Studiodbds Dave Sedgwick On Why An Idea That Lost Him Thousands Was The Best Thing He Ever Did

Creative Boom: Insight Creative Industry StudioDBD's Dave Sedgwick on why an idea that lost him thousands was the best thing he ever did The agency founder discusses passion projects, not taking no for an answer, and why the slow burn always pays off. Written By: Tom May 2 April 2026 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.

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The article shares a personal story that emphasizes persistence in branding, which is relevant and insightful for brand strategists, but it doesn't introduce groundbreaking concepts or practices.