About

Fourteen years of changing shape.

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If you read nothing else

A small studio for hard problems.

Yes, that sounds like something printed on a tote bag. Here is the plain version: Bunker is a strategic design firm in Portland, Oregon. We work the problem alongside your team and hand it back stronger than we found it.

We would like to tell you the number that proves it worked. We don’t have one we would defend. What we have is that ninety-five percent of our work arrives because someone said our name to a friend. Make of that what you will.

Fourteen
years in business
Twelve
of them inside a Fortune 100 company
95%
of our work comes by referral
Portland
Oregon, still home

Embracing change

Bunker has changed shape three times.

Each time because the technology, the work and the opportunity changed first. (Oh, and there was a worldwide pandemic in there too.) We cut our teeth on the early years of the web, weathered the boom and the bust, and wiped our brow when Web 2.0 finally died — phew. We helped user-centered design become design thinking. We were working it before they were buzzwords.

  1. The first years

    Settled

    Agency

    A studio in Portland with a door, a conference table and a roster. We had great clients, and they were local. Some came, some went. The best engagements were never the biggest — they were the ones where the client had a hard problem and we had the right three people on it.

    Back then we said we were the handshake between humans and technology. We’re still that, a little smaller and a little more specialized. It is the first thing on the front page.

  2. The middle years

    Nimble

    Startups + Remote

    In 2016 we kept many of our long-term clients and went looking for trouble, the good kind. We partnered with a local agency to bring a startup to market and shifted from enterprise agency to startup mode to see it through. We didn’t know it yet, but it opened a new world, and we jumped in with both feet.

    The work was hard and fun, and it took us places, mostly San Francisco, where we worked out of cowork spaces to sit where our clients sat. We tracked 60+ flights between 2018 and 2020 alone. Less a brag than a confession.

    Then the world stopped. Our team went from many, to some, to two. Getting through it meant changing our shape and our business model. We came out smaller and stronger, with a few more clients doing cool things.

    The tools had caught up and the room had stopped being the point, so we were already distributed before the industry was forced into it, and the team on your project is chosen for your project. The rest of the industry joined us in 2020. We were gracious about it.

    Through all of it, twelve of our fourteen years went to being a strategic design partner to a Fortune 100 company.

  3. Now

    Fractional

    Consultants

    Then the work went global, out of the brand box and from big enterprise to startups with a runway and a deadline.

    We were fractional before fractional was a thing. We come in as a partner, not a vendor, holding a seat you haven’t filled yet: head of product, design director, the person who decides what the thing is before anyone builds it. When the seat gets filled, we hand it over and step back.

    We can still talk the talk (twenty years of it, twelve with a badge on), but it’s old hat. These days we’re in the trenches with you, slogging it out.

Three shapes in fourteen years. There will be a fourth.

The adaptation in front of us now is AI, and we are not waiting on it. We have already reworked our process and workflow around AI tools and methodologies, which puts us ahead of most. Where we stand on it has a page of its own. The shapes are our history; the three ways in — strategize, create, extend — are what the last one made possible.

Friends of ours

Not a directory of freelancers. A short list of people we have shipped alongside for years — principled, proven, and not your average folk. Some are industry giants. All of them are better at their one thing than we will ever be.

When your project needs a discipline we don't hold ourselves, we don't go looking. We make a call. They usually pick up.

  • Art directors
  • Creative directors
  • Writers
  • Engineers
  • Researchers
  • Motion designers
  • Illustrators
  • Brand strategists
  • Prototypers
  • Producers

We bring an arsenal of talent wherever we go.

Here’s the deal.

We are not a yes-man shop.

Plenty of studios will execute a bad idea beautifully and bill you by the hour to do it. We would rather have the argument early, lose it occasionally, and build the right thing.

  1. We’re in the discussion, not just the output.

    You are not buying production. You are buying someone at the table with you who has seen this go wrong before and will say so while it is still cheap to change. If you wanted a pair of hands that never disagrees, there are cheaper ones.

  2. We teach while we build.

    If your startup needs a product design lead, we will hold that seat and show your people how the work is done while we do it — so when you hire for it properly, the team already knows what good looks like. And if you’d rather we simply kept the seat — fractionally, indefinitely — that works too. Let’s talk.

  3. We work our way out of a job.

    Deliberately, and fairly relentlessly — by building with your team rather than for it. It is poor business and good practice, and we have made peace with that. The consolation is that everything one engagement taught us turns up free with the next one.

  4. The impact is collective.

    We don’t claim your outcomes. What we made mattered because of what your team did with it, and we’re happy to let the credit land where it was earned. Why we don’t publish numbers.

Heard in a kickoff

A client once reminded us how long a piece of work had taken ten years earlier — different problem, different team, different decade — and asked whether this one might land in about the same window.

We asked whether oranges taste like apples, and whether apples taste like bananas.

Not to be difficult. An honest “that isn’t a comparable question” is a better place to start than a number you both already know is fiction.

How we think

Fail early. Fail often. Fail in private.

Being wrong isn’t the problem. Being wrong late is — and being wrong in front of your market is the expensive version. So we go looking for the flaw while it still costs a sketch to fix, then widen the circle until there’s nobody left to surprise us.

4 · Market 3 · Users 2 · Your team 1 · Us

Each step on the right widens the circle.

First, we break it

The cheapest critic is the one already in the room. Before anything leaves the file we have argued with it ourselves, pulled out the assumption that was carrying too much weight, and rebuilt the part that wobbled.

Then your team

The people who have to build it, sell it and support it find what we can’t see, because they live with constraints we have only read about. Their objections are free and they are usually right.

Then the people who’ll use it

Real people, on the real thing, early enough that changing our minds is still cheap. This is where an idea stops being a guess and becomes something you can bet a roadmap on.

Then the market

By the time it reaches the shelf it has survived every audience we could put in front of it. Launch day should be the least surprising day of the whole project.

Iterate, adapt, test again. The loop never actually stops — it just gets more expensive after launch, which is exactly why we run it so hard before.

What stayed the same

The shape keeps changing. The work does not. Figure out what should exist, design it so it earns its place, and stay with it until it ships.

We have done that inside Fortune 100 platforms and startups with eleven people and a deadline. The context changes enormously. The questions don't.

Still Portland. Still the same founder, twenty-odd years in, and the same handful of people we trust. And we still say no to work we are not the right answer for.