# Hiring a design studio in another country > A studio that only ever works remotely would write a more enthusiastic version of this article. Canonical URL: https://vancouverwebsitedesign.com/insights/hiring-a-studio-abroad/ --- Working together Hiring a design studio in another country A studio that only ever works remotely would write a more enthusiastic version of this article. 6 min Reviewed July 2026 Dave Curtin / Founder and creative director A studio that only ever works remotely would write a more enthusiastic version of this article. Brainstorm runs from Limerick and from Vancouver, so depending on the project we have been the local studio or the foreign one. Here is what actually changes when the people building your website are eight hours away, and what the distance costs you. 01 What actually goes wrong on cross-border projects When one of these projects goes badly, the postmortem rarely mentions the clock; it says nobody on the client side owned the content, or that a decision sat with a board meeting monthly. Distance does not create that, though it delays the moment you notice, and three days lost in a twelve week schedule is expensive. The thing distance does change is how much vagueness survives a conversation, because a loose brief that a room would sort out in twenty minutes travels the ocean intact and gets built. So we write more down, and we ask you to approve in writing what someone nearby might take on a nod. The upside is that a remote project leaves a trail: six weeks in, when someone asks why the pricing page lost its comparison table, the answer sits in a thread with a date on it. Plenty of local projects cannot reconstruct that, because the decision happened standing beside a printer. 02 The overlap window, in practice Vancouver is eight hours behind Ireland, nine in the weeks when the clocks are out of step, which leaves a usable overlap of roughly 7am to 10am Pacific, or late afternoon in Limerick. The window is narrow and it works better than people expect, mostly because nobody joins a 7.30am call without a reason to be there. A normal week runs on two calls of about 45 minutes, usually Tuesday and Thursday your morning. Work arrives overnight and you review it during your own day, so your feedback is written rather than spoken, and we work through it while you are asleep. Most clients find the writing awkward for a fortnight and then stop noticing. Decisions need a deadline, normally end of Thursday, because a decision made on Friday afternoon in Vancouver reaches Ireland on Monday and costs you most of a week. We list the open ones each Monday. If your organisation cannot reliably decide small things inside two working days, add two weeks to whatever schedule you are quoted. 03 The contract, and the parts of it that matter Governing law and jurisdiction will be in there and you should read them, but be honest about what they are worth, because suing a studio in another country over a $20,000 project costs more than the dispute is worth. What protects you is the payment schedule, since money you have not sent yet keeps a studio responsive. Stage payments should track delivery: a third to start, a third when the design is signed off, a third before launch. Longer programmes can just bill monthly. Anyone asking for the whole fee up front is asking you to carry all of the risk, and you can say no without it being rude. Write the ownership terms down while everyone is still friendly: copyright in the final design passing to you on final payment, source files handed over, font licences bought in your company's name, and hosting, domain and analytics accounts registered to you with the studio added as a user. That last one avoids the common ending where a falling out leaves your domain in somebody else's account. 04 Currency, tax and the boring transfer costs Agree the currency in the contract, and agree who carries the movement, because a fee quoted in euro but paid in Canadian dollars across four months will not cost what the proposal said. On a $25,000 project a few points of drift is real money, so either sign in your own currency or add a buffer of five per cent. International wires cost more than the advertised fee, because most of the charge hides in the exchange spread rather than the line item. Multi-currency accounts and services like Wise usually land nearer the mid market rate. Ask for full bank details, including any intermediary charges, so an invoice does not arrive short and start an awkward email chain. Tax is usually simpler than people expect, though an article cannot settle your case. Broadly, a Canadian business buying design services from abroad handles GST by self assessment, and an EU studio invoicing a business outside the EU usually does not charge VAT. Have your accountant confirm both. We are not qualified to advise you on tax, and neither is any studio pitching you. 05 When distance actually matters Photography is where being in the country counts, because somebody has to stand on the factory floor, or in the guesthouse bedroom at the hour the light is right. For a manufacturer like Shannon Coil Springs, or a venue like Thomond Park, the pictures carry most of the persuasion. A stock library substitute is obvious to anyone in that industry. What works instead is a local photographer we brief and direct: we write the shot list, choose locations from a walkthrough video and review frames the same day. Budget CA$1,500 to CA$4,000 for a shooting day, plus half a day of our time. The difference from being there usually shows up as one extra round of frames. The other place distance shows is workshops, since positioning and naming sessions work better in one room with a wall to put things on. Brainstorm, the studio's Irish practice, has run these since 2010, and the shape of that early strategy work assumes live conversation. Remotely we split one session into three shorter ones across a fortnight. It is slower and works nearly as well. 06 Judging a studio you will never sit beside Published work is still your main evidence, but read it for reasoning rather than images. A case study that says what the business problem was and what got cut along the way tells you more than a grid of screenshots. Ask for two references in your own timezone and ring them, ideally including one project that ran into trouble somewhere in the middle. Ask who does the work and whether they stay on it, because continuity is what usually slips when a studio gets busy. On ours, Dave Curtin is in every call from first conversation to launch, which is ordinary for a small studio and unusual in a large one. You can see how the practice is put together and who is in it . A paid discovery stage, a content audit, or one page designed and built, somewhere in the CA$3,000 to CA$6,000 range, will teach you more about a studio than three proposal calls will. Buy something small like that before committing to the whole thing, and if it goes badly you have spent a fraction of the budget finding out. Most studios will agree to work that way. 07 Worth doing before you hire anyone Take ownership of your own infrastructure this week, whether you hire us, somebody local, or nobody. Log into your domain registrar, check the account is in the company's name and the renewal card has not expired, then do the same for DNS and hosting. Businesses regularly discover mid-redesign that their domain sits in a former employee's account. Write down who has to approve the new site, and how fast each of them can realistically respond. An owner who decides alone is in a different position from an owner, a co-owner and a board that meets quarterly, and that difference is the biggest single factor in what the project costs. No studio can fix that from the outside, so settle it before anyone quotes. Then gather whatever content you already have: staff names and titles, service descriptions somebody actually wrote, photography you own outright rather than licensed years ago. Content is the usual reason website projects run past their end date, here or anywhere else. Two weeks of gathering before the work starts is two weeks you do not pay a studio to sit and wait. 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