What’s in it for me?

Find out how Metro Design Consultants successfully use the diversity of its creative teams to add a distinctive edge to its design approach and improve its bottom line by:

  • Recruiting the best global designers
  • Actively putting together design teams from different ethnic backgrounds for client projects
  • Using the organisation’s diversity to win public sector and third sector (voluntary, charity and community) contracts
Guidance for Large Enterprises  
Guidance for SMEs  

Case study summary

Metro Design Consultants is a small ethnic minority-owned design and build company with an autonomous contract furniture division based in London. It provides interior design solutions for a number of major clients, including the Conservative Party, Boeing and the trade union, Unite. In a UK design market that tends to employ talented young, white designers Metro Design Consultancy has consciously taken a different approach by employing a diverse range of designers to maximise the company’s talent pool. The company now enjoys a £10m per year turnover. It has achieved this by:

  • Recruiting the best designers from around the world, successfully competing for staff against more established design brands
  • Actively putting together design teams from different ethnic backgrounds for client projects with the aim of improving the creativity of the team and generating new ideas
  • Using its diversity to win contracts by promoting itself as a successful ethnic minority-owned business, and matching designers with clients from the same backgrounds to bring empathy to the design process

Metro Design Consultants

Business issue Managing a diverse workforce
Diversity strands Ethnicity
No. of employees Approx. 28 people
Organisation size Approx. £10m turnover in 2006
Industrial sector Creative
Business area Design
Organisation type Limited Company
Location UK

Related Sites 

Creative and cultural skills

Competing for contracts for SMEs

Competing for contracts for LEs

Download the tool

Document downloads

PDF: You may download a free Acrobat viewer from Adobe. Adobe resources for accessibility are also available.

The LDA is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

RTF: RTF files may not retain the formatting and layout of the original document and normally do not include graphics. They can be read by most word processor software.

Glossary