There are things about working somewhere that are hard to put into words.
The brief you pick up on a Monday that turns out to be genuinely important - for a client, for their customers, for the shape of how a business grows. The colleague who's been here twelve years and still gets animated about a new tool they found on the weekend. The kind of setup where working from Bali is a very real possibility.
And the studio has a dog. Her name is Lush, and she has opinions about Monday all-studio meetings.
This is what it's actually like to work here.
There's the R&D Lab, where new tools get tested and refined. The structured professional development programme that doesn't just hand you a learning budget and wish you luck. The fact that staying at the bleeding edge of technology here is just what happens when the studio is as curious as the people in it.
"I came from a much larger agency. I thought I'd miss the scale. What I didn't anticipate was how much faster you grow when you're close to the decisions, close to the clients, and close to the work that actually ships." - Hayden, Head of Client Services, 5 years at Juicebox.
There's the size of it. Eighty people is large enough to work on genuinely complex, high-impact problems for clients in Australia, the USA, the UK, Singapore, and Saudi Arabia. And small enough that your name is known, your work is visible, and the things that shape the studio aren't decided three floors above you.
"We had a developer on the team who wanted to go deep on AI automation. Within weeks he'd rebuilt how we approach an entire category of client work. That kind of thing happens here because we encourage it." - Nathalie, Digital Director, 7 years at Juicebox
Then there's the culture that sits underneath all of it. Three values - Make it Matter, Work as One, Embrace Change - that weren't handed down from a leadership offsite, but built with the team. Seventy-two percent of staff come from diverse nationalities. Half of the leadership team are women. The studio has a Reconciliation Action Plan it takes seriously, with ongoing cultural mindfulness training and community engagement.
Outside of work, people hike the Perth Hills for Movember, walk together for Darkness into Light, and march as a team at Pride. There are deck BBQs, padel competitions, sundowners at Besk, and once a year, everyone brings their person, whoever makes up life outside the studio, for a cook-up. The industry comes here too: sold-out Friends of Figma events, TEDx Salons, and a fireside with Professor Byron Sharp that people are still talking about.
It's a studio that's genuinely curious about the world beyond the brief.
There's the lifestyle reality that people from interstate or overseas discover and never quite get over. Perth is one of the best cities in the world to actually live in. Add proximity to Southeast Asia, a studio with offices in Bali and Jakarta operating as a single borderless team, and a creative industry tight-knit enough that your reputation travels fast and your relationships run deep.
"I was hired as a designer. Since then, I've had the opportunity to work on projects that have won Campaign Brief, AWA, PADC, and AGDA awards, and been lucky enough to head to Bali a few times for work. It's hard to imagine getting those opportunities anywhere else." — Mike, Design Director, 12 years at Juicebox.
There is the extra day off that is yours to use exactly as you please. The good coffee, the better beer, Lush doing her rounds. The small things that, taken together, mean you don't spend Sunday dreading Monday.
Not all agency work is equal. Some of it changes how a business operates, how a brand is perceived, or how a customer experiences something they do every day.
Nearly two decades in, that distinction still matters to us.
Image credits: Duncan Wright
