"Despite the American obsession with individual grit - dropouts in Bay Area garages, star spangled bootstraps, etc. - the United States is a lot more generous to corporations than it is to people. For independent designers, that means it's often cheaper and safer to operate as a business, even though they're working alone. My own design practice is set up as an S-Corp, which,"
"But much like ghost kitchens and drop-shipping have scrambled our sense of what counts as a "real" restaurant or business, it's no longer obvious what it actually means to "have your own studio" anymore. The term once suggested an office, a diverse full-time staff, and a clear internal hierarchy. Now, many studios have none of the above; no IRL space, and no stable of designers waiting in the wings. Remote work has made the model porous."
Corporate-friendly systems and tax rules make formal business structures attractive for independent designers, encouraging setups like S-Corps that allow owners to pay themselves salaries and take shareholder draws. Designers can therefore be simultaneously employee, boss, and investor within a single legal entity. Traditional expectations of a studio—physical offices, full-time staff, and clear hierarchies—have dissolved as remote work and platform-driven models reshape practice. A studio can be a solo practitioner or a distributed network of collaborators. The term functions more as a public-facing signal of ambition and identity than as a dependable description of scale or organization.
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