Three founders, one name, London in 1992.

Pearlfisher grew out of the London design group Michael Peters and Partners. The Drum, profiling co-founder Jonathan Ford on 12 February 2025, says he studied graphic design at Middlesex from 1980 and, after a round of interviews, joined Michael Peters and Partners, which he describes as a challenger agency at the time. In 1989 the agency made him creative director of its New York office. Ford told The Drum that the company went bankrupt a year later, and that by early 1992 he had decided he did not want to stay with the people he was then working with.

The other founders came from the same place. The Drum reported on 28 June 2019 that Karen Welman, Ford’s wife, had met him while both worked at Peters & Partners in the 1980s, and that the couple spent three years in New York helping to build the agency’s American office, which then became Sterling Design. Back in Britain they joined forces with their friend and colleague Mike Branson. The 2025 profile dates Ford’s return to England to September 1992 and says that he, Branson and Welman founded Pearlfisher that year.

The start was slow. Ford told The Drum that the three came back to the UK with no clients and simply rolled up their sleeves and made phone calls that turned into meetings. To set the tone, the studio created brands of its own, among them a honey, teas and a sparkling water, and actually produced them. A shopfront the studio designed, in what Ford calls the pre-internet years, helped it get noticed. According to the 2019 report, the first client was Green & Black’s, which Welman later cited as a defining moment in her career.

The name has a precise source. Ford told The Drum in 2025 that the founders took their inspiration from the Japanese Ama, the “sea women” divers known for collecting pearls. For Ford, he said, the name stands for “diving deep to get something of value”, and the idea of surfacing a pearl was like finding the gem in every brand. The studio returned to that image for its 25th birthday, when it entered an ocean-themed show garden at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show; The Drum says it was designed with the garden designer John Woodland, using cacti, succulents and other arid plants to stand in for coral and seaweed.

New York, then Copenhagen.

The first studio outside London was in New York, the city where Ford and Welman had worked for Michael Peters. Ford set out the move himself in a column for Design Week dated 31 March 2005. He wrote that Pearlfisher had kept links with clients from its early days and, about nine years after the founding, had arranged for one long-standing client to act as its agent in the United States. That agent worked on the ground for two and a half years, until clients in New York began asking for a local creative presence.

The column describes the practical side of the move: six months of revised business plans, questions about staff, salaries and visas, and a search for a studio space that Ford wanted to be large and light because some clients knew the Pearlfisher culture and expected it. The launch, planned for late spring, was pushed back to September, and Ford wrote that by March 2005 the studio had been open for about a year with a team of six. He described the New York office as a “little brother” studio that was building its own identity while working as one company with London.

A third team followed in Denmark. The Drum reported on 11 April 2016 that Pearlfisher had created a design team in Copenhagen, its third after London and New York, to strengthen its relationships with existing Nordic clients, which it named as Interflora and YogaMood. The report listed the Copenhagen team as Jesper Von Wieding, strategic creative director; David Ramskov, managing director; Thomas Kjær, creative director; Tim Larcombe, strategy director; and Tobias Wandrup, head of industrial design. Ford, then founding partner and chief creative officer, called it an unexpected move to Scandinavia at a time when other agencies were looking east and to America.

By 2019 the studio list had grown again. The Drum said in its June 2019 report that Pearlfisher had studios in London, New York, San Francisco and Copenhagen, and that Branson, the third founding partner, was chief executive for the Americas. The same report recorded that Welman, a founding partner and the studio’s chief creative officer, had died on 24 June 2019. Ford remained with the studio; in the 2025 profile he spoke of teams in the UK and the US.

A name taken from pearl divers.

A packaging or brand design studio spends its working life on other people’s names, so its own identity tends to be quieter than the work it shows. The name on the door is often the plainest part: founders’ surnames joined by an ampersand, a single word, or a short phrase chosen to be said aloud in a pitch meeting. The same habits that shape a client’s pack—what is read first, what is recognised at a distance, what survives being printed small—apply when a studio sets its own letterhead, website and case-study pages.

Case studies do much of the work a logo would do elsewhere. A studio’s portfolio is arranged like a shelf: one project beside another, each with a client name, a year and a short account of the brief, so the visitor reads the studio through the range of work rather than through a mark. Some studios extend this into print, publishing books, posters or self-initiated projects that carry their name into shops and libraries.

For a design guide, the useful lesson is restraint. A studio identity built from a clear wordmark, a limited palette and a consistent way of presenting projects lets the client work stay in front, while the studio’s own name remains easy to find, repeat and remember.

Client work, dated.

Ford names a handful of projects as markers of the studio’s history. He told The Drum in 2025 that roughly every five years a signature piece of work came along, and that the first was for Absolut, which led to the Absolut Mandarin bottle, designed to give the illusion of an orange inside the glass. He listed later work for McDonald’s, Sipsmith, Lucozade and Cadbury. The Drum’s 2019 report added Unilever, Coca-Cola, Innocent, Jamie Oliver and Waitrose to the client list.

Two projects show how the studio describes identity work. Design Week reported on 21 June 2017 that Pearlfisher had given the art-materials brand Reeves a new identity, packaging and digital presence, aimed at young adults rather than professional artists. The magazine said the work introduced a cleaner typeface, a colourful coding system and a bolder wordmark in which the R evokes the corner of a frame, and quoted associate creative director Jon Vallance saying the old packs had shown finished artworks and step-by-step guides while the new ones aimed to spark creativity.

The second is Lucozade. The Drum reported on 12 April 2024 that the drinks brand, owned by Suntory Beverage & Food, had unveiled a refresh of all its brand assets, created by Pearlfisher. The work brought the Lucozade Energy and Lucozade Sport ranges under one masterbrand, Bring the Energy, and revived the brand’s arc and wordmark: the wordmark moved away from its vertical setting and was rotated to lock up with the arc, in a bright yellow. Pearlfisher partner David Jenkinson told the magazine that, with the arc at the heart of the design, the team then set out to communicate the distinct offerings of the drinks, from glucose to electrolytes.

For a design guide, Pearlfisher shows a studio name built on one image — divers bringing a pearl to the surface — and an office map that followed the founders’ own careers, from London to the New York city they knew from the 1980s and on to Copenhagen. Compare Turner Duckworth, another studio split between London and the United States, and Here Design, another London studio in this collection. For this guide we use deep sea blue, teal and pearl with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Pearlfisher’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.