confident breaking out 100 VFX shots for a boutique, but they’re not going to award 500 substantial shots on a single project. That’s too many eggs in too small a basket.
Front of House / Back of House
If we put aside the term “boutique” and focus on what clients really want, this leads to a better operating strategy than simply appealing to the benefits of working with a smaller company.
Clients want easy, accurate communication with their VFX providers. They want expectations to be agreed upon, and met. They also want VFX providers that can take on more work without jeopardizing deliveries, and can adapt to changing deadlines. Calling your studio a “boutique” suggests you’re good at the former and bad at the latter. Clients want the best possible balance of service quality and cost for their particular needs too, of course.
What does a successful operating strategy look like? The key is distinguishing “front of house” from “back of house”.
Front of house is client-facing. Your front of house staff and operations must always provide clients with clear points of contact and complete accuracy in communication and deliveries.
Clients don’t get to see what goes on in back of house (and, often, don’t care to know much about it). If you have a vast factory floor back there, along with scalable systems that ensure delivery in the face of rapid changes on the project, that’s an advantage a true boutique doesn’t possess.
Most VFX studios of any size have several client-facing VFX production teams under the same roof, each a unit offering clients focused attention and communication while tapping into the same back of house resources. Think of these client-facing teams as boutiques if you like. Provided your front of house and back of house operations are well coordinated, though, you don’t need to be a boutique for clients to love you.
