Closed for vacation, round 3 by EOD: a Monday on Via Eustachi
Monday June 1, the Italian Republic Day long weekend. I am at my Italian studio at Via Eustachi 31, Milan. The street outside is empty in a way that does not exist in New York. Not empty of traffic, empty of intention. In New York, even Thanksgiving day someone is running deliveries. Here there is one lady walking her dog, a bicycle abandoned against a pole, and the “chiuso per ferie”, closed for vacation, sign on the shutter of the shop next door to my entrance. The masking tape that holds it is yellow. That sign is not from today. It has been there at least two weeks, maybe three. I take a photo with my phone.
While a 2.1 GB PSD downloads from the server, a message arrives on the Mac. American client, Brooklyn agency, writes: “Round 3 by EOD?”. Three words, one question mark. No pleasantries, no “hope you are well”, no extra commas. That is their way of saying “I respect you enough not to waste your time”. I reply “yes”. I close the laptop, sit down, open the PSB, finish the pass on a series of skin retouch we had already discussed the day before, export, upload, send the link. Seventeen minutes from the arrival of his message to the “perfect, thanks” that bounces back in the chat. That “thanks” is not politeness. It is the record of a completed action. To him it means the four o’clock meeting now has an asset, that tomorrow’s delivery does not slip, that the final client will not ask for a discount for delay.
Two hours later the studio’s landline rings. Italian number. Old client, Italian photographer, someone who has known me for fifteen years and for whom I have retouched something like three hundred images. Warm voice: “ciao Andrea, can we grab a coffee one of these days? I wanted to tell you about a little project”. I say yes immediately, because you always say yes. He says he will check his schedule and reach out. I hang up. I know with absolute certainty that the next time I will hear from him is mid-August, two months from now, and that by then he will be on vacation. The “little project”, when we finally talk about it again in September, will have been done somewhere else or will never have started. I am not saying this as a critique. It is a fact of the trade. Voice follow-up in Italy is water flowing downstream.
I am standing at the studio door with a coffee in hand. On my phone I have two conversations open at the same time: one with “perfect, thanks” as the last line, one with “talk soon” as the last line. Both sentences are true. Both clients are real clients. The difference is not in the quality of the work we produce for them, because the PSD opens with the same attention in both cases. The difference is in the relationship with time.
Two Clocks On
Since we extended Digital Area to the American market, our studio lives with two clocks on. One ticks “by EOD”, “round 1 of 3, fixed at brief”, “kickoff Monday, delivery Thursday”. The other ticks “I will get back to you next week”. Keeping the two clocks together is the real trade. Not the retouching. Retouching is the easy part. The hard part is figuring out, when a brief lands from a Rome agency at five o’clock on a Friday afternoon, how serious it has to be before answering “ok, we start Monday”. And figuring out, when a brief lands from a Brooklyn agency at nine on a Monday morning, that “Friday delivery” means Friday delivery, and every minute of slip is a minute of damage.
Italian Craft, American Timing
Our brand claim, “Italian craft, American timing”, is not a marketing tagline written by a copywriter. It is the photograph of a compromise we manage every day. The “Italian craft” part is the way we look at an image, the time we choose to spend on it, the care on a detail nobody will probably notice. The “American timing” part is the discipline of sending the file at 4:45pm when you said 5pm, even if you have found one more thing to fix. The two parts are not contradictory. They are complementary, and you have to hold them together with your hands.
The “chiuso per ferie” sign is part of who we are. The seventeen-minute turnaround is part of who we are. We don’t choose between them. We are fine with both. And when it works, it works precisely because both sides genuinely matter to us.
Comments are open. If you have an example from your work where you have felt this same friction between two clocks, write it below. I want to read.
PS. This post was written by a human.
