Figueres is a town shaped by trains, salt cod, and Salvador Dalí. It is also, for our purposes, a remarkably good place to run a copywriting studio. We have written from larger cities — Barcelona, briefly Madrid — and we keep coming back here.
There are practical reasons. The Figueres-Vilafant station puts Barcelona at fifty-five minutes by AVE and Paris at six hours; we can take a meeting in either city without staying overnight. The cost of office space in the centre is low enough that all four of us have our own desks, our own light, our own noise discipline. None of us share a kitchen with someone else's startup.
There are softer reasons too. A copywriting studio is, finally, an editorial operation, and editorial operations are improved by the existence of cafés where you can sit alone with a notebook and not be marketed at. Figueres has approximately sixteen of these. The same cafés are also where we have the second meeting on every brief — the one that decides whether the page wants to be quiet or loud.
The economics work because our clients are mostly elsewhere. Eighty per cent of the studio's billings come from outside Catalonia — Madrid, Lisbon, Berlin, occasionally London. We bill in euro, we work in three languages, and we keep the office in Figueres because the work gets better here. That is a defensible reason, even though it sounds like an aesthetic one.
A note for any copywriter considering moving out of a capital: do it. The work will improve. The first six months will feel quiet. The seventh month, you will realise that the quiet is the work.
Words come last. Everything before them is research.
Filed under Studio · TextImpactForge Issue Nº 042. Back to all pieces →