Earnings up for Top 100 consultancies

For the very first time, all but one of the Top 100 independent UK design consultancies broke the £1m fee income barrier last year.

The results of this year’s trawl, published separately in this issue of Design Week, describe a growing independent design sector that seems to have finally shaken free of its recent economic troubles and found a path of steady growth.

There are differences in the final line-up this year, but total fee income for the Top 100 is up £100m to over £450m, and total earnings are up by £40m to just under £300m.

Design consultancies owned by publicly-listed marketing networks demonstrated only ‘modest improvements’ on previous years, says Bob Willott, editor of Marketing Financial intelligence, based on less recent financial data from Companies House.