As the Vilnius agency celebrates its 10th birthday, co-founder Augustinas Paukštė discusses transforming a local firm into an international player.
Ten years ago, two designers in Vilnius, Augustinas Paukštė and Doman Mikšys, launched Andstudio with no clients and no plan. Today, they have 14 people on staff, a client list including Ikea, NordVPN and the Berlin character design festival Pictoplasma, whose new identity we covered last month. In 2025, Andstudio was ranked the number one design firm in the ADC Europe ranking by The One Club.
Here, Augustinas looks back on what he’s learned along the way: from going undercover as a student to moving his entire team to Florence.
Long and winding road
It’s been quite a journey so far. Augustinas co-launched Andstudio shortly after graduating. Before then, he’d spent his summers interning at advertising agencies, as this was more or less the only place to get creative experience in Lithuania at the time.
Kino Pavasaris
In those early agency jobs, Augustinas says, good design wasn’t always the priority. “Copywriters and art directors led the conversation, and designers executed,” he explains.
“If I did it again today,” he reflects, “I think I would first go to work in a real branding studio, to see how it works from the inside. But there’s also a big advantage to starting early. When you are young, you don’t have much to lose.”
Gap in the market
Timing is also important when starting a new business. At that time, Augustinas believed there was a clear gap in the market.
“The Lithuanian scene at that time had two extremes,” he explains. “Small, radical studios did culturally exciting work but made almost no money. Big agencies made money with the biggest clients in the country, but the work was not so interesting.”
Augustinas wanted something in the middle: a small studio focused on craft, but one that could also solve business problems. “So we tried to bring the model of the studios we admired to Lithuania,” he says. “Not the look of their work, but their way of working: strategy first, respect for craft and a studio culture built around branding and design.”
Lithuanian Culture Institute
One of their first projects was for SMK University College, Lithuania’s largest private higher education institution by student numbers. Inspired by how DesignStudio’s team had travelled and experienced Airbnb’s service before redesigning the brand, they came up with a lower-budget version of the same approach.
“We went undercover as students,” says Augustinas. “For one week we attended classes, spent time with other students and experienced the college from the inside, instead of only listening to what the client told us.”
Lessons from the tech world
Lithuania’s tech founders offered another lesson. “We’re a very ambitious country,” Augustinas stresses. “Companies like Vinted, NordVPN and Oxylabs never wanted to be the best Lithuanian company in their category. They wanted to compete with everyone in the world. And because their benchmark was global, they didn’t see each other as enemies. Founders met, shared information, talked openly about their mistakes and helped each other grow.”
Unfortunately, he says, the advertising and design community in the country took the opposite route. “Everyone was competing with each other: who won which local award, who got which client,” Augustinas bemoans.
“If your only benchmark is the same 20 people you see at every event, you start measuring yourself inside a very small room. And you stop sharing.”
Mostai Padel Club
Thankfully, he adds, those attitudes have changed over the last 10 years. But at the time, Andstudio was going against the grain by looking outside its borders. “We started sending our work to international blogs, to people who had no reason to care that it came from Vilnius. Sometimes they liked it. Slowly our work became international online, long before we had international clients.”
Then they started something called Studio Exchange. “We sent invitations to design studios around Europe, and Studio Muttnik from Florence answered,” explains Augustinas. “For two weeks we swapped: our whole studio moved to Florence and worked there on our own projects, while Muttnik worked from our studio in Vilnius.”
Not a project but a feeling
“Florence felt very different from Vilnius,” Augustinas says. “It is much more cultural. Everything felt more authentic and more crafty, like the city itself. The biggest thing we brought back was not a project. It was a feeling. We felt more free. When you take the whole team out of its usual office and routine, you see that many rules you follow every day are only habits.
Pictoplasma
Unfortunately, COVID and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine brought Studio Exchange to a halt. But this year, it’s returned in a new form called Wine Design Exchange, where the studio spends a week at an independent winery, creating a complete wine brand on site with the winemakers.
“For us, it is a way to test something we believe in more and more,” he says. “Being in the same place, with the same people, for a short and intense time, can create better work than months of calls.”
One of the best things about getting out to international conferences, if you’re from a small country, is that it can help puncture imposter syndrome. “When I was younger, I imagined famous studios as perfect machines,” he says.
Now, though, he knows most of their problems are the same: “Clients, cash flow, hiring and how to convince someone that the slightly strange idea is the right one. Sometimes I visit an independent studio in another country and feel like I met a parallel-universe version of myself, only in a different language.”
He still feels the distance before going on stage at conferences. “Around me are speakers from studios I have admired for years, and I don’t approach them before my talk. I feel I first need to prove that we are good enough to be there. Then I give the talk, people come to talk with me, and I realise that most of this distance was only in my head. Maybe this is the part of the small-country complex that takes the longest to lose.”
M1
So what advice would he have for someone who’s where he was 10 years ago? “If I had a beer with a 25-year-old designer starting a studio in Vilnius, Riga, Ljubljana or Bratislava, I wouldn’t tell them to develop an international style,” he responds. “I would tell them to write in one sentence what makes them different. And then go outside.
“Publish the work, enter awards, travel, meet people and be curious about how other studios work. Don’t think that quality only happens somewhere else. But also don’t spend your life trying to become Amsterdam. At some point, you have to build your own benchmark.”
