A Toronto design firm with serious digital chops, Teehan + Lax, has closed its doors following the departure of several senior-level executives who have joined Facebook‘s California-based design team.
In an essay posted to the agency’s website, partners Jon Lax, Geoff Teehan and David Gillis explained the company faced a major challenge if it wanted to grow and remain on-target with its founding principles: scale.
“Teehan+Lax was imagined as a boutique,” Lax wrote. “We had organized it in such a way that scale (in the way that agencies traditionally do this — more offices, more admin, more offerings) was in conflict with the values of the company. If we wanted to be successful over the long term, we would need to fundamentally retool how the company worked to resolve this tension.
“We tried to imagine Teehan+Lax as a company at scale and it just didn’t feel right to us.”
Teehan + Lax has not been sold to Facebook. An undisclosed number of its employees have been hired by the social service and will soon move to the San Francisco Bay area, while the remaining employees (as many as 40, according to some reports) have been let go as the agency shutters its doors.
“Our business was very healthy,” wrote Lax. “In 2014 we had the strongest financial year we’ve ever had. But we believed we had more potential than we were seeing in the numbers: value, both economic and professional, that wasn’t being captured.
In order to achieve these financial results, Geoff, Dave and myself were spending large amounts of time on new business. This meant extensive travel, time away from the office and lack of focus on the work. We felt that if we could find a situation where we were more focused on the work, we could be more valuable.”
Teehan + Lax had built an international reputation not only for its client work, but for the products it designed and launched from it’s internal incubator program, Labs. One such product, Hyperlapse, was shortlisted for the inaugural Innovation Lions in Cannes in 2013.
Labs also produced Wattage, a company launched by former T+L employees Peter Nitsch and Jeremy Bell. According to one report, their departure in April 2014 may have spurred the remaining partners to begin debating the agency’s future.
