Ferro Studio

Ferro Studio is a 50-person design agency based in Portland, Oregon, specializing in packaging, identity systems, and campaign creative for consumer brands. Founded in 2016, the studio has grown from a scrappy five-person team to one of the Pacific Northwest’s most respected creative shops, working with clients ranging from emerging DTC brands to Fortune 500 consumer goods companies.

Despite their creative excellence, Ferro’s operations were anything but streamlined. The agency relied on a patchwork of tools—Gmail for client communication, Google Calendar for scheduling, Slack for internal coordination, and Asana for project tracking—none of which talked to each other in any meaningful way. The operations team, led by Maren Cole, had become the human glue holding everything together.

With a client roster that demanded fast turnarounds and constant communication, Ferro needed a way to reduce the administrative overhead without adding headcount. They needed their team designing, not triaging.

The core problem at Ferro Studio was one of volume. At any given time, the agency had between 12 and 18 active client engagements. Each engagement involved a steady stream of emails—feedback rounds, revision requests, scheduling changes, asset deliveries, and the inevitable last-minute fire drills. The operations team was spending the first two hours of every morning sorting through inboxes, identifying what was urgent, routing requests to the right designers, and manually updating project timelines in Asana.

Design leads were also caught in the crossfire. They spent roughly a quarter of their work week on administrative coordination: scheduling review calls, sending follow-up emails, and making sure client feedback was logged and tracked. This meant less time for the deep creative work that clients were paying for—and it was beginning to affect both morale and output quality.

The breaking point came when Ferro missed a critical deadline for a major CPG rebrand because a client’s revision request sat unread in a shared inbox for two days. Maren realized the team couldn’t scale by simply working harder. They needed a fundamentally different approach to managing their communication overhead.

Ferro brought Intelo on board in early 2025 and deployed Ivo across the entire studio within two weeks. The rollout started with the operations team, where the pain was most acute. Ivo was connected to the studio’s Gmail accounts, Google Calendar, and Slack workspace, giving it full visibility into the flow of client communication.

Almost immediately, Ivo began drafting client responses, flagging urgent requests, and auto-scheduling follow-up meetings based on project timelines stored in Asana. The drafts were remarkably on-brand—Ivo picked up on Ferro’s casual-but-professional tone within the first few days and required only minor edits before sending. The operations team went from spending two hours on morning triage to about fifteen minutes of review and approval.

The design leads saw an even more dramatic shift. Ivo started handling the scheduling and follow-up emails they had been doing manually, which freed up entire half-days for creative reviews, portfolio development, and mentoring junior designers. The team also set up Ivo-generated daily digests in Slack that gave every project team a morning briefing on what had changed overnight—new feedback, upcoming deadlines, and any client messages that needed attention.