Call to arms by print designer

Jan Hildebrand, managing director of five-strong Hildebrand Design, is trying to rally smaller print design consultancies to follow the example of the brand packaging groups and unite against free and “subsidised” pitching.

“Pitches are costly exercises and I feel strongly that if we charge a reasonable fee, the days of the six-way pitches might end,” she writes to Design Week this week (see Letters, page 13).

“We [at Hildebrand Design] have managed to survive without [free pitching], but it rules us out from getting the bigger projects,” she says.