What export actually looked like for a small design studio

About ten years ago, when I first co-founded a design studio, getting local clients felt much harder than I expected.

Where the work came from

My memory is that the Estonian market was hot, crowded, and relationship-driven. Everyone seemed to know everyone. If a client already had an agency, they usually had a reason to stay with them.

For a small new studio, the local market felt tight.

International work felt different.

Part of that was luck. During parts of that period I was living outside Estonia, including Australia and Finland, while the studio itself was in Estonia with the other cofounders. One of the other founders also spent a lot of time abroad.

That gave us a strange little edge.

We were local somewhere else, at least socially. We had weak ties in a few places. We had people we could write to without sounding like a complete random. We were also used to remote work way before it became the norm for service businesses.

The export work came through messy channels:

• referrals
• years of being online
• RFPs
• project boards
• outreach

A few serious clients came purely remotely, without a local office or a big public audience behind it.

I have mostly been a lurker online. Compared with people who post constantly and build large public networks, my own network always felt small (still does). Surprisingly, even a small network can travel far when it is built over years.

That is one thing I keep coming back to when people talk about export for creative firms.

The abstract version sounds big.

Market entry. International growth. Export strategy. Target countries. Partner networks.

The actual version, at least for us, was much smaller:

• a warm intro
• an old internet contact
• a timely response to an RFP that did not require being local
• a project board post that looked slightly better than the rest
• a buyer who was comfortable collaborating with a remote team

Then came the real work.

• Can we do this well from Estonia?
• Is everyone fine with the timezone windows for calls?
• Does the buyer care where we sit?
• Is English enough?
• Do we need to find someone local to partner with?
• Is occasional travel for us or the client ok?
• Is this a serious brief or unpaid strategy dressed up as a proposal request?

Questions like that mattered. The word “export” did not help much by itself.

Bigger export efforts

Over my career, I’ve also seen a couple of bigger attempts to solve export for creative firms.

Around 2010, there were larger agency-side efforts that tried to build international consortiums and partner routes, including towards Asian markets. I may be fuzzy on the exact details now, but my memory is that the idea was closer to traditional advertising — basically selling market adaptation and partner matching.

The 2017 EAS annual report shows how much machinery already existed around this. There were creative-economy project rounds, export trainings, contact trips, export advisors, the Disainibuldooser programme, and a large creative-economy internationalisation and export study.

That work has its place.

A programme can create meetings. A contact trip can create introductions. A study can map the problem.

The small-studio question is narrower:

Did this put us in front of a buyer with a real brief, a real budget, and a credible reason to work with a remote team?

I remember a live event at the Estonian Design Centre where a studio shared their export programme experience. My memory is that the trip was interesting, but ultimately did not land real work.

I may be fuzzy on the exact details, but the pattern stuck with me.

Export activity can look real from the outside. But for a small studio, the working part is usually closer to the ground:

• live demand
• a buyer with a real problem and a budget
• a credible route in
• language that works
• a delivery model the buyer trusts
• fast rejection of bad-fit opportunities

Design travels differently

This is where I think design and development work behaves differently from some marketing-heavy export.

Advertising and campaign work often depends on local language, media context, cultural references, buyer trust, and knowing what a market will accept. That’s often hard to adjust to.

Design and development work can travel far more easily, especially when the scope is clear.

A website redesign, product interface, service design project, design system, research sprint, or technical build can sometimes be delivered across borders with a remote team. Sometimes it needs a local partner. Sometimes it needs one person on the ground. Sometimes language or procurement rules kill the fit.

The remote version is real.

The cross-border data

The data points in the same direction.

That number can sound discouraging.

I read it as a sign that the market exists, but the friction is real.

The old European platforms

This is where older European tender platforms start to bother me.

Mercell is the obvious driving example. It is useful infrastructure in many markets. The pricing logic has always felt old to me.

When we looked at it, adding countries quickly turned into a per-country cost problem. Roughly the mental model was: pay for one market, then pay again if you want another one. Their public pricing pages still show country- and region-based packages in different markets.

For export, that is a strange fit.

A small studio usually does not know in advance which country will have the right signal. Estonia might be quiet. Finland might have something. Sweden might have a good design system tender. The Netherlands might have an English-language digital project.

The useful workflow is to scan across markets first, then decide where to spend attention.

Mercell is also broad procurement infrastructure, so even just tracking it is plenty of work.

You get all kinds of notices, tenders, categories, documents, and procurement language mixed together with occasional private-sector projects. Then you click around, open the source, read the documents, and try to figure out if any of it is actually relevant in the first place.

A different market: the US

Outside Europe, the same problem gets messier.

The US is the extreme example.

For a European studio, it can feel completely out of reach. The market is huge, fragmented, and full of local rules. According to the 2022 Census of Governments, the US had 90,837 government entities when local and special-purpose bodies are included.

That explains why the work is so hard to monitor.

It also explains why useful RFPs keep appearing in strange places.

Small towns. Universities. Nonprofits. Regional bodies. Healthcare organisations. Economic development groups. Tourism boards.

Just because it’s such a huge market, literally every week there’s tens of local entities posting RFPs who need websites, branding, digital services, research, or visual communications work.

Many will be wrong for a European team.

A local-vendor rule is a hard blocker unless you have a partner or any kind of local presence. Mandatory onsite meetings are likely the hardest blocker. Insurance can be annoying but completely possible. A smaller subset may be open enough for a foreign remote or near-shore team if the proposal is strong and the delivery model makes sense.

The mistake is treating all of them as one market.

This is also why I pay attention to curated RFP newsletters and lead services.

The better ones seem to pull from a mix of LinkedIn, Google, procurement sites, direct outreach, and manual filtering. They are evidence that there is steady design and development RFP demand outside the places most studios check.

For European teams, the useful follow-up is eligibility:

Can this buyer actually work with a remote or foreign studio, or is the listing only open in theory?

The pay-per-tender problem

Then there is the pay-per-tender version of the older model.

RFPMart is one example. Its own FAQ describes it as a paid search engine for government RFPs, bids, solicitations, and tenders. It also supports individual single-RFP purchases. RFPPlanet markets pay-per-tender access alongside subscriptions.

Much of the underlying information is public. It is accessible, but annoying to track. It lives across portals, municipal pages, national registries, PDFs, and weird local systems.

Charging small teams heavily for access to that public information, especially per country or per tender, feels hard to justify.

The useful layer is interpretation — which listing is worth your time?

Why we're building Briifin

That is one of the reasons we’re building Briifin.

Aggregating public sources is the semi-easy part. The useful work is qualification: live demand, real fit, eligibility, language, budget, and delivery model.

A small studio should not spend two days reading documents for an opportunity it could never win.

The local market may be too narrow, too crowded, or too relationship-heavy at the exact moment when the studio needs room to move.

Export can be part of the answer.

It works best as a practical qualification workflow: specific buyer, specific brief, believable delivery model, clear blockers, and enough context to decide if the opportunity deserves your time.

The Briifin beta is open now.