On how caring about your creative community builds a studio and work that lasts.
By recreative + co.
There’s a version of creative success that looks like all those big agencies we’re familiar with. It’s the ability to take on clients anywhere, work from anywhere, and above all – be recognized anywhere. For a long time that felt like the goal. Build something that follows the trajectory of the big shops so you can see your name in those big, bright city lights. Meg Raiano started recreative + co. in a NYC basement apartment back in 2015 before moving to Connecticut, and eventually Kittery, ME in 2020. To cut a long story short, we’re never leaving Kittery. We’ve found our permanent home in this adorable, coastal town.
Kittery is a cute little town on the very bottom of Maine’s coast, just over the bridge from Portsmouth, New Hampshire. People mostly visit it for the outlets on Route 1. But Kittery is so much more than that. Though it’s not a huge design and creative hub, there’s a small (but mighty) creative community but the closest ‘big cities’ for meetups are an hour in each direction. What Kittery does have is an awesome walkable main street, a collaborative community of independent business owners (who are mostly women), and residents who are lifers. Once you move here, the chances you’re leaving are slim. Kittery inspires that sort of deep dedication to a location because it’s remained a sort of speakeasy town, where people know of it and word spreads, but it’s not widely talked about or a destination. Actually, it’s situated right between two of the largest tourist destinations in the seacoast, Portsmouth NH & York Beach ME.
Over the course of our eleven years in business we learned a very large lesson: your community has the ability to feed or hinder your creativity. The community in Kittery absolutely feeds ours.
What community actually means
The word community gets used a lot in creative circles as a kind of flag to welcome everyone to something you can’t quite put your finger on. People use it as a selling point to inspire support from other locals. When we were in Connecticut, we used to lean on our location, touting that we were a part of the Northwest Corner. It wasn’t meant to be cynical, but it wasn’t real either. Meg even joined the board of a local business, but she never really immersed herself. She knew it wasn’t her community, even if it was a great one. The idea of community only became something real when we moved into our studio space in Kittery Foreside. Ever since moving to Maine and discovering the Foreside, we knew this was where we belonged.
We felt a sense of belonging immediately. Though we knew a few folks in the building already, when we moved in it became something else entirely. The act of making work for people you actually know, whose restaurants you eat in, whose events you’ve taken part in for years, who you knew before you knew, is a feeling like no other. You’re no longer just providing design services, you’re contributing to something you live inside of. That change showed up very visibly in our creative output. When Meg photographed The Wallingford Dram, a bar she used to go to every Sunday to doodle, well before we ever worked together, she wasn’t starting from zero. She knew the bartenders well, she understood the atmosphere, the regulars, what made the place feel like itself on a Wednesday night versus a Saturday. That comfortability in a space isn’t something you can brief into a photographer who hasn’t experienced the space firsthand in all its phases. It’s earned through genuine love for a place.
Kittery is filled with creative minds and individuals who understand and appreciate the joy of making something beautiful. In a way, you could say we found some kindred spirits in Kittery. We’ve met people whose company we genuinely enjoy and want to help, long before the opportunity to work together arose.
Creative community : Genuine connection spurs better work
The more local our focus became, the better the work got, and the more the work got noticed beyond the region. The photography we took of Salty Spirits, Anju Noodle Bar, and The Wallingford Dram, three independent Seacoast businesses, recently earned Muse Creative Awards in commercial food and beverage photography. The Wilder website project received a GDUSA American Digital Design Award. None of this was the end goal, but there’s a clear and decisive local reaction to the photography and design we’ve done for local brands. And that’s because of how legitimately engrained we are in those companies.
Work made with genuine care comes across differently. It looks like home, and how each of those businesses were actually meant to be. The depth of genuine human care and connection in our community, and the relationships that predated the projects, produced better creative work.
The VisitKittery project
Earlier this year we launched VisitKittery.org, a destination website for the town, built as part of Meg’s master’s degree in Graphic & Digital Design through Barcelona School of Art & Design. It was a project for a web design course, and since Meg had both the means and love of the place, she decided that we should build it to ‘lift all boats’. You see, Kittery Foreside is a bit hidden, and over the past few years has had a hard time attracting tourists who are visiting nearby destinations. We wanted to build something for the community that we loved that would help everyone without weighing on them.
We reached out to local business owners, some of whom we already knew, some of whom we had never met before. The response was overwhelming. A few people were wary, but the majority were so excited to take part… Not because we were wildly polished (we can assure you, we were not), but because they either knew us personally or knew someone who knew us and trusted that we truly care about the town just as much as any one of them did. The website came together in record time.
Could someone who didn’t live here build that website? Sure. Would it look just like Kittery feels or have been as community driven if they didn’t? Likely not.
What this means
Show up before you need anything. The business owners who trusted us with VisitKittery weren’t doing it because of our portfolio. They were doing it because we’d been around. They recognized our faces before they recognized our work. Attend things. Support people. Have opinions about your town. And do it because you want to, not because you think you should. Fake support comes across as just that, fake. Let the place inform the work, not just the creative brief. A photoshoot for a Seacoast bar should feel like that bar, not just any old place. A website for a Kittery destination should feel like Kittery. Regionality isn’t a constraint, it can be the difference in making the work memorable or letting it blend in with all of the noise online.
Build relationships because you want to, not because you want to sell something. Easier said than done, right? As a new business owner you’re likely looking to gain clients wherever you can but selling to someone who doesn’t want or need it is never going to get you anywhere.
The longer game
Ten-plus years in, the clearest reason why this small creative studio is sustainable is the relationships we’ve made and nurtured. The genuine connection between a person and the place they’re in makes a big difference. The trust people around you have in you and the understanding that you’ve got each other’s backs and businesses matters.
Ever since we moved to Maine, this is exactly where we knew recreative + co. needed to be. It is our perfect place and the work really reflects that.
The place you’re from is not a limitation to grow out of. For most of us, it’s the most honest brief we’ll ever get.