StudioDBD's Dave Sedgwick on why an idea that lost him thousands was the best thing he ever did

There's a moment in a talk by Dave Sedgwick, founder of Manchester's StudioDBD, where he mentions that his name keeps coming up in Google searches alongside football manager Pep Guardiola. He says it like it's slightly embarrassing. It isn't: it's the punchline to a story that took 12 years to reach.

Dave was speaking at a Studio Session: a live talk hosted inside The Studio, Creative Boom's private membership community for working creatives. In this honest and often hilarious session, Dave walked us through BCNMCR: a passion project he invented on a whim in 2012, paid for out of his own pocket and lost money on repeatedly. And yet, it eventually landed him a paid commission from Marketing Manchester and a rebrand for a major investment agency. Not too shabby.

Big idea but no plan

It all began when Dave's girlfriend was offered work in Barcelona, and told him he couldn't spend the whole time drinking beer in the sun! So he emailed a handful of Barcelona design studios he'd been following on Instagram, asked if he could come for a chat, and touted the idea of an exhibition of their work in Manchester. It's fair to say his approach was on the chaotic side. "I had no idea where that would lead to, and I had no preconceived plan or structure as to why I was going to see these people," Dave admits today.

Veronica Fuerte of Hey Studio, one of Europe's most admired design studios, politely declined his meeting request. Undeterred, he turned up at the Studio in person and pretended to be a delivery driver. "Once I managed to get in, it was a really small space, and they knew that they couldn't get rid of me," he smiles. Veronica agreed to take part.

Dave also developed a "phone your mates" technique for persuading studios to come on board: tell the first one you're doing an event, tell the second one the first is already in, and so on until the first one calls you back to ask where to meet. It was clearly cheeky. It could have totally backfired. Thankfully, it worked.

A catalogue of mistakes

Although the project went ahead, Dave is honest about the mistakes he made. The first event in 2013 cost him around £3,000-£4,000 of his own money. The design work was inconsistent and lacked a coherent brand identity. "I didn't have a plan, and I didn't have a structure," he says. "I was making it up as I went along."

Worse still, for all the buzz the event generated, leading to sold-out tickets and over a thousand attendees, it didn't immediately open any professional doors. "Looking back, it was purely done just for a bit of fun and a bit of enjoyment," he admits. So, although he returned for a second event in 2014, after becoming a dad in 2015, he let the whole thing go quiet.

Then, in 2020, COVID hit, and with it came the existential wobble many creatives experienced. "I started to think that I hadn't really done anything for five or six years that felt really scary," Dave recalls. "I'd just been kind of treading water."

So in 2023, 10 years on from the first event, he brought BCNMCR back, producing a limited-edition book with a cover inspired by the Catalan flag, turned on its side to read like a tally chart: 60 Barcelona creatives, one project that refused to stay finished.

The eventual payoff

At this point, things started to turn around. Twelve years of passion projects had left Dave enough of a digital footprint to get him noticed.

Specifically, Marketing Manchester, the city's official promotional body, had been Googling connections between Barcelona and Manchester (I'll explain why in a second). Dave's name kept appearing alongside Pep Guardiola's, and that wasn't entirely coincidental. Both men had built a well-documented public association with both cities: Guardiola through managing Barcelona and then Manchester City; Dave through years of BCNMCR events and associated press coverage.

Marketing Manchester got in touch and commissioned Dave to represent the city at La Mercé Festival in Barcelona: the first time a UK city had ever been chosen as a partner. He went on to design the exhibition, pairing 20 emerging creatives from Manchester with 20 from Barcelona, and taking the whole thing over to Spain. Then, shortly after the festival, Manchester investment agency MIDAS approached him for a full rebrand, having come across his work through the same Barcelona-Manchester connection.

Advice for fellow designers

Dave's advice for anyone considering a similar project is characteristically direct. "Just get on with it," he urges. "It's a case of just doing it and not overthinking it." On finding new clients for your business, he suggests approaching businesses with bad branding and showing them what you'd do differently.

On portfolios, he wants to see initiative, not university briefs. "I love seeing work where they've gone, 'I saw this brand or logo on my walk to work, and I thought it was horrendous, so I redesigned it,'" he explains. "To me, that shows real passion and curiosity." And beyond the work itself: "Personality, ideas, and initiative are the things I'd be looking for."

He ends his talk with a killer line: "Sometimes you never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory." And it's a sentiment that's certainly apt for Dave. The passion project that looked like an expensive hobby for a decade turned out to be the thing that defined him professionally. He just had to wait long enough to find out.