Creative & Design Services 

Creative & Design Services  

Three anonymised engagements across creative and design-led businesses show that even highly bespoke, hands-on work benefits from a structured process behind the scenes. 

€151,083 

Combined savings identified 

2x 

Wholesale sales growth (one engagement) 

€50,000+ 

Average value per engagement 

3

Engagements completed 

Creative businesses often assume Lean doesn’t apply to them because the work itself is bespoke — but the process around the creative work almost always has room to run smoother. 

– Jigsaw Better Business 

SECTOR

Creative & Design Services 

ENGAGEMENTS

3 completed projects 

SERVICE

Lean for Business  

REGION

Leinster 

In their own words

Sector Overview

Across three creative and design-led businesses — a floral art and preservation studio, a photography business, and a print and retail business — growth was being held back not by the creative work itself, but by everything around it: production planning, client records, and sales routines that had never been formalised. 

The Challenge

Each business had reached a scale where its founder’s informal, organically-grown ways of working were starting to hold back growth.

•  Floral art & preservation studio — no formalised production planning, work instructions or quality standards, making delegation and consistent output difficult as demand grew 

•  Photography business — client records kept in a diary by shoot date, with no way to proactively re-engage past clients, and business tasks regularly spilling into personal time 

•  Print & retail business — no structured wholesale sales process, sales targets or forecasting, particularly around the pre-Christmas peak period 

Our Approach

We mapped each business’s end-to-end process from enquiry or order through to delivery, then introduced the structure needed to support growth without losing the bespoke, hands-on quality of the work — standard work instructions, single-piece flow, CRM systems for client re-engagement, and standardised sales and forecasting routines.

The Outcome

Every engagement produced a measurable result:

•  Floral art & preservation studio — standard work instructions and single-piece flow delivered €67,466 in identified savings and capacity, supporting a clear production plan for growth 

•  Photography business — a standardised calendar and CRM re-engagement strategy delivered €23,617/yr, cutting out-of-hours work by roughly 80% 

•  Print & retail business — a standardised wholesale process and sales forecasting delivered €60,000 in identified revenue uplift, with wholesale sales more than doubling